shopping is so exciting

Shopping is so addictive, especially on the net. When you are still awake at 1 am, when the city you live have so limited resources, and when it's hot out in the streets, or when the city has the largest shopping web in the country. Naturally you will feel so proud or so obliged to shop with it.

Open anytime the web: www.taobao.com, and you will be thrilled you have anything you need now or in the future. With its secure payment system, alipay, it has won over all the shopper or stores from chinese version of ebay. ( I had one bad shopping experience on ebay.cn, and found the buyers are very often not protected.) Alipay supports all bank cards, and works as the middleman. You decide to buy and deposit the money on your account, and if you are satisfied with the quality of the purchase, you inform it to transfer the money.

And taobao is a smal universe, where you can meet all sorts of people, lazy, smart, or too smart. And take my recent shopping experience for example.

I'd decided to buy a new camera, a compact one, all manual operations, wide lense. I've focused on Panasonic Lx2 and Canon s80. Although both have big shortcomings, like the noise at even low ISO with Lx2, and S80 doesn't have 16:9 widescreen mode.

After searching and comparing , I locked a store with good record. A Japan based store with very competive price, too. I pressed the button, and waited for a long week, each day expecting the surprise and then comvincing it takes time from Japan.A week passed and there was no response from the store. I lost patience and contacted his email and left message there at his store. But all went with no replies. Two days later, I sent another message, threating if he/she doesn't give any response, I will cancel the deal and give a 'bad' evaluation. Maybe it works, the threat of a bad record. Came soon the reply and an explanation about his busy work. He had no time for the deal and promised to refund the money to my account.

Same night, I placed on another store, but instead, for a S80. around 23:00 pm. Next morning, I got a call from the saleswoman, mentioning someone had remitted the money through real bank. She had no camera for me and apologized for it. I got the refund again, 24 hours later, which is the minimum time for a deal. I guessed for each deal through alipay the store has to pay commission. So stores welcome real cash remits better ( but no gurantee for the buyer though).

I searched again, firm now with S80, believing the photo quality cleaner and better. The deal this time worked perfectly. After a small discount, I accepted the deal and condition of express delivery.

Two days later I got my new camera here in Hangzhou from Wuhan, central China.