Tech News

Four Online Shopping Trends for Jamaica in 2011

Published

13 years ago

December 21, 2010

1. Digital Coupons – Discountsja.com is like the Groupon.com for Jamaica. What they do is to secure discounts from merchants and make them available to people who sign up to save on their purchases of goods and services across Jamaica. You can Print the voucher, then present it at the business to get your deal. They are only a few months old, have close to 5,000 users. It’s timely as many people are very money conscious and are being wise with how much they spend and everybody loves a deal, a discount.Watch for coupons for your smart phone too.

2. Buying groceries online -Online shopping for groceries by Jamaicans who live in Jamaica has been pretty much nonexistent. It was more an exercise in window shopping on brochure sites, followed by a call or email to place an order. As the ecommerce industry blossoms on the consumer, bank, busines owner angles, expect to see more options for Jamaicans to shop for groceries online and more providers making it an option. Asljamaica.com, calls themselves an Online Wholesale Club and launched in December this year, while the name is in our opinion unfortunate, it seems to have a powerful idea in play.

3. Setting up Your own online store – Virtualmalljamaica/Shopvmj.com pioneered online shops for Jamaican businesses a couple of years ago. Now they have 70 online stores that offer Jamaican and global products and services. But with First Caribbean Fire starting the banking industry to offer Visa Debit cards and with more banks to jump on the bandwagon- more Jamaicans will see online shopping as a safe, viable option. This in turn will make selling to Jamaicans online will be viable for business owners. We see that there will no only more people setting up online shops inside online malls, but establishing their own using options such as bigcommerce.com, Facebook online shop options and wordpress store themes and credit card processing.

4. Rating and Reviews – Now, when you’ve had a great experience or not, at a restaurant, store online and offline,you can not only tell your friends but you can also share it with the world on Jamaican sites like yuhrate.com and roamingdonkey.com. Jamaican consumers have been more exposed and are demanding variety, better prices and actual consistent customer service. So expect more sites that help to keep Jamaican and Caribbean brands accountable, just in case they haven’t already heard that Customer Service is the new Marketing.