For the purpose of my blog entry, i will be touching on e-commerce only.
Personally i am an avid user of buying things online. One of the reason that i like buying things from online store is that i feel it is damm convenient, all you need is to click click click, check out, payment, and wait for the goods to arrive at your doorstep. (of course you have to worry about your credit card bill at the end of the month).
What more, recently i have just been online shopping from a couple of Britian's online store. Considering the fact that the currency of pound and singapore dollar is at somewhere about ( GBP 1= SGD 2.2), which in my opinion is a good rate. The same product could be selling in singapore at say $100, but due to the flucuation of the value of currency, when we get it from Britian, it may cost say $80 bucks. This may be just a mere value of $20, but when you think of buying even more expensive goods, the savings would be incredible.
As much as i like to shop online, of course there is the security issue. One of the key factor that i would look out for is the "VeriSign Secured" logo to ensure that my information will be encrypted and that my information is safe.
An example is:
Personally, as much as i enjoy buying from apple online store, i am not very pleased with the apple itunestore because the moment we sign up for the account, we have to put our credit card information, and the next time we sign in to purchase songs or applications from the store, they will not prompt for our credit card information already. As such, i dont feel "safe" in a way. Although it might be more of a hassle, but by putting in the credit card information everytime we purchase will definately be better.
Another drawback in my personal opinion is that certain goods that are available online, are not being able to ship to Singapore for a reason or two. After clicking the products that you want, and that you are preparing to choose the country, there is no selection for Singapore. It is rather frustrating as you could have been browisng for quite sometimes, and just as you thought that you are happy with your products that you chose, you realized that those items cant be shipped to Singapore as they are not part of the option. How dissapointing can this get . . .
To counter this problem, i realized that many have set up blogs where they have spree shopping. From my understandings, forum have this too. It is something like whereby kind of groupbuy whereby the thread-starter or the blog owner would show the link of certain products and ask those interested to put the product code. After that you will have to transfer the money to the thread-starter/blog owner and goods will typically arrive 1~2weeks after payment.
To sum up, i feel e-commerce definately has more a lot of advantages, but there are its disadvantages as well, at the end of the days, its your call!
~me~ at 2:42 PM