Electronic Shops in the Czech Republic

It’s routine to complain that the holiday season has become overly commercialized. A more cheerful way to see this busiest shopping time of the year is to re-imagine it as days when the greatest number of people who make things meet the greatest number of people wanting to buy things. This is the greatest annual exchange of human energies, essentially a time of rebirth, with earth’s citizens finding themselves newly clothed, perfumed and iPhoned.

Where you can get this iPhone or other electronic goods in the Czech Republic is the ultimate aim of this article. You can go to physical stores or you can go online, and some retailers offer both options. Did we personally buy and return numerous items from every store in the ČR, causing a significant upward spike in the country’s economic indicators, just to research this article? No, we didn’t. But we did ask for first-hand shopping experiences from everyone we knew.

Generally better prices and a greater selection of items are other reasons to consider shopping on the net. Online stores typically offer cheaper deals, even including delivery. An additional tactic suggested by a number of people: shop at online stores that have non-virtual branches in tow. If you pick up the goods yourself, you save on delivery!

One drawback to shopping online that you’ll quickly discover: it would help to know some Czech, as most of the sites make no attempts to offer information in English.  It is possible to figure them out, especially if you are looking for a very specific item and engage google.com/translate, but finer details might prove elusive.

Another drawback, of course, is the fact that you don’t see the product you are buying. One solution practiced by creative shoppers is to check out the item in a physical store and then order it on the web.

Mall.cz offers a number of payment options (credit cards, wires, cash on delivery, cash in store, etc).  This variety of ways to pay can be found on many other sites as well, so you don’t necessarily need a credit card to shop online.

Policies differ a bit from store to store, but overall, consumer protection and customer service in the Czech Republic still leave a lot to be desired. In general, you better buy the right product the first time around and hope it doesn’t break.

As art would have it, while writing this article, I had an experience that perfectly illustrated this topic. The charger for my computer conked out mid-sentence and I had to go to the iStyle store at Anděl, where I recently bought it. I´ve had many Apple products in the past and was sure they had a universe-wide 90-day exchange policy. The clerks at the store assured me that the laws of Czech Republic trump the laws of Apple, and I have to give them the charger so they can send it off some place where some people will take up to a month to figure out what’s wrong with it. In the mean time, I can’t use my computer (in fact, this article was due that day). My only option is to buy a new charger and be out another 3k. Needless to say, it took much yelling and holding up the line to finally get the second salesperson to connect me to a manager that he earlier claimed did not exist. The manager was nice enough, and we came to a mutually unsatisfactory agreement.  They are supposed to give me back the money I´ll pay now for a new charger, if the repair center will confirm a few weeks later that the old broken one is under warranty. I am holding my breath.