Online Shopping And Social Networking †MyAssignmenthelp.com

Question: Discuss about the Online Shopping And Social Networking. Answer: Introduction There was once a time when window shopping was considered as a craze, but slowly with the advent of the internet and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) the shopping experience gradually revolutionized. People no longer had to move from one shop to another in search of their favorite products. Now they can sit in their home and order their products of need and want. These products range from simple story books to big huge machines. This new craze was termed as online shopping which made shopping feasible and accessible to people irrespective of their geographical location. Online shopping revolutionized the conventional shopping style and infused a touch of glamour into it. The feasibility and the accessibility of the products over the internet empowered people to choose from a wide range of alternatives, which was earlier not present (Shanthi Desti, 2015). Along with the online shopping came the added benefit of package delivery right at the door step of the consumer. This quickened u p the process and along with it a different industry gradually grew up which know as Amazon, EBay, Newegg, Alibaba (McDermott Payvision, 2015). This study is based on online shopping, how it evolved, the ethical issues associated with it, the various advantages and the disadvantages, impact of the online stores on the retail stores and the probable future of online shopping. Introduction to online shopping Online shopping can be defined as an activity or an action of purchasing services or products over the internet. This in simple words means going online and searching for a sellers website. Then choosing any specific product or service for delivery. The buyer then pays directly via debit or credit card over the internet or pays upon delivery. Online shopping not just include buying but also includes searching for the product online, and also looking for the current prices. This means that a person can effectively look for the product online, however he is not making any purchase. Through online shopping anything can be purchased. The online experts made a market analysis that online shopping will gradually overtake the sales of the offline retailers. Online shopping has some alternative terms like e-shopping which is also called electronic shopping and the e-tailing which is a shortened term of electronic retail. Likewise, online stores are also called by the name of virtual store, o nline storefront, online store, web-store, internet shop, e-store, e-shop, e-web-store. Mobile commerce can be described as making purchases from the mobile or hand held devices through the online retailers (Li, Dong Chen, 2012). These online websites are modified for the mobile viewing and the online retailer companies make standalone apps for shopping through mobile. These soft wares and the websites are designed to browse through the list of the brands and place orders through the computers or mobiles. The present day online shopping is also termed as e-commerce (Laudon Traver, 2013). Just like the online shopping, ecommerce also means selling and buying services and products, or transmitting data or funds or data through the electronic network, basically the internet. The transactions that take place occur between consumers to business, consumer to consumer, business to consumer, business to business. The terms e-business and ecommerce are often use interchangeably. Whereas, t he term e-tail is used when referencing to the transactional processes occurring in the online shopping. The history of ecommerce can be traced back to the year 1960 when the businesses were using Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) in order to share the business related documents with the other companies. American National Standards Institute introduced a new standard to share document to share documents over the internet called the ASC X12. While after 1980 these transactions grew in number and in the year 1990 Amazon and EBay brought a revolution to the e-commerce industry (Pfeiffer, 2012). Thus, both enabling and empowering the customers to purchase several different types of products online. Ecommerce is conducted via different applications like the web services, file transfer protocol, electronic data interchange, shopping carts, online catalogs and email. These applications include sending newsletters to the subscribers, sending emails to that contain advertisement of the new products (Zhao et al., 2015). The latest trends say that the different companies are trying to lure consumers over the internet through the social media marketing, digital coupons and the targeted advertisements. While the benefits of the ecommerce can be related to the 24/7 availability of speedy access of the services and the goods without any geographical limitations. However, some of the limitations of the service include consumers not being able to touch the product physically before making a purchase, limited consumer service and sometime long wait for product delivery (Mohapatra, 2013). Due to the rise in the ecommerce or online shopping, the IT professionals are forced to move beyond just the designing the website to the other aspects of online shopping. The other aspects include data security and the data privacy due to the innumerable number of customers data on to the databases. Nowadays when the IT systems are developed, it incorporates the important criteria of maintaining compliance with the government regulations, protection and rules (Business.qld.gov.au, 2018). Evolution of online shopping