And shopping with Women is like experiencing hell down under (pun intended!) I took my cousin Kanu out for shopping when she came to Bangalore once; and she would take hours to shop for just 1 garment. She would check out 5 garments in 5 different shops in 5 different malls before going back to buy the 1st garment in the 1st shop! My body gave up half way through the shopping and I was slumped into waiting room chairs trying to catch forty winks! But her selection for me was always very nice; and helped me get compliments from everyone!

Now Kanu stays in Australia and I miss her company whenever I go out to shop. She is not here to choose the best t-shirt or jeans for me. And of course I have no patience to go for offline shopping. So what to do?

Then I heard of Shopcorn.in, India’s 1st social shopping community. Hmm… interesting concept I thought. Let me try it out for myself.

I mailed Kanu and told her to be online at the same time that I was; and we jointly logged onto community shopping website which promised a very interesting shopping experience.

And did we love it! within minutes of logging and using the video chat feature, we were reviewing the good and bad deals in the deal box.

Deal box was giving us options to drop in deals from other websites like Rediff, Indiatimes and then evaluate them online via text/audio/video chat. We are kicking the worst deals and picking the best deals among the lot. Loads of fun it was! One particularly bad deal from Indiatimes for a faded jeans for Rs.3000 was promptly kicked by my cousin and she said I’m much rather not buying a pair of jeans. You know how it is with Women and making decisions! If this chat feature was not there, I would have blindly bought it!

Another very interesting feature we liked was the community angle of the entire online shopping experience. As a social media evangelist, I totally believe in the power of crowdsourcing. I rely a lot on blogs and sites like moutshut.com more than advertising websites for information. This community feature actually allows people to create profiles of themselves, write blogs, participate in question & answers section, and even upload videos. How cool is that! We really benefited a lot from this feature failing which we would have fallen prey to a  unscrupulous vendor!

The entire online shopping comparison experience would have been bought to a naught if not for the wonderful Tataindicom USB connection which I had for my laptop. I was sitting in the balcony of my highrise building and sipping chai while I was doing this shopping, on a pleasant summer evening. The speeds were so good that it was almost as if I was sitting across with my cousin and chatting away with her about life in general and shopping in particular. I had used Tata Indicom’s earlier USB modem and the speed of Photon Plus is atleast 10 times better than the earlier one. Really impressive! The flexibility offered by USB modem has always helped me in online shopping as in the middle of a long road trip, I have been able to quickly order supplies to reach before I reach my destination. It always helps to stay connected on the entire road trip via a laptop with USB connection!

A very interesting shopping experience indeed and I would recommend the same to anyone who miss shopping with their near and dear ones, just because they stay far away.