Online Shopping Nowadays, Internet shopping is becoming a powerful alternative to traditional storefront shopping, due to it

Online Shopping
    The advent of the Internet as a shopping medium has enabled shoppers to gain shopping benefits such as convenience and time-saving, better information, and price savings. This lecture aims to provide a better understanding of the benefits of Internet shopping by identifying and discussing the advantages of Internet shopping over traditional storefront shopping. I roughly classify the advantages into the following four points, namely, 1)convenience and time-saving, 2)powerful research instrument, 3)lower search costs and better product selection, and 4)better price information and lower prices.
    Let’s begin with the first onexonvenience and time-saving. Shopping on the Internet offers convenience and time-saving benefits to shoppers, as compared to shopping in traditional stores. Changing consumer lifestyles and lack of time may make it more difficult for consumers to shop at physical locations such as stores and shopping malls. Shopping on the Internet addresses this problem as shoppers can shop in the comfort and convenience of home. The Internet operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and can be accessed anywhere in the connected world; shoppers can expect to browse and purchase goods on the Internet anytime, unlike traditional storefronts that have fixed opening hours. Shoppers can also purchase goods that are unavailable at their location, and are able to bypass restrictive import policies, as the Internet allows shoppers to make purchases from vendors in other locations around the world.
    Secondly, Internet is a powerful research instrument. Shoppers are able to use the Internet as a powerful research instrument in the purchasing process. For certain products such as books and Videos/CDs/DVDs, reviews and recommendations are important factors in influencing purchase decision. With such products, shoppers are not only able to browse through a larger selection on the Web in sites such as Amazon.com, but are also able to conveniently obtain reviews and recommendations that are usually unavailable in offline stores.
    Shoppers who shop online do not necessarily make the purchase online, but "offline" from a brick-and-mortar storefront, and vice versa. 46 percent of online buyers research online to purchase offline, while 27 percent research offline to purchase online and 17 percent research in both ways, according to Forrester Research. The above information gives evidence that the Internet can also be viewed as a supplement to traditional storefront purchasing, rather than as a competitor. This ability to shop, research, and view potential purchases on the Internet empowered customers and accelerated their purchase decisions.
    Besides, Internet offers lower search costs and better product selection. Shopping using the Internet overcomes the time and pecuniary costs of traditional shopping; shoppers can shop from the comfort and convenience of home, and need not travel to physical storefronts. Shoppers are able to locate many vendors online using search engines and websites designed to navigate shoppers, view detailed product information from a variety of vendors’ websites, compare price and quality among different vendors, and make purchases online.
    With online shopping, shoppers no longer have to suffer the costs and incomplete information of traditional hierarchical search, making product searches easier and more effective. For example, a shopper is able to search over 3 million titles in Amazon.com from the computer screen at home, as compared to going physically to the bookstore, which carries an average of 80,000 titles.
    At last, better price information and lower prices are one of the best attractions of shopping online. The Internet makes it easier for shoppers to compare prices between vendors. Online vendors offer the prices of their goods in their websites. Simply by viewing different vendor websites, shoppers are able to obtain and compare prices easily, as compared to visiting different physical storefronts, which is costly and time consuming. Shoppers are able to find lower prices using the Internet due to the wider reach of information, and navigator websites such as www. autobytel.com that offers prices of competing vendors. With price information on the Internet, shoppers are less vulnerable to overpaying when buying from physical storefronts that may manipulate prices to shopper’s disadvantages.
    One of the reasons for lower prices is that shoppers are able to buy direct from a manufacturer’s or wholesaler’s website using the Internet. As more manufacturers and wholesalers cut off retail intermediaries to sell direct to consumers via the Internet, costs are lowered and hence they are able to offer lower prices.
    Examples of such companies are Dell Computer and Amazon.com, which are able to offer its products at lower prices as compared to most physical retail storefronts.
    The other is online stores are not burdened by the costs of running a physical store, such as the rent of the physical premises and operating costs such as the wages of sales staff. The cost savings by online stores lead to lower pricing on the Internet, passing on cost savings to shoppers. The Internet encourages online vendors to compete amongst one another by lowering prices.
    In conclusion, I highly recommend that all consumers should try online shopping. Once you have a go, you will never let it go. I’m sure.