The concept of online shopping came as early as 1979, when Michael Aldrich an entrepreneur connected his TV with a computer through a phone line. This modified computer system with a connected TV had a simple menu driven interface which later developed in to an e-business system. This technology was termed as videotext and this creation further laid the basis of the social networking services which became evident after 25 years. Again in the year 1980, Michael Aldrich introduced a new innovation to the world. This innovation enabled the service companies, suppliers, distributors, agents, customers and consumers to be connected with the corporate business entities and facilitated the completion of business transactions electronically. In the late 1980s, Michael Aldrich supported, maintained, installed, sold and manufactured online shopping systems through the videotext (Khoshnampour Nosrati, 2011). This system also provided the handprints and the voice responses. Later on in the year 1990, Tim Berners Lee created the first browser and a World Wide Web server, this technology later became commercialized in the year 1991. Subsequently, innovation came pouring in in the year 1994. These innovations included the Intershops online shopping website, Netscapes SSL v2 encryption that was standard for the secure transfer of the data, Pizza Hut opened up a brand new online pizza shop, and online banking. One of the first secure online transaction was made by internet shopping network and Netmarket in the 1994. Subsequently, both EBay and Amazon launched their websites in the year 1995. Tmail and Taobao both the sites of Alibaba were launched in the year 2003 and 2008. Retailers were selling goods over the internet before the availability of the product and this was called pretail. This was done to test manage, build and test the demand (Kumar Maan, 2014). Online shopping made its first touchdown in 1995 in the American market through the hands of Amazon and EBay. Both these websites introduced a new era of online shopping that led to the creation of a new business and the overall value of the online shopping business touched trillions of dollars. PayPal was launched in the year 1998 and on the other hand, Jack Ma launched Alibaba in China in the year 1999. Through a report in 2015, the ecommerce sales were found to be leaded by China with a whopping 562 billion dollars, and was followed by the US with 349 billion dollars (Kuah Wang, 2017). There are several different online shopping websites and online merchants to choose both the services and the products. The differences in the features offered by these different online retailers are an important matter of interest. The online shopping is made possible only through the websites whether it is viewed from mobile or computers. Thus, the features offered on these websites is an important part of the discussion. Functional and large product images- product images that shows visually detailed presentation of the product is a standard feature of all the websites, it helps the developer and the consumer to see the product with the ability to zoom over it (Wu et., 2013). Product reviews- through a survey it has been found that consumers find a product when they see both the negative and positive reviews. Online shopping websites that provide the option to comment on a particular product is an important feature that can increase the sales and visits. The products reviews help the buyers to make more thoughtful choices (Korfiatis, GarcA-Bariocanal SNchez-Alonso, 2012). Faceted and layered navigation- faceted and layered navigation helps the buyers or the shoppers to easily navigate and search for the desired product. Navigation helps the products to be separated and kept in the sub categories and the option of filtering the searches help to sort the search into desired number of products. The extra option of segregating the products based on the price, attributes, features and color helps the buyers to choose products based on their taste (Rsto?n, TvaroÃ… ¾ek Bielikova, 2013). Fast checkout and single page- paying for the chosen products is the last hurdle that a buyer wants to pass as quickly as possible. Thus, making the last step easy and hassle free for the customers is one of the best feature that buyers should look for (Luo, Ba Zhang, 2012). Search- it is surprising that certain sites still do not support the searching option in their homepage. T hus, selecting a website that supports searching makes it easy to easily navigate to the product that a buyer is checking (Luo, Ba Zhang, 2012). Coupons and discounts- a good online shopping website will incorporate the option of having discounts and coupons. This helps the buyers to avail discounts and use their coupon codes that they have received from other places (Sharma Khattri, 2013). This experiences are from the users side, whereas other features also contribute to a better online shopping destination. These features include product import and export- even a decade ago, the product do not require to be imported or exported to and fro from required destination. The ability of an online retailer to ship product from country to another is now an essential feature (Gessner Snodgrass, 2015). Hassle free integration with the third party solutions- there are different ways of building an ecommerce shopping website, this includes the modular type of construction and this allows the easy integration of the third party solutions (Saleh, 2012). Analytics and reporting of sales- the last but one of the most useful feature of an online shopping website is to effectively use the built in analytics and the reporting capabilities. This