For Seller

By: Lizz Cassidy

I’ll admit it right now. I’m one of those few women who hate spending time in shopping malls and at stores. I tolerate it, at the best of times. Of course, it never helped that I could rarely find what I was looking for.

You see, I’m one of those types with very unusual taste in things. Most of the music I like, no one else has ever heard of. Many of the movies I enjoy watching are ones that never get carried in stores around here. And the books I read - well, don’t get me started on how frustrating it is to hear about a book and then realize that it’s not released in North America. Needless to say, looking to buy a new CD, movie or book can be quite frustrating at times.

It didn’t take me long to start shopping online, and even less time for me to realize how much more convenient it can make life. Instead of hunting until exhaustion for something, I can easily go to one of many online stores in order to have it sent straight to my door.

I was a little skeptical at first, not only because a lot of the things I wanted were international, and I didn’t want to pay an arm and a leg for it, but also because I had heard horror stories about third party vendors who never shipped anything that they had sold.

However, most of my experiences have been quite pleasant. I have found that Internet shopping has allowed me to find a lot of the lesser known items that I couldn’t find in stores. The international or independent movies and CDs I could never hunt down in retail stores are usually found in Canadian online stores. This is always nice for the international items. Instead of paying expensive shipping and handling costs for merchandise from a foreign country, I can have it shipped to Canada, from Canada; plus, I don’t have to worry about money exchange rates.

I’ve been lucky and have only had one experience with a third-party vendor that I wasn’t really happy with. I had bought a large number of items at the same time from an online store, and only one of them was from the third-party person. Well, it took over 2 months for me to receive that item, which is a really long time considering the rest of the items I had bought had arrived in about 2 weeks time. I realize that the items were coming from different parts of the country and the postal system isn’t always super speedy, but that’s still a very long time to have to wait for something that you’ve bought when the rest had arrived in a timely fashion.

Of course there are times when what I want still can’t be found in a Canadian store, but if you’re willing to deal with the exchange rate, sometimes you can find really great deals internationally. My best find ever was from Amazon UK. A book I was really looking forward to was being released in Europe, but not in North America. Not only did I manage to find it for a lot less money than I would have paid for it here (that’s after the shipping costs and money conversion), but it also took almost a month less shipping time than they had told me it would.

The best thing about shopping online is definitely the fact that you can find things that you wouldn’t ever be able to find in a physical retail store. Most of the time you don’t have to go from one store to another store just to find out that no one carries what you’re looking for. With just a few strikes on your keyboard and a few clicks of your mouse, you’ve got exactly what want.

For more great online shopping deals, go to AlgraShopping.com.

Are you a Canadian business who’s interested in selling online? Then go to AlgraOnline.com!