Online Retail Shopping

This analysis shall attempt to discern the development, promise, problems, and implications of electronic commerce, with a particular emphasis on electronic retail selling over the World Wide Web. It shall attempt to determine the chief issues facing electronic retail commerce and provide some general, preliminary guidance that would be useful to the retailer when seeking to understand the implications of e-commerce for his or her business.

The essay begins with a brief thematic introduction that presents an overview of the growth of electronic retailing, and a discussion of the similarities and differences from non-electronic retailing. The bulk of the essay consists of a literature review, intermixed with discussion of the implications of the findings in the literature. Specific examples of current practices and experience will be followed by a consideration of theoretical work on the shopping process; the suggestion is made that the full exploitation of e-commerce requires rethinking the retail process at a basic level. The essay will close with brief concluding remarks and implications for further research.

A note on terminology: In this essay, as in most of the literature on online commerce, "the Internet" and "the World Wide Web" (or simply "the Web") will be used interchangeably. In fact, the World Wide Web is only one component of the Internet, which also compr

earch. After giving up on the keyword "modem," which linked only to manufacturers, the writer tried other keywords such as "mall," only to be inundated by largely irrelevant links. When a suitable product is finally found, from an American vendor, it turns out that (at that time) international orders were not yet taken. In the end, this writer's online shopping expedition collapsed entirely, and the writer had to fall back on non-virtual shopping. A more recent article in The Economist noted that Virtual stores have ... found that the hard goods traditionally sold through consumer catalogues and retail stores often sell poorly online, where they cannot be held and examined. Instead, online commerce seems best suited to services -- such as finance, travel and cars -- where in the past their physical counterparts have benefitted from the general public's limited access to information ("Electronic commerce: In search of the perfect market," 1998). Automobiles, it may be noted, are a thoroughly physical product, not a service; the advantage of selling them online arises from two considerations. The first, a necessary prerequisite for online sales, is that many consumers already know what make and model they want, and thu