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or housewives, shopping is often a break from household chores. They can spend hours browsing in stores comparing the quality and prices of goods.

With the widespread use of IT these days, this pastime has turned into a source of income for some women who have connected with buyers outside Java to help them shop.

Lutfiana Nisa Wiegati, 28, living in Depok, West Java, is an example of a housewife for whom becoming an online personal shopper is an opportunity to earn money in her spare time.

She said she displayed pictures of furniture and home décor products on her Instagram account to attract customers. She also teamed up with bigger online personal shoppers as a reseller to get more customers.

“I work like a salesperson for them, so I just need to send them shopping lists and they will do the rest,” she told The Jakarta Post.

Personal shopping, also known as jasa titip, is an online business that is currently mushrooming in Greater Jakarta and other urban areas where outlets for luxury and branded goods are more commonly found.

The customers, who usually live in smaller cities or regencies, inform the shoppers about products they want to buy and provide details of the items.

The products vary from skincare products to furniture. The customers pay a charge that includes the product price, personal shopper’s fees and shipping costs. Then the shoppers go to malls and stores to hunt for the products.

Lutfiana said she started the business with zero capital because she required customers to pay in advance before she went to shop.

“I shop based on customers’ requests, so they have to transfer full payments before I buy their orders,” she said.

Nurul Fitriani, 35, a housewife who owns @bright_ikea online shop on Instagram, said that she once received an order to buy a bedroom furniture set and a cabinet in Ikea from a customer in Papua.

“That customer transferred a total of Rp 17 million [US$1,257] for the order even though we had never met before and that person only knew my shop from Instagram,” she said.

Nurul added that orders also came from customers living in Greater Jakarta who were unwilling to endure traffic to get to the stores.

“That has brought luck to my business,” she said.

Nurul, who lives in Bintaro, South Jakarta, said that from 2006 she had operated an online clothing store. However, she shifted the business in December 2016 to personal shopper because she saw it was trending.

She said her online shop usually displayed Scandinavian-style home décor products because it matched her taste and liking. Therefore, she also tried to attract young women who liked the same furniture style as her by sending the products to famous Instagram users for promotion.

She recalled her experience when she was overwhelmed in the initial months of the business because she had to do all the work such as shopping, packing and sending packages on her own.

“I almost cried every day because the task was overwhelming. Sometimes I did not have time to take a shower because I needed to respond to customers’ chats from morning to midnight,” she said.

Now, Nurul employs nine staff to help her run the business.

Although she declined to discuss her margins, she said that she charged a jasa titip fee of up to 10 percent of the product prices. “The profit is enough to pay my staff.” (ecn)