Online shopping requires time and some daring

It is cheaper online – if you do not price the time you spend searching

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By Perttu Kauppinen
      Cheap prices and flexibility – Jan-Peter Hautaniemi, 29, has clear reasons for shopping online. For a man who spends his money carefully, cheap prices are the main attraction, but freedom from opening hours also makes shopping much easier.
      "My largest single savings, 300 euros, came when I bought a combination hard disk recorder and DVD player. I also bought my current mobile phone online. I saved around 100 euros that time", Hautaniemi says.
      In addition to home electronics, he purchases records, games, train tickets, and vacation packages online. Hautaniemi has done so for the past three years. It is difficult to calculate the total amount he has saved, but Hautaniemi estimates that it must be a significant figure. At present, he makes large purchases online around once a month.
     
The savings do not come free online, however. Those who seek good deals online must carefully investigate what, when, and where to buy.
      "When you cannot inspect the goods yourself beforehand, you need to find out quite a bit about their qualities. Sometimes I have gone to stores to see what I could order online", Hautaniemi explains.
      "You need to trust your own investigative abilities when you shop online. But the situation is the same in regular home electronics stores. When you ask the salesperson for recommendations, they always praise the model that has an ad campaign going on."
     
When the right product has been selected, it is time to search for the right price. In order to save time, Hautaniemi does not visit the websites of each separate vendor, but uses different kinds of price comparison sites. He does not always pick the cheapest store, however. Some shops are more reliable than others.
      "I read message boards to find out which vendors people have good experiences from. People are usually prone to report negative experiences. Finns do not easily give out praise, but someone has to put in a positive word before I place an order."
      In fact, at first Hautaniemi did not dare to order from other stores besides those where the customer could pick the merchandise up himself after ordering. Then he began to use companies that based their operations on mail-ordering. The last hurdle was ordering from abroad and using his credit card.
     
It is hard to say whether it is a result of his cautiousness or not, but Hautaniemi has not had any trouble with online vendors. He only recalls one problem with a travel agency, and even that was technical in nature.
      "The pages were so slow that I could not proceed with the order. I had to call them many times. They eventually lowered their price."
      Since it normally takes around one and a half hours to do the background research and select a product, it is clear that Hautaniemi does not make any spur-of-the-moment purchases online. "I do not make them in regular stores either. But online, I consider for an even longer time than usual."
      You need to wait for a while even after you have made your selection online. It takes days before the package arrives in the mail. Hautaniemi can live with that, because you need to make sacrifices in order to get the best price.
     
Shopping online has not liberated Hautaniemi from the curse of living sales clerks. He still needs to go to real stores to buy his food and clothes.
      "I could not imagine buying clothes from the internet. The sizes are so different in different countries and stores. Food I could probably buy. But it feels strange that someone else would pick out tomatoes for me", Jan-Peter Hautaniemi says.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 27.5.2005

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PERTTU KAUPPINEN / Helsingin Sanomat
perttu.kauppinen@hs.fi