The glitch in local online shopping

12/04/2023

These past years we’ve seen an increase in online shops in #Malta in sectors such as beauty, retail, health, food & beverage, pharma, and beyond. Personally, I’m a big fan of online shopping because it’s the solution to my very busy schedule, and I also find it unacceptable to have a whole Saturday morning wasted on running errands after a long tiring week.

But here’s the thing. As much as I love supporting local small/medium businesses, I still opt to buy certain goods from abroad, and I’m sure I’m not the only one! Here’s why.

Delivery


How come an Amazon DE item gets from Germany to Malta in 1-2 business days, but my supplements took 5 business days to get from Malta to Malta? I mean… we do have various delivery services to choose from.

Customer Care


Is it normal to place an online order on a Monday, and by Friday you haven’t yet received an email from the business with delivery information? In some instances, I had to phone the shop to check if they received my order and met with responses such as ‘your order was lost in our system’ or ‘yes we saw it but the person in charge was on leave’ or ‘your order is being prepared but we only deliver to the north of Malta on a Wednesday’.

Inventory


The online shop has a limit of 50e for free delivery, and you only needed an item worth 30e, so you spend an hour browsing trying to find additional items you may need to reach the limit because you know free delivery is cool! But then, you get the magic call stating, ‘the items you selected are and have been out of stock for quite a while, we will deliver the items in stock anyways.’ And get this, the item that you wanted most and your whole order is based on, is the one out of stock…

All you need under one roof…


If you’re doing this claim, make sure you really are the one-stop shop. For instance, why does a business claim to be the best pet store in Malta, and then have 90% of all the items online marked as out of stock, or coming soon? Or how come the online hair products store claiming to be the biggest in Malta, merely has half the brands known locally? All I’m saying is, false claims are client repellers.

Search function


POV: You found this online shop that finally stocks all the items you need. But then, the search function doesn’t work or is non-existent. So, you must go through all the tabs manually and give up and accept that you were doing fine living without those items. Most online shoppers buy in the spur of the moment, so bad user experience, long registration process, and weird checkouts will lead to a loss of sales.



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• and many more!

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