If you’re a smoker and are thinking about switching to vaping, one of the first things you need to learn is that traditional tobacco retailers like gas stations and convenience stores are often the worst places to buy vape gear. At a convenience store, the primary nicotine products will always be cigarettes. There’s very little shelf space left over for vape gear, and the few vaping products that you will find will almost always be tobacco-flavored vapes produced by Big Tobacco companies. They might be cheap, but they certainly won’t be very enjoyable to use. If you want to buy the best products, you need to go to a vape store.
Knowing that you need to buy from a dedicated vape shop if you want to enjoy the best product selection, though, is only part of the battle – you also need to choose the right vape shop. You can go to a local brick-and-mortar operation, or you can buy from an online vape store. Buying locally gives you the benefit of instant gratification. You can walk into a store and walk out with the product of your choice, and there’s no need to wait for shipping.
Aside from the instant gratification factor, though, brick-and-mortar vape shops don’t really have a lot to offer compared to online vape stores – and you’re about to learn why. Buying vape gear online requires a little planning for the best experience because you’ll always get the best price when you buy in bulk. It’s worth the few minutes of extra effort, though, because online vape stores have much more to offer than a typical brick-and-mortar vape shop.
Why should you buy from an online vape store if you want to have the best possible experience? It all comes down to these three reasons.
An Online Vape Store Will Have the Biggest Product Selection
There is a truly enormous selection of vaping products in the world today. Between all of the vape mods, disposable vapes, e-liquids and accessories, there are thousands upon thousands of individual products. There’s so much on the market that it would be impossible for any brick-and-mortar store to find the display space for everything that’s available. Since there’s no way to find room for everything, brick-and-mortar vape shops have to choose the products that they believe will be most popular.
An online vape store, on the other hand, doesn’t have to worry about finding enough customer-facing display space for all of its products because “display space” is unlimited when your website is your store. Online vape shops store their products in warehouses, and that gives them plenty of room for even the most obscure items. If you want to try the latest disposable vapes and the most interesting and unusual vape juice flavors, you’ll always enjoy the biggest selection if you buy your vape gear online.
Buying online is also a great way to find obscure or older vaping products. Are you looking for replacement parts for an older pod system or vape tank? Is there a hard-to-find vintage vape mod that you’d like to add to your collection before the remaining stock sells out? You can often find those products online, but you won’t find them in a brick-and-mortar vape shop.
An Online Vape Store Will Have the Best Prices
Next, let’s talk about how competition works in the vaping industry. The more competition a vape shop has, the lower its prices are likely to be. The level of competition is very different depending on whether a vape shop does most of its business locally or online, and that’s going to affect the prices you pay.
Have you ever taken a moment to think about who your favorite vape shop’s competitors are? A brick-and-mortar vape shop’s competitors are the other vape shops within driving distance. That tends to limit how aggressive local vape stores have to be in pricing their products. Some brick-and-mortar vape shops don’t even have local competition, and that essentially allows them to charge whatever they want.
An online vape store, on the other hand, competes with every other online vape shop that ships to the same region. In a major vaping market like the United States or the United Kingdom, online vape shops are competing with literally hundreds of other websites for the same customer base. The high level of competition forces online sellers to price their products aggressively, and you benefit from that as a consumer.
Want to save even more money when you buy vape gear online? Plan your purchases ahead of time, so you can buy in bulk and avoid shipping charges. Major online vape shops almost always waive their shipping fees for bulk orders, and it’s wise for you to avoid those fees if you can because they’re often quite large.
An Online Vape Store Will Give You Frequent Opportunities to Save Money
One of the best things about buying vape gear online is that you’ll often have opportunities to save money if you’re an astute buyer. A popular online vape store will often have promotions such as coupon codes and flash sales – and if you’re a frequent buyer, you’ll be among the first to find out about those opportunities because you’ll be a member of the store’s mailing list. If you’re not too picky about when you get your vape gear, you’ll have plenty of opportunities to save money if you pay attention to your inbox.
With brick-and-mortar vape shops, on the other hand, opportunities to save money don’t come along quite so often. Local vape stores will often have clearance areas where they display slow-selling products and e-liquids that are about to expire, but that’s usually about the most that you can expect to find. Once again, it all comes down to the fact that local stores have little incentive to lower their prices. Bargains are rare at brick-and-mortar vape shops because instant gratification is the main thing that those shops have going for them. If you want to walk out with that disposable vape or bottle of e-liquid today, you’ll need to pay sticker price.
