Easy Come, Easy Go

I have been on a lookout for a super-zoom digital camera over the last couple of months now. Choices are rather limited in the local Malaysian online market. Nevertheless, I have narrowed my choice down to either a Nikon Coolpix or a Canon Powershot within the RM 900 to RM 1,300 range with at least 40x zoom. To be honest, I kept delaying my purchase, hoping for a big bargain to come my way one fine sunny day.

Santa Came Early

I was overjoyed when I saw the above in my Facebook news-feed on the evening of 24th August from Lazada Malaysia. The validity for this discount e-voucher is between the 25th and 28th August 2016 - no problem there - and I have to make the purchase via the Lazada mobile app running on a smartphone - no problem there either.

The best price that I could find for a Canon Powershot SX 540 HS was RM 1,360 on Lazada Malaysia. With a RM 200 discount, I only pay RM 1,160 - an almost 15% discount there, don't think I can find this bargain anywhere else online or offline.

Checkout Problems

Unfortunately I had problems; problems during my online payment via Maybank2U online banking during checkout - the login prompt did not appear, I got an error message instead.

And the worse part when I tried again: the Lazada's online system said that I have 'redeemed' my RM 200 discount e-voucher. Huh??! I can't even login to my Maybank2U account, damn it.

Curious, I tried 'paying' via my desktop Windows PC web browser. To cut a long story short: no problems encountered here - the login prompt appeared as expected.

With an invalidated RM 200 discount e-voucher, there was no bargain anymore. Only one thing to do: I terminated the transaction and the order.

A Sign From God?

I don't know. Maybe it's a sign from God telling me that I have made the wrong camera decision.

Or maybe it's just that I have some hardware or software incompatibility issues between the Lazada mobile app and my rather old donated-to-me smartphone - page loading in the Lazada app is rather slow, by the way.

Or maybe somebody did not debug their software properly.

I seem to prefer the Canon Powershot SX 530 HS now - more raving reviews for the SX 530 HS compared to the SX 540 HS from what I could see online; cheaper too being an older model (but still meet my requirements). I did find one online; the price is within the range of what I was suppose to pay on Lazada with the RM 200 discount.

Now what am I to do? Which should I choose? Or should I just wait for another big discount to come my way?

Note: I did file an official complaint to Lazada. They were very courteous, apologising whenever they could. But, no reason was given to what went wrong.