Yes, you love bazaars, but which online place should you buy products from?
If you don’t care about getting COVID, Divisoria is the best place to shop. If you don’t mind wading through a sea of people just to check on the latest and cheapest goodies, Divisoria is the place for you. Suppose you’re ok with smelling like humanity after 4 hours of walking through the narrow streets. In that case, Divisoria is the Mecca of your desires. If you take pleasure in getting lost through a maze of side roads inside bodegas, Divisoria is your playground. If you don’t mind dedicating an entire day for shopping, the traffic to get in and out, around and about Divisoria, will help you kill time.
Being the oldest commercial and business district has its advantages. Tutuban Train Station has turned Divisoria into a major drop-off point for merchants seeking to sell products from different provinces and other countries. Almost every type of goods and services are sold in the streets of Divisoria. This includes, but are not limited to:
(a) fresh food (fruits, vegetables)
(b) processed food (tinapa, tuyo, longganisa from every province and city)
(c) prepared food (cooked, preserved, canned)
(d) non-food/durable (machine and vehicle parts, houseware )
(e) non-food/non-durable (school materials, household items, makeup, cleaning products, chemicals, shoes, jewelry)
(f) textile/clothing (RTW, curtains, bedsheets)
(g) services (traditional medicine, industrial machine repairs, key duplication, fortune telling)
If you hate crowds, you would love the privacy you get when you shop online (especially at 3am when your husband/Special Someone isn’t looking). Online shopping will be your best option if you don’t mind waiting for products to get to you. If you are still feeling jittery over this Covid crisis, the safest place to go is online shopping. If you are ok with using a debit card or credit card online, nothing stops you from clicking “Add to Cart” when shopping online. If you know your foot/bra/waist/hip size in centimeters, millimeters, or inches, and you’ve memorized the EU, UK, US, and China conversion charts, then shopping online will save you a lot of time. Suppose you love opening tabs of the same product to cross-check prices with different sellers before picking your options. In that case, it is obvious that you move faster when doing online shopping than pushing a cart somewhere in Manila.
Given the range of sellers in both Lazada and Shopee, you can get products produced worldwide in just a few clicks. You can make sure that you’re not being duped by reading reviews. Yes, like when buying in Divisoria, there are fly-by-night sellers everywhere. Gadgets and glassware could arrive broken. Sellers could take your payment today, then disappear and close their sellers account tomorrow. It happens. Online marketplaces like Lazada and Shopee are all about building trust. That’s why both online malls now have familiar brands from L’Oreal to SnR Shopping as a part of their vendor list. Instead of putting their own online stores, Lazada and Shopee have convinced the likes of Unilever, Honda, Huawei, and Apple that they’re as competent as any department store with a “nationwide audience.”
Rica Palomo-Espiritu
Web & Digital Media Management • VerticalSkylin
