Lazada Review: How to tell if your online shopping company is reliable

I did not start shopping in the Philippines’ online shopping mall Lazada  because everyone is getting in on it and the hype but rather it was because of their proven reliability.  I am very particular when it comes to business transactions and making my purchases. I am very picky so to speak in terms of selecting online shopping websites. I would like to call myself as a smart and inquiring consumer and employ thorough yet very simple and effective strategies and methods to determine the reliability of a particular online shopping website. Reviews and ratings all over the internet might help since those opinions are real but I tend to usually go beyond just merely reading reviews, I pound the pavement so to speak and go lengths and terms of my research. When I say I go to great lengths, I did not mean that I am doing research offline, I do all of my stuff online but I follow a set of questions that I ask myself to determine if an online shopping website is legit or not. 

Is the webpage constantly updated? – When I say updated, it means that everything should be current. Like the inventory, products, information, on sale items and those kinds of stuff. Also updated does not mean that it is only confined to the surface, being updated means  that the website is updated as well in terms of coding and such things  behind the  curtains. You can tell easily that the website is not fully updated on a regular basis if you often encounter links on the website that does not work, or if the browser always times out or if the website is doing all sorts of weird things or loading up information that you did not request it to show you. Lazada is number one in this category and does it really well, everything is served fresh on a daily basis and you can see that the developers behind it are always up on their toes working to have everything updated daily. I say it because I never had any experience getting errors, lags or anything like that. All the links are working fine and is always in good order. The products are always fresh and if they got it on display that means that the product is available. This is one of the aspects of reliability that the company is absolutely amazing at.  

The second question that you need to ask yourself is that, is there a person that I could speak with if ever I have questions? This is very important for most people because sometimes, even though everything has gone fully self-service nowadays online, phone support is still necessary as things can always go wrong especially if you are dealing with a computer.  Lazada again is awesome in this category; they provide the most knowledgeable, most reliable and courteous customer service personnel that you can find locally. 

The next question is, is there a PCI-DSS logo? – This part is more on actual safety of online payment and you should be more concerned about this if you are using a credit card. However, in Lazed even though you are not using a credit card to pay, you’ll be glad that the company is PCI-DSS protected should you, at one point decide to use a credit card instead of the cash on delivery payment.  

So there go some of the criteria and questions that need to be asked to determine the reliability of a website and Lazada are pretty much compliant with all of them.