By Joanne Lee

IN SEARCH of a little retail therapy the other weekend, I headed to the beauty hall in one of Orchard Road's department stores. In these times of self-imposed spending austerity, the only pick-me-up I was willing to allow myself was a new eyeshadow or two.

Imagine my disappointment when I found out that the Stila cosmetic counter at Tangs was gone. Well, not quite gone. It had been moved to a location of less value and scaled down to about one-fifth of its previous plot size.

What happened? The shop assistant had no explanation. My guess was that Estee Lauder, which bought the cult brand in 1999 when it was five years old, might have since sold out.

Googling later when I got home, I discovered that the international beauty product powerhouse had sold Stila to private equity company Sun Capital Partners back in April 2006. Presumably, Stila's retail channels were drastically reduced once it could no longer leverage off Estee Lauder's distribution network.

At the store, however, the more important question in my mind was: How am I going to get my Stila favourites that are no longer being stocked?

'Buy online?' the shop assistant shrugged. Downcast, I went browsing elsewhere, knowing full well that stilacosmetics.com does not ship outside the United States. (Yes, I was unaware of Stila's sale to a private equity company but disgracefully familiar with its shipping policy.)

It's outrageous, really. Stila is a big enough brand to be an acquisition target but not big enough to ship internationally? How is it going to grow its global footprint and meet sales targets if it does not cater to overseas customers?

Thankfully, a girl can always turn to brand-aggregating emporiums like beauty product giant Sephora with well-developed logistics systems.

For shoppers like myself - too lazy to rummage through crowded stores and too eccentric in taste for off-the-rack products - online shopping has been a saviour for years. The obvious cost: the additional shipping charges that can at times cost as much as the loot itself.

During the fat years (financial, not physical), ordering products unavailable locally was worth forking out the extra change. But in these lean times, how does one still indulge in the habit without spending excessively on outrageous shipping fees?

Here are some suggestions:

Combine, combine, combine.

Since smaller merchants, like Stila, don't ship direct internationally anyway, it makes sense to turn to online emporiums like one-stop shop Amazon (which sells everything from books to DVDs to dog collars designed by Paris Hilton) or speciality stores like Sephora.

Combining purchases at such emporiums means shipping costs may be minimised. Instead of paying $20 for a $150 purchase, for example, one might pay $30 for a $250 one. Of course, the danger of trying to minimise the shipping percentage per package is that you may end up giving yourself excuses to spend more.

Enter vPost.

The service, provided by Singapore Post, is simply brilliant. It allows you to shop at overseas online merchants at domestic shipping rates. Upon signing up, vPosters are given an address in the US (Oregon and California), Europe (London) and Japan. Using these addresses when shopping online allows one to take advantage of cheaper local postal rates, even free shipping where available.

Shoppers can also consolidate their packages. Say, if you bought Christmas presents from Red

envelope.com and a pair of shoes from Bluefly.com, you can opt to get them sent back home together at a reduced rate based on their combined weight.

And there's more!

vPost now offers a vConcierge service that lets you buy stuff from websites that don't accept international credit cards. Upon payment for shipping at the vPost website with locally issued credit cards, packages are dispatched within five to eight days. It might be a two-step process, but hey, it's hefty savings in the long run.

Shop with strangers.

It's possible. Join online shopping 'spree' blogs such as http://community.livejournal.com/sg_shopping to combine your purchases with other shoppers and save on postage/goods and services tax (GST) per shipment.

At such blogs, shoppers post their shopping intentions, get together and order online under one user name. They pay the primary shopper via online bank transfers and meet up in real life to distribute the goods.

The motto: The mall we get together. Obviously, there's a lot of trust involved and the blogger-shoppers must go through pretty rigorous getting- to-know-you rituals.

Curiously, the blog's last entry on an Urban Originals shopping spree invitation dates back to October. Presumably, the credit crunch must be curtailing even the most avid online shopper's budget.

So there you have it. A couple of cost-saving measures if you really have to shop online this recession. The one I'll be adopting is slightly different though. My new mantra is: Thou shalt not spend.

Just last night, for example, I convinced myself not to invest in a beautiful, and affordable, walnut wood fountain pen, hand-crafted by an artisan in Iowa.

Exercising mind control, I clicked all over his website until I found the perfect reason not to buy the pen: He also does wood work for pistols and revolvers. Since I approved of gun control, I managed to appease my online shopping conscience.

Now, if only I can persuade my conscience to be less needy about Stila eyeshadow.

This article was first published in The Straits Times on December 06, 2008.