enables the users to track the sales detail of a product to a significant level and these reports must be easy to export (Thushara Ramesh, 201 6). Ethical issues in online shopping When an online business or ecommerce business is run, there are certain ethical implications that needs to be kept in mind for the effective conduct of the business. However, these ethical concerns are an important and need to be maintained. Online security and data theft- data theft is an important and one of the vital topic of discussion especially within the ecommerce or online shopping websites. Breach of data takes place every day, but the degree of the data breach is not the same everytime. Notable data breaches in the past have occurred and it targeted the kmart, Home Depot, Sony and Michaels, Staples. The sale of the products over the internet is great breakthrough for the retail business. The online shopping brought a big relief for the consumers and the way they choose to shop. Online shopping created an opportunity for the shoppers to directly connect with the sellers. Selling online is a novel way to bypass all the hassles of opening a wide range of shopping stores over different geographical areas. Seller bear the responsibility towards the customers. These online shopping companies must ensure that ecommerce related transaction do not result in security breaches or data theft (Chakraborty et al., 2016). The reason for such an emphasis on the data security is because a lot of serious information is accumulated during the online transactions. The several sensitive information includes: credit card numbers; personal information like phone numbers, emails and address; purchase history (especially important for the purchase of the sensitive products). Hackers especially are able to damage the customers through the misuse of the data. These precautionary steps are mandatory for keeping the trust of the buyer. Violation of consumer protection laws can lead to serious consequences. Data protection and prevention of the security breaches can be effectively dealt through the effective implementation of the usage of HTTP/SSL for the ecommerce related websites that deal with the sensitive information; adherence to the PCI compliance guidelines; only storage of the customer data that are mandatory; protection of the buyers data through an extra layer of defense; usage of the trusted platforms for the purpose of data storage and financial transactioWang Zhang, 2013). Accurate product listing- from the traditional retail, ecommerce is different. The buyers are unable to touch products when they are placing the orders. Buyers only look at the pictures and the videos shows the product in the ideal lighting conditions. These include artistic touch through the Photoshop and the light room. At the same time, the product descriptions either speak a ton or speak very little about the product. Thus, online shopping customers do not see the actual product before they receive the product. Within a store, customers take the items off the shelf and carry the same to the register. Whereas, the ecommerce transaction is instead speaking of sending the delivery. Thus, the entire responsibility falls on the sellers to effectively list the products honestly, completely and accurately (Dai, Forsythe Kwon, 2014). The sellers can effectively make the customers happy through delivering products before the delivery time, usage of the nice packaging materials and small freebies. However, doing the opposite can surprise the customers negatively. If the delivered products do not maintain the quality and deliver products that are of low quality, and not accurate. This will disappoint the customers and probably the customers might shift to other websites. For a majority of the online shopping websites, providing inaccurate data on the website is inappropriate. This often result when inexperienced people handle data and unable to manage the data effectively. Providing inappropriate product description can result into issues like bad customer feedback. Thus, tracking and collecting information from the negative feedback from the customers and timely rectification can result in effective management of the issues (Weathers, Swain Grover, 2015). Following the online selling laws- it is always essential for an individual or a business to follow the laws and work accordingly. There are certain laws that need to follow to avoid any major issue. These laws are: product-specific regulations; international regulations that are country specific; online marketing laws like laws on advertising disclosure and CAN-SPAM act; tax regulations, privacy laws and the data compliance laws (Kigerl, 2015). Selling counterfeit products- the sellers must check the products they are selling. Although it is not possible to check each and every product before delivery. The manufacture should be able to designate that a product is safe. Sellers must act with the trusted suppliers that will minimize any compromise in the quality (AR, 2012). Advantages and disadvantages of online shopping Advantages of online shopping- Customers have the comfort of placing order from their homes and also from their work places. Shopping is made convenient and easier for the buyers through the usage of internet and the best part is that, transactions can be cancelled ay time. The other benefits of online shopping include: wide range and variety of products that are available online; lower prices and good discounts; detailed information regarding the products; various brands and models can be compared; save the effort and the time. It is seen generally that the sales representatives try to