GlamBox is a ‘try before you buy’ online service for cosmetic samples, make up and beauty products. As someone who never has time to for these things, all the beauty products I own are months/years old. I read somewhere that mascara should be thrown out every 6 months. Oops.

The online shopping industry in South Africa is pathetic. There are a number of reasons people do not shop online; security, stupidity and general lack of trust in the general process.

During the past holiday season, my fancy took me to surfing online shopping sites. A form of consumerism that is becoming popular in leaps and bounds.

Because I've just started! I was quite skeptical at first. But this meant that I was missing out on the global effect of trading goods between borders, and we ALL know how brilliant this is!

It is week 19 of 2010 of our price comparison of the major supermarkets Pick & Pay, Woolworths and Checkers. There has not been much movement this week with the price comparison. Pick n Pay is once again the cheapest this week – biggest special on the list is Skip  R57.99 (last week R69.95).  So the rankings are yet again Pick and Pay being the cheapest for 24 items at R558.04 (last week R559.46), Checkers at R563.52 (R561.12) and Woolies at R577.14 (R579.14).

Here are some money saving tips when shopping online:

Buying on-line has become much more common place over the last few years. Paypal has been available for this purpose from South Africa for a long time. The limit on Paypal in South Africa until now was that it was possible to shop internationally using Paypal but a South African trader could not use it to earn money. 

This year, rather than try the usual “shopping” route for my family gifts over the festive season, I decided to modernise my process, and went with a pure online route.

Take2 has been quite a favourite of mine for some time now, and I’ve spent a fair amount of money making use of their services. Yeah, the pages might be a little ancient in their look and feel, definitely having a pre-Web 2.0 feel to them, but at the same time, it’s the core services you really need to look at, rather than the look and feel (bringing to mind the saying: never judge a book by it’s cover).

This year, I found an extensive range of items that were so cheap, I had to order three copies. You read right! Three. Copies. My reason was that these would make perfect gifts for my like-minded friends, while supplying me with an original too (and lets be honest, there’s nothing better than a tangible, touchable original, right?).

For those of you who have never delved into the world of online shopping, I highly recommend you give it a whirl – my collection of gifts took me less than an hour to decide upon, and now I’m just waiting for them all to arrive. The great thing about this: no shopping, no queues. I found exactly what I wanted, ordered it, and paid for it. And if there’s one thing I hate – it’s shopping.