A new emerging term which is getting common day by day is "online shopping". It is a form of electronic commerce where people can buy goods or services from any seller company or brand over the internet without an intermediary service, This Shopping online can save you money especially when you couple it with online savings codes, deals of the day, and free shipping offers. Although not all the time same deals are offered in their brick stores as they do at their online stores. Its major reason is the costs of running an establishment is considerably greater than an online store. Factors such as rent, electricity, payroll, fixtures, and shrinkage loss, all contribute to the gross margin and overhead of doing business in a shopping center. An online shop, e-shop, e-store, Internet-shop, web-shop, web store, online store, or virtual store evokes the physical analogy of buying products or services at a bricks-and-mortar retailer or Shopping Centre.
Sellers have discovered that they can meet the needs of their customers with less operational expenses, by having an online location and not a physical store. Good online retailers then pass that savings onto their customers by cutting the cost of the products. Right now the world’s largest online retailing corporations are EBay and Amazon.com
Benefits of online shopping:
Convenience: The online shopping websites are available 24 hours every day and now a days every one has all time access to internet so it is very much convenient for the customer to place an order at any time, without waiting for store to open in business hours.
Time Saving: The online shopping can save our precious time; if we have to buy any gift for our loved ones but are busy in our tough life then we can also order that using online shopping so that we can get our required product without even wandering around the shopping mall.
Price and selection: The advantage of shopping online is ability of quickly searching out deals for items or services with many different sellers. Search engines, online price comparison services and discovery shopping engines can be used to look up sellers of a particular product or service.
Reviews and Information: Just like in a real time stores, the salesmen are there to guide you, in online shopping, there are some features like chat, e-mail or call available on the online shopping websites. Some stores even allow customers to comment or rate their items by proving the review section in their website. There are also dedicated review sites that host user reviews for different products. Also online stores must describe products for sale with written texts, photos, and multimedia files, whereas in a physical retail store, the actual product and the manufacturer's packaging will be available for direct inspection (which might involve a test drive, fitting, or other experimentation).
Drawbacks of online shopping:
Fraud and security concerns: As there is lack of Given the lack of inspection ability before purchase, consumers are at higher risk of fraud on the part of the merchant than in a physical store. Merchants also risk fraudulent purchases using stolen credit cards or fraudulent repudiation of the online purchase.
Lack of full cost disclosure: The lack of full disclosure mean not to have full inspection of your required product with regards to the total cost of purchase is one of the concerns of online shopping. It may not be easy to see the total cost up front as additional fees for example shipping are often not be visible until the final step in the checkout process.
Privacy: The big issue of privacy of personal information is a big issue for some consumers. Different legal jurisdictions have different laws concerning consumer privacy, and different levels of enforcement but some costumers does not like to give away their personal data for such websites which can cause problems for them later on.