Filipinos were already ‘adding to cart’ from home long before online shopping

Printed catalogs and brochures gave Filipinos an early version of today’s online shopping experience, from browsing products and comparing prices to placing orders from home.

Long before online shopping put thousands of products on a smartphone screen, Filipinos were already browsing and ordering products from the comfort of their homes through printed brochures and catalogs.

These brochures turned shopping into something that could be done without visiting a store, with pages filled with photographs, product descriptions, prices, and ordering information that allowed customers to decide what they wanted before contacting a seller.

Direct-selling companies such as Avon and Tupperware helped make this shopping experience familiar in Filipino households, with sales representatives bringing catalogs to homes, collecting orders, and returning with the products.

The experience was a slower version of scrolling through an online marketplace, where a catalog could be flipped through at home, and a product could be circled, listed, or shown to others before an order was placed. But the fun and excitement of finding something you wanted were much the same.

Newspapers expanded the same idea through classified advertisements. They allowed Filipinos to look for appliances, furniture, vehicles, and secondhand goods without physically visiting multiple sellers, with buyers contacting sellers through the telephone numbers or addresses printed in the advertisements.

Television shopping programs eventually added moving images to the process, allowing viewers to see products demonstrated before placing an order through a phone call.

Now, online marketplaces have made the process dramatically faster by putting product comparisons, customer reviews, digital payments, discounts, and delivery tracking on a single screen.

The technology may have changed, but several familiar parts of shopping remain the same, from discovering a product and checking its price to contacting the seller, arranging payment, and waiting for the purchase to arrive.

READ: