Having received an offer for a Giordano watch from a credit card company, Ghosh decided to encash it online and logged on to one of the several online portals to look for the best deal.

“It was actually a great idea. While original Giordano watches cost you a fortune, this one cost me only Rs 399. A great bargain. This watch, moreover, holds special significance since it was a gift from my wife too,” says the designer with a city-based-print media.

Ghosh is not the sole exception. Increasingly, a number of people are logging on to the net to buy a wide range of goods— from household utilities to accessories, books and even lighters.

For Sayantan Bhattacharya, an employee with a private bank in the city, online portals were the only place where he could find a Zippo lighter, due to its unavailability in city stores.

“Since Zippos were unavailable in the city, a friend and I went online to log into eBay —the shopping website — and I found great offers. It cost me only Rs 4,500 and is working fine. Since then I have bought more things like pocket watches,” says Bhattacharya.

For today’s workaholic professionals, there is hardly enough time to go to different stores and look for the things they fancy, which is where these online portals come in handy. Sites like eBay, Amazon, Rediff, Indiaplaza, Indiatimes and Future Bazaar offer a variety of deals and at prices that meet all pockets.

From mobiles to MP3 players to diamond rings to even collectors’ items like coins and stamps — the online portals are the best for many. Many like Ghosh regularly order books and DVDs from the portals. “I wanted to buy Peter Brook's Mahabharata, something that is not available in India, so I had no options but to order it from these sites. It's a collector's item and was worth every penny that I paid for it. Another thing that I buy online is furniture, from a store in Rajasthan through its website,” says Ghosh.

For college students like Rituparna Chakrabarty and Suchetana Basu, who wanted to attend the recently concluded Scorpion’s concert in Shillong, the net was where they went to book an air ticket.

“There was no way we could have missed the concert, and since we are still students we had to look for the cheapest airfare, and it was the online portals that came to our rescue. We compared the different prices of the fares and finally found one that suited our budget. Now we are dedicated online window shoppers. While we might not have enough money to buy things, we still keep track of all the sites and what's available in them,” say the duo.