Internet shopping in South Africa
People in South Africa are definitely becoming more comfortable with Internet shopping; especially when it comes to airline tickets where you need to balance cost and the time of your flight, and you need to look on the airlines time-charts to compare. But the marvel isn’t that people are using theInternet to shop; it’s that we are starting to see variety and competition in where you shop. I’m also seeing an increase in product research; people are looking on forums and reading reviews about similar products before they buy.
An example has been my recent experience doing my Christmas shopping. I’m not a big Internet shopper, normally only going online now for the holiday season because the shops are so mad. Anyways, I’ve taken an interest in drawing and cartooning and rather than leaving it up to my family to hopefully get me what I want, I’ve gone online and started hunting for some gifts; specifically a good book to learn from.
I quite like Amazon’s browsing features, so I spent a lot of time there looking up book titles and authors. Once I had found what I was looking for I jotted down the name of the book and called Exclusive Books (a really convenient bookstore in South Africa) and asked for the title but they were out of stock. I then jumped onto Take2, highly revered by friends, a local shopping portal but they were also out of stock of the book I was looking for. I found what I wanted on my third try at Kalahari.net also a local shopping portal but more in the vein of Amazon; and what’s more, they could deliver my book within 24 hours.
What I want to point out is that without shopping at an international site (Ok I reviewed my books on Amazon but that’s because more people shop there so there are more reviews to compare), I had a couple of different options within South Africa to find what I was looking for and this extends into comparing prices and looking at delivery times.
BTW, I ordered my books on Kalahari.net after midday and I still got the books delivered to my office the following day in the afternoon. I’m very chuffed.
What I also want to point out is that it’s looking like you don’t need a credit card to shop online either! Kalahari also accepts First National Bank’s eBucks and Standard Bank’s AutoPay. This, I’m sure, will peek the interest of many South Africans who don’t like the huge interest charges added to local credit cards.
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