HO WAN SIN, 34, skipped the Great Singapore Sale that took place here in June and July. She found better deals on the Internet.
In the last few months, the mother of three young children has been filling her shopping basket with Victoria's Secrets clothes and lingerie, diaper creams, soaps and books from merchants in the United States.
She is won over by the wider variety and cheaper deals online; cheaper partly because of the weakened US dollar. The exchange rate is now US$1 to S$1.41.
'Some of the stuff - if they were sold here in the first place - would have cost me twice as much,' she said.
Also, she doesn't have the time or the stamina to brave the Orchard Road crowd for good bargains.
That was why Wan Sin became one of the early adopters of vPost when it was introduced in Dec 2003.
vPost is a shipping service that provides shoppers here with a US address to enter on a merchant's website when ordering goods. It also provides a virtual concierge - a paid service - for shoppers who do not have a US-issued credit card. The concierge buys products on customers' behalf, then ships them to Singapore.
Recently, she dumped vPost for Globeshopper. It was launched in March this year by Citibank, global logistics firm DHL and British e-commerce solutions firm Borderlinx.
'I'm a Globeshopper convert; it's cheaper and allows me to keep track of my shopping.'
Detailed tracking - from the time the goods leave the merchant's warehouse to the time they arrive at the Singapore customs - is available on Globeshopper's website, powered by DHL.
This feature is lacking at vPost.
Also, Globeshopper's concierge service is free, while vPost charges a service fee of $20.38 per merchant as well as a 5.1 per cent transaction fee.
That's not all. vPost also charges a holding fee of $10.19 per item per week if the goods are held at customers' US addresses for more than 14 days.
Globeshopper's holding service is free for a month, which gives customers more than enough time to consolidate their orders before shipping them here.
By lumping their purchases, customers benefit from economies of scale in a single shipment rather than multiple ones.
The last straw was when vPost messed up her orders.
'Once, vPost claimed it had an item shipped to me when, in fact, the merchant rejected my order. vPost said it would destroy the item, which I never paid for,' she said.
This story was first published in The Straits Times Digital Life on 3 September 2008.
