Shopping online can save you money, especially when accounting for time and cost associated with in-store purchasing.

Retailers sometimes mark up the price of products in their stores based on the overheads that come with running a shop — utilities, rent, staff, etc. The upshot is that the price of those same items may be cheaper at merchants’ online stores, which lack similar operational expenses.

Stephen Laing, managing director of Tara Courier Services, which made a strategic move to diversify into the online retail business several years ago, believes customers are able to shop for better deals over the Internet than on foot up to a whopping 90 per cent of the time.

Consumers can get much better deals and get exactly what they want if they order through the Internet, and nine times out of 10 they’re going to get a much better price than if they go to buy at a store over the counter, said Laing.

Searching for the best deal at stores in plazas or malls can also be costly, considering the cost of fuel to get there and the time spent wandering from store to store.

Savings on travel-related expenses are a huge advantage of shopping at Ronald Stephenson online store, Virtual Mall Jamaica (VMJ), he told Sunday Finance. VMJ operates a website through which consumers can purchase items from local stores, where the in-store prices are usually the same as those listed by the online retailer.

“Just by jumping in your car you’ve spent at least $500 already on gas,” he said, emphasising online retail’s price-competitive advantage.

Additionally, shopping online allows customers to avoid huge crowds at the plazas, and long lines. The mere fact that in-store shopping can be time-consuming makes buying over the internet a high-value proposition, Stephenson suggested.

“The bottom line is that time is money. It depends on how you value time,” Stephenson noted.

“We sell the convenience of doing transactions within their (the shoppers’) environment,” he said. “A lot of Jamaicans have gotten to the point where they don’t have time to walk up and down to look for a product.”

And for those shoppers who place a high value on customer service, retail websites usually include toll-free customer service numbers, Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) lists, and ‘live’ sales representatives to ensure optimal customer care.

What’s more, some online retailers offer customers the opportunity to use the store’s credit card instead of their own personal cards. This eases consumer reservation about providing personal credit card details online.

However, there are some drawbacks to buying over the Internet. Among them, critics of online shopping often point to the fact that consuming over cyberspace does not allow for the shopper to physically test a product before buying.

“When you come to my store, you can feel what you’re thinking about buying and then make a decision,” said Gem Meyler, proprietor of a furnishing store in Westmoreland.

At Meyler’s Furnishing Store, she emphasised, “Customers can feel, sit and lie down on the mattresses… They could not have done that on the Internet.”

The ‘virtual’ element of e-commerce unsurprisingly leads to bigger security concerns, particularly credit and debit card fraud, which rips off tens of millions of dollars from consumers annually. While ‘plastic’ is the typical mode of payment online, you have an option to use cash at the physical store.

What’s worse, getting an “error” or a “server down” message in the middle of a transaction is always a possibility while shopping online.

Still, more people are arguably shopping over the Internet now than ever before, say online retailers.

“The market has expanded significantly,” said Mark Gonzales, managing director of local online shopping company MailPac Services.

“It’s not just for the middle and upper classes any more.”