[App]cessorise: Shop until you drop (your mouse)

When it comes to shopping these days, we love the real world experience of getting in the car and going to the mall to rummage around and get our ‘hands on’ the goods.

But, we can also kick back in our armchairs, or crowd around our desktops, and fill our carts online shopping.

After initial fears surrounding fraud and security, many of us have accepted online shopping as a normal part of our lives. Shrewd shoppers today will often be heard to say: “Let’s have a look online first,” as they check availability, special offers, store locations and whether they might be better off just ordering over the web.

Following the birth of Amazon, eBay and other local country websites back in the mid-nineties, there are now dedicated online shopping apps. This means that these services can be installed as applications in their own right, on the user’s desktop or mobile device, bringing additional functionality, such as barcode scanning and special offer alerts. But for now, this model hasn’t been fully developed in the Middle East.

Online shopping’s winning factor is, of course, its convenience. Consumers can sit back and relax as their goods are despatched to them by post or courier after they settle their bills through online payments. For many though, the real benefit of online shopping are the community reviews that other consumers post to detail their happiness (or unhappiness) with purchased products.

Amazon

The king of the online shopping world for many is Amazon. The data giant supports a massive online electronic retailing business that not only caters for books, DVDs and music, it also offers a massive range of other goods from clothing to coffee grinders and everything in between. Helpfully, Amazon has taken the trouble to construct a specific shipping rates information page for consumers in the Middle East which you can find at this shortened URL — http://amzn.to/c629Y6. Amazon also provides a dedicated app, which users can download to iPhone, Android, iPad and Windows Phone devices.

eBay

Favoured by many for its ability to act as a marketplace for both buyers and sellers, eBay also provides a downloadable app for most platforms including Apple and even new Windows 8 users. From its roots as an auction style sales model where buyers submit bids electronically, eBay expanded into offering standard shopping services across a massive range of item categories.

SuperMart.ae

More local to the Gulf is SuperMart.ae with its online supermarket offering which although not a downloadable app, is available as a web service online. From drinks and food, to baby goods for new mums, it’s all there. The service divides Dubai up into two delivery sectors labelled Zone A and Zone B and is heavily focused on the Jumeirah area as a hub.

Souq.com

Souq dot com is actually the largest e-commerce site in the Arab world, featuring more than 200,000 products across categories such as consumer electronics, fashion, household goods, watches or perfumes. This site has also yet to progress to offering itself as a full-blown downloadable app. For now you can “Like” it on Facebook and “Follow” it on Twitter, so it’s only a matter of time before we start to be able to use dedicated apps for this kind of service here in the Gulf.

Adrian Bridgwater is a freelance journalist who specialises in software applications, gadgets and games.