MORE home-grown companies specialising in gadgets are capitalising on the power of the Internet to sell their products online. spider88.com is one such company. The online store, which was set up in July, sells mobile phones and mobile accessories.
The general manager of spider88. com, Ms Annie Liew, 37, thinks there is a demand for online mobile-phone stores because the real-life experience is, more often than not, unpleasant.
"The shopping experience for mobile phones has room for improvement," she told my paper in a recent interview. "Besides the long wait in queues, you might be f a c e d w i t h not-so-friendly salesmen," she explained.
Mr Vincent Lim, 30, is one customer who has found the online shopping experience better - he disliked travelling to a physical store and waiting to be served.
"I was given very detailed information and the customer service was good. It's also convenient," said the first-time spider88. com customer of his online buying experience. He purchased a Samsung i900 Omnia phone.
On good days, Ms Liew said the website receives 800 to 1,000 hits. The website's target is to sell 1,000 phones by the end of each month. But she concedes that the business still has a long way to go because of the already-saturated market for mobile phones.
This is why she aims to differentiate her store by providing services like free delivery and a concierge repair service. For a fee, spider88.com picks up phones from customers' homes and sends them to repair centres, then delivers them back to their owners. The length of the process depends on the service centre, but spider88.com will collect the phone from the centre and return it within two working days. spider88.com is not the only business hoping to cash in online.
There's also qisahn.com, a local online store selling gaming consoles. It was started last June by Qishan, 22, a business student at the National University of Singapore who did not wish to reveal his surname. He said that the response to his site has been "better than expected".
But, he notes, there has since been a growth of online stores like his, making it increasingly difficult to attract new customers.
Yet, there is obviously a market for such services as people grow increasingly Internet-savvy.
Not to mention that online shopping allows one to buy with the click of a mouse.
One qisahn.com customer, Mr Allister Ngim, was particularly impressed with the online help the website provided.
"You can ask anything about their products and they will answer on MSN (Microsoft Network) Messenger or post a reply on the tagboard within a few minutes," he wrote on the website's forum.
So, are online stores set to replace physical ones?
Mr Kevin Chua, 40, managing director of Internet store computer.onlinestore.sg, does not think so.
He sees his online store - which sells everything from printers to laptops - as an alternative way to shop.
Ms Liew shares the same sentiment: "There will always be people who want to see the products for themselves, but we are offering an alternative and more comfortable way of shopping."
