Written by Amie-san(Laksmi Kusumawardhani)
How do you usually do grocery shopping? Most of us might say ‘go directly’ to the supermarket. But for the muslims in Japan, the numbers of supermarket selling halal products might be limited and are not just located in your neighborhood. Not to mention our tight schedule and the distance, halal product shopping might not be an easy task.
To solve this problem, the net/online shopping will be a very helpful way. It is not a very popular method back in my country Indonesia yet, due to the security reason. But in Japan it is already very common for using online shopping and most of the sites are trusty as well. Lots of ‘Halal Shops’ in Japan provide the online shopping, for example you can refer to Smile Infinity Item List where you can get halal meat, Japanese halal foods and Japanese halal cooking ingredients.
I do online shopping for my groceries a lot lately since I found the online shopping is really saving my time, energy and money for going to the store. Not to mention that it is also saving my shoulders and hands since I do not have to carry heavy things (lols). In addition there might be some stores are ‘way too far’ from your place and you will just simply have a chance to try their products while laying down at your room. Some online stores also sometimes do ‘special discount’ which are not available if we do shopping on stores.
The common procedures are quite simple. After you find the online store that you want to do online shopping:
- Register your name, address, contact number in the ‘registration section’
- Choose the products together with the number of items you want and put them in the ‘cart section’
- Go to the ‘cashier section’ and choose your payment method. You might think that ‘no credit card’ means not being able to shop online. But luckily in Japan, most of the online stores provide three payment options:
- Credit card
- Bank transfer- usually with extra charge
- Cash on Delivery- usually with extra charge
- Some websites provide the options of ‘delivery time’ where you can choose what day and what time you want the items to be delivered to your place.
And you get your stuff at your door!! How convenient it is!!
Tips for doing online shopping:
- We might not know all available online stores in our country so start using the ‘name of products’ as a keyword for googling and you will get information of some available online stores.
- Make sure that the online store is having the ‘Contact Us’ or ‘Inquiry’ section for you to contact them for any troubles. You can contact them first before you do shopping.
- If there are any ‘rate section’ check how the rate of the store is.
- When you just start shopping at one online store, the COD (cash on delivery) payment method is recommended since you will make sure you receive the items first before you pay.
- Make sure whether the price is already including tax and delivery fee or not.
- Some online store will set the certain amount of purchase for free delivery fee. So it is recommended for you to buy at big amount at one time to get benefit of this. In order not to do ‘over-shopping’, arrange the schedule and the necessary items for your online shopping.
HAPPY ONLINE SHOPPING!!
