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Online Vs. Traditional Shopping The Tremendous Growth Term Paper

Online vs. Traditional Shopping The tremendous growth of the Internet over the past decade has given a significant boost to e-commerce and made online shopping a part of every-day experience of many people. However, since online shopping is still a relatively new phenomenon, and has its advantages as well as disadvantages, it has not yet realized its full potential. In this paper, I shall compare and contrast online and traditional retail shopping; look at some of the reasons that drives consumers to shop online and discuss which shopping experience is more satisfying.

The Advantages

Online shopping provides the convenience of shopping from the comfort of one's home 24 hours a day, 7 days a week -- since online stores never close. It enables a customer to avoid braving the weather, the hassles of navigating traffic or trying to find parking places -- common requirements of traditional retail shopping.

Online shopping provides an enormous variety of products to choose from. The choice for an online shopper is much greater than in traditional...

Besides, specialized items and hard to find products are often available online.
The greater choice of products and the avoidance of brick and mortar expense for the cyber shops enable lower prices. New ways of selling and buying such as online auctions also contribute to low prices.

The Internet provides a much greater opportunity to research and compare the products before buying. Independent reviews and ratings are also available online.

There is less pressure on online shoppers to buy, as no salesperson is present to corner customers into buying something they don't really want. (Granovsky, 2000; Gilman, 1999)

Disadvantages

The main disadvantage of online shopping is that there is no way for a 'reality check' in cyber space. An online shopper cannot see, touch, smell or taste a product before buying. It also does not provide the immediate gratification of possessing an item right away since there is usually a time-gap between buying a product online and its delivery.

The advantage…

Sources used in this document:
References

Gilman, Alan. (1999). "The GC Tech.net guide to online shopping: The Advantages."

Gilman Computer Technologies. Retrieved on June 27, 2004 at http://www.gctech.net/textsite/advantage.html

Granovsky, Nancy (2000). "Consumer Decision Making Contest 2001-2002 Study Guide: Online Shopping." Retrieved on June 27, 2004 at http://fcs.tamu.edu/monman/consumerdecmaking2001/studyguidespdf/onlineshop.pdf.

This is also true of mail-order shopping
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