convince, persuade and influence the buyers. Thus a pressure remains over the buyers and are unable to look for their desired products. However, the purchasing products through the online stores in a relaxed way. Online shopping saves the precious time that are wasted during standing in a queue. The buyers do not need to reach a particular in order to purchase the products. One of the major benefit is that customers can enter the name of the product either into the search engine or to the search section of the online shopping website, in order to receive the desired results (Hsu, Chuan-Chuan Lin Chiang, 2013). Companies display a wide range of products that are available for the customers to compare and contrast. The customers look for the products that suit their needs and tastes and thus the wide range of options provide a wide range of options. The comparisons can be made based on the features that are displayed and also based on the prices of the products. In comparison to the malls, the online shopping websites remains open for the 24/7. Thus, be it night or day, the online shopping website remains accessible for the entire time period. In order to attract the online customers, the shopping websites provides discounts on a wide range of products to the customers. Sometimes, the shopping sites also offer comparisons of the different stores available. Another best advantage is the ability of the customer to track the packaging to shipment and delivery of the product (Jusoh Ling, 2012). Disadvantage of online shopping- lack of the proper management of the inventory and the long duration of the delivery. Although the process of ordering a product can take about 15 minutes, whereas the delivery of the product may take 1 to 3 weeks depending on the geographical location. This prevents the customers from using the online shopping websites and frustrates them. In comparison to the offline retailers, the online shopping websites don not provide the requisite amount of discount (Richa, 2012). Although, online shopping websites have the several advantages. The major drawback is that inability of the customer to touch the product physically before making the purchase. The offline stores provide the feasibility of making negotiation with the seller, whereas in online shopping websites the prices are fixed. It has been seen that there are fraudulent websites that dupe the customers and take away the money. Online payments through the online payment gateways are sometimes not s ecured and thus raises the security concerns. E-commerce websites must pay attention to the increasing issues related to the cybercrimes in order to boost the online shopping. Conventionally, before making a purchase customers look through the products and only after a close examination attempts to make the purchase (Kacen, Hess Chiang, 2013). Impact of online shopping on retail stores It is a well-known fact that global market leaders in the e-commerce or the online shopping websites include the Amazon, EBay and the Alibaba. Some of the market researchers have found that in the coming years, the traditional retail industry will more customers to the online retailers. Several offline retailers are now facing bankruptcies due to the lack of customers visiting their stores. The overbuilding of stores has made this shrinking an excessively more competitive for the survival of the smaller retail stores (Agarwal Durga, 2016). This have not only affected the smaller players but also the bigger chain of stores is now facing shutdown. The investors that previously used to invest money on to the offline retail stores are now moving away and looking for the newer opportunities in the online retailers. Conducting retail business requires opening up of stores over a wide range of places. This is sometimes costly and a time consuming issue which encompass the huge operating co sts due to the rent, utilities, electricity and security. Walmart a big retail seller reported to have incurred losses in which their revenues decreases by 0.75 percentage. The company also faced issues outside North America which included the South Korea and Germany (Cost, 2016). Future of online shopping The future of online shopping is bright although it may require newer innovation and features to keep the business afloat. The present day e-commerce website can further face competition from the offline rivals like Walmart. Because, these offline giants will adapt the online selling strategies and will provide products that will compete with the like of Amazon and EBay (Harvard Business Review, 2018). The other options that are available for the online giants is to utilize the social media for the promotion of the newly launched products. The offline giants that were restricted to the offline retailing will take on the social media for the effective promotion and induction in to the online scope. The social media can be taken as a platform for the selling and buying of products that will use the added advantage of person to person interaction (Grewal, Roggeveen Nordflt, 2017). Conclusion Thus from the above discussion, it can be concluded that online shopping is boon for a wide range of individuals that exhibit different needs. The fame and craze of online shopping started with the online sellers selling books, whereas now online shopping can even deliver products like bulldozer or a car. The retail sellers got affected from the rise in online shopping and their revenues got hit badly which led to closure of several big chains of shopping marts. Although, the business of online shopping is booming and it has a prosperous future. 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