What does the inside of an Internet business look like? If you visit the office of BuyOnline.lk you can see. BuyOnline is a decent looking website that sells tablets, computers, cameras, etc.
I wanted to buy a tablet (to test stuff on) so we checked out the website and decided to pay them a visit. Not cause you can’t buy online and get delivery, but because I just to get the stock immediately.
BuyOnline is not necessarily a place designed to visit, but it’s an interesting experience nonetheless. It’s on Deanstone Place, off Galle Road, which has no parking per se. On that corner you have to climb four flights of stairs and BuyOnline is a little office at the top. There’s a very nice fellow surrounded by a little bit of stock, some tablets, some hair things – two shelves and a laptop, essentially.
In my case, they didn’t have a GPS enabled tablet in the room so we (me and the salesman) walked down four flights of stairs and down two blocks along the Galle Road. We hung out on the street for a while till someone came out of an office, opened the trunk of his car, and then I helped the salesman carry some fresh stock to the store (back up four flights of stairs).
And there was the tablet we needed, for Rs. 27,500, a bit of a markup over the $150 it seems to cost in China, but we got it the same day. There’s no particular warranty or service from this place so we can’t say we wholeheartedly recommend it, but if you know what you’re getting into, BuyOnline does seem to deliver.
As a note, you might like to visit the classifieds site I found BuyOnline through, ikman.lk