I will be the pattern of all patience; I will say nothing.

I expected to buy up a storm when I took a couple of days off after Christmas for the Post Christmas Sales. But alas, nothing materialised. It was wet, and crowded, and disgusting. I hardly bought anything (that I remember at least).

offline
Then a couple days back I went health food shopping. Got my mom an all-natural facial essence and she seems to be pleased with it. She says it makes her feel refreshed. I had to check that she wasn’t eating it, haha. She also likes the ginseng pills, she says she feels less tired after consuming it. That was moola well spent, if I do say so myself. Too bad can’t do my health food shopping online.

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Last night out of sheer itchybacksideness I went to Amazon and found myself unable to resist her charms. I love Amazon. It’s been there since text-based browsing, and it was already a personal favourite then – remember they were the world’s largest book store? With 2.5 million titles? As the internet matured Amazon moved along with it – selling more than books – and now I am so dependant on the community on Amazon to help me make a purchase (even at a brick and mortar store) it’s scary.

In fact – because of the description and the reviews on Amazon, I bought Cranium instead of Trivial Pursuit, and I didn’t bother with Scene It.

Using Amazon is easy and fun. It looks like a company that’s focused on doing 1 thing, with many moving parts co-perating to make that 1 thing happen. I always enjoy myself there. Because:

1. They take pains to give you an endless browsing experience. There are always sale items and bargains
2. When you’re done browsing, they tell you what other people thought of the product, and what else they purchased
3. They keep your browsing history, in case you want to go back
4. If you search something, they will help you refine your search. For example, I searched Women’s shoes. And on the left nav, you can find different other filters – like filter by brand, by size, by price. You can add a filter within a filter, so I can look for shoes that are a) from Asics b) size 5 and c) under $50
5. After you make your purchase, you get a day or so to make changes to the order. So there have been instances where right before the order ships, I change my order to something completely different, and nothing bad happens. You don’t have to call customer care and apologise profusely, you don’t have to write an email to explain things. It happens on your My Account dashboard.
6. The community of reviewers and raters – people who own the product and will tell you if that pair of jeans runs small or the game is better than another. It’s invaluable
7. $25 free shipping. Neato!
8. If you want to sell something, they’ll fill in the product details for you, cos they have it!

After Amazon, I still didn’t feel like I had quite enough, so I headed onto Target.com. Target has its own set of inventory, but the backend is an Amazon one, so you can use the same login, and it also features the 1-Click purchasing. Neato!

Two huge online shopping sites, 1 board game, and 3 pieces of clothing later, I pressed on and headed to Gap, Old Navy and Piperlime – their shoe store. You used to be able to buy Gap off Amazon, but they might have ended that relationship. Well, why would you use Amazon to sell your stuff if your site isn’t so bad itself.

The feel of Gap, Old Navy and Piperlime is different from Amazon. First, there is no user reviews and ratings. The site is more browse than search. But – they’ve also gone to some lengths to make the buying experience easier for their target audience. For example, now you can do a Quick View from the browse page instead of clicking a top and waiting for a page to load to see if you like it or they have it in your size and then go back and continue browsing. The Quick View loads on the browse or category results page without disrupting your original flow.

Old Navy boasts $5 shipping, and most times at Gap if you purchase over $75 you get free standard shipping anyway. At Piperlime, shipping is free for most shoes.

The only grouse I had with Piperlime is that they didn’t seem to share the customer database with Gap/OldNavy so I had to register again. But it wasn’t too difficult to set up. I just didn’t like typing the address in all over again.

After you shop at a US store, you can’t really bear to use any of the online stores here (except out of desperation). Maybe to order a hamper. But that’s about it.

Anyway. Here I am, the next day, with a large shipment on VPost, an email from Target saying they’ve shipped, and a hole in my pocket that hopefully will come in handy for Chinese New Year.

And this is why it’s so fun to be on the internet.