When to buy online, and when to go to your local retail store.

Considering I own and run an online shop, I’m obviously a believer in online shopping! However, I still believe that there is a place for retail stores - online shops and retail stores are complementary, and the computer market in South Africa is well served by having both.

If you’ve ever shopped online, you know the advantages of an online store:

- Wide range of products. If Prophecy was a retail store, we could carry a couple thousand products at most. As an online shop? We can easily have more than 10 000 products available.

- Low pricing. Because we can avoid the high overheads of expensive retail premises and huge amounts of stock, we can offer much better pricing than the average retail store.

- Convenience. We ship products direct to your door - no dealing with crowded shopping centres!

- High end technical advice. Because we have a large number of clients, many of whom purchase high end products, we are able to give you very good advice in terms of high end and unusual products. Even the most high end, unusual products (980XE CPU? High end memory?) is something we are likely to have worked with before.

What are the disadvantages to an online shop? Well, the main disadvantage is immediacy - although we process and ship orders as quickly as possible, nothing can compete with walking into a retail store and taking a product off of the shelf. The second disadvantage is that we can’t guarantee stock levels the same way a retail store can. For us, a product being in stock is a number on a system - a system that is 99% accurate, but can (and does!) have errors. By contrast, for a retail store, a product being in stock is the sales person holding it in his hands.

For these reasons, if you are buying something and you need it immediately, we generally suggest you go to a retail store. In some cases, if it’s a product we have in stock at our premises we can help you out, but these are the exception rather than the rule. Phone us and we’ll be able to suggest a few possible places to buy - even if we can’t help you out today, we still want to build a relationship with you for the long term!

Finally, I often get asked why Prophecy doesn’t carry everything in stock - why we don’t operate “as a retail store”, but with our prices and range. Unfortunately, as mentioned above we would not be able to offer the range of products we do at the prices we do if we operated as a traditional retail store. But rest assured that we are working every day to improve the experience of shopping with us, to mitigate the disadvantages of purchasing online, and build on the advantages of buying online.

Let us know what you think in the comments.


Comments

[Michael Trautmann]

Hi Paul,

Just out of curiosity, why did you call your online store Prophecy?

[Paul Johnston]

Hi Michael

Well, it's a bit of a long and involved story. The short of it is that we took over the forum from the people who started it, and then the shop inherited the name.

You can see the longer version here:

http://www.prophecyblog.co.za/blog/2010/5/26/whats-with-the-name-prophecy-a-short-history-of-prophecycoza.html

Thanks for the comment!

[Alain]

Sorry cannot agree, yes on-line shopping allows for a wider range and ability to find those hard to get items, it is cheaper when looking for books and CD/DVD but SA on-line stores give no real price advantage to the retailers. Compare on-line notebook, printer, screens, camera etc prices to any of the big retailers and you can more than often get a better price at the big chains even if you discount the delivery charge. A big ticket item for a few Rand cheaper will also not entice me on-line. If you save all this money why does it not reflect in substantial price differences which are evident in the overseas on-line stores. The excuse cannot be duties or freight as the mortar and bricks guys have to pay those too.

[Adminstrator]

Hi Alain. You are quite right that there are no price benefits when comparing standard consumer items lile screens, laptop and printers. Even pre-built pc's like HP and Toshiba should be quite cheap through the large chain stores, who can purchase large quantities of an item and get huge discounts on those items.

This said, ask them to quote you on a custom PC (even a custom HP or other branded PC) or purchase a single component like a CPU or VGA card from them, and then you will see the savings Paul is talking about in this article. Even asking for a ram or CPU upgrade on a standard branded PC will cost you much more than it needs to. And this is if they can help you in the first place. They often cannot help you outside of the standard options HP provides.

Hope this helps and thanks for reading our blog!!