The Best of Online Shopping

The Internet is definitely a rich country’s marketplace, though. In the
poorest countries, a few businesses put up sites, but these sites are
really ads offering to manufacture clothes, toys, gimcracks for businesses
in the First World. Even their wholesale businesses do not sell on the
Internet; you have to call or write a letter to negotiate arrangements.
For instance, in Costa Rica, the rain forest preserve sells furniture in
lots of $1000, but your treasurer has to send a formal letter of credit by
mail.

If web retailing were a race between countries, here’s how we would
snapshot the competition. The US and Australia are far out in the lead,
with France making a very splashy third place, and Holland, Germany and
Canada coming up close behind, with the U.K. hanging in there, and Japan
stumbling into the race, late. Most other first world countries have not
caught on; their retailers tend to offer brochures, and invite you to drop
by or call.

Retailers in countries that do not yet participate in the consumer
marketplace are facing big problems: lack of programming support, banks
that refuse to handle online transactions (even in Sweden), and attachment
to the old ways of doing things by phone, fax, and mail.
So you’re reduced to shopping in countries that have central heating,
indoor plumbing and sewers, half the population with personal computers,
good electrical systems- and a Web-aware culture.

France, for instance,
gave away their Minitel to phone customers, who now feel comfortable
ordering just about anything electronically. Germans feel at ease ordering
by mail from catalogs. Aussies are so far away from the rest of the West
that they have been heavy Internet users from the beginning; they’re hip
and edgy, and have fun online. Canadians give the impression that they are
going online not because they want to, but because they have to. Brits
show a similar crankiness. The Dutch, having sold to foreigners for
centuries, understand the idea of multiple languages and currency
conversions. In Japan, where the phone company just about gives away the
phone itself, the service costs a lot, so most people cannot afford to
browse a deep and complicated site, or wait for a database to perform a
complex search; without eager consumers, the stores lag behind the rest of
the high-tech world. Oddly, the most interesting online stores in Japan
deal in traditional crafts.

What to look for when you are shopping internationally on the Web:
Ask these questions of a store:
Does the store offer something you can’t get at home?
Does the store offer a currency converter, or prices in US dollars?
Does the store allow ordering through a secure server?
Do you feel comfortable enough to trust the site with your money?
Is there an English version? (Look for the British flag in Europe, or an
American flag elsewhere).
Does the site offer a detailed explanation of sizes, with a table or
utility to convert their sizes to ones you are familiar with?

Suggestion

If you know a little of the host country’s language, try browsing the site
that way, to soak up the ambience.

Caution:
Never order by fax or email: your credit card info could be exposed to
anyone passing the fax machine, or , through the miracle of email,
distributed to a whole mailing list. If you must buy something from the
store, use the telephone. That way, you know you are talking to a clerk at
the store, directly, reducing the possibility of someone stealing your
credit card info. To be safe, look for a secure server- when you go there,
your address line should automatically begin with https, and you should
see a lock or key in your status bar.