Online shopping in India is booming, more and more people are opting for online shopping in our country.
We at FrugalView will help you in making your online shopping experience easy & fun by guiding you with tips, tricks and some amazing products lists to help you choose products you want to buy without wasting much time on browsing.
To make sure you enjoy an absolutely safe & happy online shopping experience you need to take care of few points and then you are good to go. Let’s check what are they?
Table of Contents
Online Shopping Starter Pack
Let’s look at what are the things we need to do flawless online shopping.
A list of things we mandatorily need is :
- A smartphone or a laptop/pc. (please make sure you use your own device or a family member’s device only for the online shopping)
- An online shopping “app” if its on your mobile phone or online shopping “website” if it’s on your laptop/pc.
- Use your own cellphone data or a trusted wifi network only for the online shopping.
- A credit card, debit card or your net banking details. You do not need any of these if you decide to go for “cash on delivery” option.
- voila, just make an account using the app/website by providing email/phone number & you are good to go.
Is Online Shopping Safe?
Yes, it is one 100 % safe! Provided you show precautions and rely only on some of authentic shopping websites/apps available in the market. Do not blindly trust random pages on social media sites like Facebook or Instagram offering to sell products.
A few trustworthy online shopping sites in India are Amazon India, Flipkart, Myntra, Grofers etc,. We at frugalview personally largely depend on these sites more often for our online shopping.
If you stick to big names when it comes to online shopping you are pretty safe. As these websites have your back in case a seller tries to dupe you with inferior/damaged/fake products. As most big online shopping websites in India have a certain policies like “replacement” or “return” of products within a prescribed window on most of products being sold on their website.
For added safety while unboxing the shipping package of usually expensive products like electronic devices etc,. make sure you take video while unpacking the parcel.
Pro Tip : for people shopping on Amazon India. A product like say a shampoo bottle which is non returnable product. If you find it leaking or damaged on opening the shipping package, you can simply call the customer service and they’ll refund you your money.
Mode Of Payment
Credit Card is probably the most favoured mode of payment, when it comes to online shopping. The reason being in-case you decide to return a product, then your money is easily refunded back to your credit card without any hassle, within a couple of days usually.
Like mentioned earlier above in the post you could opt for any mode of payment which is convenient to you. Cash on delivery, debit card, credit card, net banking what ever suits you the best.
Tip : Credits cards & debit cards offer you instant discounts or cash backs thus saving you a lot of money which you will miss if you opt for COD or net banking.
Best Online Shopping Sites In India
There are a lot of good reliable shopping websites in India. But from our own personal experience we would rate Amazon India & Flipkart to be the best online shopping sites or apps in India.
When it comes to reliability, ease of shopping, safety, speed of shipping and most importantly saving lot of money the above names do a great job.
Amazon India has same day or one day delivery too with Amazon Prime membership!
Amazon :
We prefer Amazon for smaller items like daily consumable, accessories, cloths, toys etc,. to get the best deals and fastest deliveries.
Flipkart :
We prefer Flipkart mostly for electronic appliances like mobile phones, fridge, tv, washing machines, ac, etc,. and have so far found amazing offers and deals on these items.
We are not saying they cannot do vice versa but it’s just our experience so far & we say so based on our order history.
Pros & Cons Of Online Shopping
Let’s start with the pros first :
- Our personal favourite has been saving a lot of money on online shopping. Apart from the instant discounts and lightning deals etc,. on Amazon we have earned around 7500rupees of cash back alone so far which is a great thing.
- Free deliveries on most products again saves you a lot of time and money.
- Fast deliveries on most products on Amazon & Flipkart.
- Easy returns/replacement without any extra charges.
- You get to compare the products by using the compare feature on the site/app.
- Customer reviews of genuine customers who have already used the product help you big time.
- You are not risking your life by stepping out of your home, this may sound petty but it is definitely a big advantage of online shopping.
- Accessibility of some products which is not available in your city or state.
- List is huge…
Let us also check the cons :
- Cons are not many but still everything has a catch in life
- You don’t get to see the product and feel it before you buy it.
- It’s not instant, there is some amount of waiting for you to get hands on of product you just purchased.
- The exchanging of products could be time consuming at times.
- You miss the action of stepping out of your home and indulge in the physical shopping experience.
- We are trying hard to pick disadvantages but there aren’t many…
Conclusion :
Online Shopping is fun, safe and saves you lot of your precious time and hard earned money. We highly recommend you give it a try if you haven’t started already.
If you are an online shopper already then you must check out our list of products in the blog section of this site, that we have created after extensive browsing on the above mentioned shopping sites/apps.
We wish you a very happy online shopping experience now and for ever 🙂
Team FrugalView.