Quite recently, the Times of Malta was in a flame war over an article which basically stated that although the Maltese love to shop online, they don’t really do it from local sites. This might seem obvious to you, the discerning users, but to many unschooled nincompoops, it is not. I tried to gather some reasons as to why I prefer to part with my Euros on teh internets. Here I have my 5 Reasons Why You Should Shop Online.

1: Choice

Do you ever regret buying a garment after seeing 30 people wear the same thing in one hour? Or perhaps you want a particular brand of whatever it is you want, one which is not stocked in the shops. Or maybe, just maybe, you’d really rather pay for this year’s laptop as opposed to last year’s model. Now tell me, have you ever encountered a limited choice on the internet? Not likely to happen if you ask me. And choice also comes by way of pricing, but more of that below.

Imagine this. Always open. No parking hassles, except where to park your ass.

2: Prices

I needed a new battery for a 4 year old MacBook. Not content with the price offered to me locally (€120 + mandatory bullshit), I looked up what Apple can offer me directly. That was around €90. I’m not about to spend that amount on an old laptop, so I looked further afield. eBay came to my rescue. A seller in Hong Kong sold me a genuine Apple MacBook 13″ battery, in black, with shipping included, for €40 and change. The best bit? It got here faster than the Maltese ‘official reseller’ promised it would. Don’t trust them chinky eBay sellers? Well, that’s what user reviews are for, but more on that later.

These colourful things really do mean something online

3: Convenience

If you have something you need to do on the daily, like, say, work, you can’t really run errands at will when you need something. Add to this that many shops open pretty much exclusively while you’re still slaving at your desk, as well as the fact that in this region of the Mediterranean, trying to get a product you need during August will be as fruitful as kneeling in front of a plastic statue of Our Lady and begging her to cry blood. Not gonna happen. But on the wonderful internet, I can shop for boxer shorts at 4 in the morning, in my boxers, and all but touch the damn garments while flicking through product catalogues on my tablet. Now if that isn’t convenient enough for you, maybe you’d like to have actual people tell you how good the product you’re buying actually is. Hang on a second.

If you buy online a lot, you'll get close to this, the Zen mode of online shopping

4: Reviews

I’ve never been bitten when shopping online, primarily because I don’t shop for teeth, but also because I use such a thing as research. Before I pay for something, I make sure I know all there is to know about it. This includes not only what the manufacturer and seller have to say, but also the User Reviews. Granted, the first couple of reviews will probably be the seller’s cousins, but if a seller or a product has 67 five star reviews, then you can pretty much assume that they know their business and that the product they’re offloading does pretty much what it says on the box.

Example, this bat is only good for pussies and pansies

5: CouponHelper

If you’re anything like me, you’ll use coupon codes when shopping online. Coupon codes, or discount codes or voucher codes or whatever, are numbers which online retailers provide to give you, the buyer, a discount of any type. I’ve been using coupons ever since I paid for something only to discover a 50% off coupon not ten minutes later. In the old days, by which I mean last year, I Googled for coupons, and more often than not was taken to some shady deals website, where every code I tried wouldn’t work, until on the 79th try I’d finally hit gold.

That was yesteryear. Today, I use CouponsHelper. Basically, CouponsHelper is a browser add on which shows you discount coupons while you’re browsing online shopping sites and deciding whether a pink thong is a better purchase than a purple one. Ok ok, I’ll back up. The browser is what you use to read this website on. Most of you here are on Firefox or Chrome, which is good news, because CouponsHelper is available for both Firefox and Chrome browsers. If you still use Internet Explorer you have bigger problems in your life, and frankly, deserve to pay full price. An add on is something you add on to the browser. CouponsHelper is one such thing. It runs silently until it realises you’re on a site for which it has coupons, at which point it gives you a notification that, hey, you can save some money here! What’s better? The notification is a little pink pig. Which will match quite nicely with your new, and discounted pink thong.

CouponsHelper; it almost saved my life