Online Shopping

 

Online Shopping

Jessica Gavarra (hopiangikay)| March 07, 2022

                       

Introduction

   

         Media has been extensively growing for the past year. Having a large user, it become advantage to people to create an idea of making online businesses. Media has a huge role to play in our daily lives, no wonder online shopping has grown popular over a year and it became patronize by many people. Many Filipino love to shop online because affordability and saving time is easy because you don't need to go to store-by-store to shop.

  According to (Hill and Beatty, 2011) The development of the internet has increased the number of online shopping activities. The internet has been adopted as an important shopping medium with an increasing amount of online sales every year (Kim and Forsythe, 2010). Still, many internet users avoid purchasing online due to privacy and security concerns (Lian and Lin, 2008) deriving by their hesitation to send personal information through the internet (Roca, Garcia and de la Vega, 2009). In spite of this, online shopping is continuing to grow as online enterprises become more sophisticated (Lian and Lin, 2008), which results in the dramatic change of how consumers buy products and swrvices (Hill and Beatty, 2011). Wu (2003) mentions that approximately half the internet users have bought a product or service through the internet and according to Li and Zhang (2002) online shopping is the third most popular internet social activity.

  Online shopping as defined by (Master Card Worldwide Insights, 2008) is the process of purchasing goods and services from merchants who sell over the internet. Generally, it is also known as buying, electronic shopping,  online purchasing or internet shopping. (Kim,  2004) further defined internet shopping as examining, searching for, browsing for or looking at a product to get more information with the possible intention of purchase in the internet. By looking at other perspective,  (Chiu et al, 2009) considered online shopping as an exchange of time, effort and money for receiving products or services.

   Online shopping is a growing area of technology. Establishing a store on the Internet, allows for retailers to expand their market and reach out to consumers who may not otherwise visit the physical store. The convenience of online shopping is the main attraction for the consumers. Unique online payment systems offer easy and safe purchasing from other individuals. Online shopping has become the norm and consumers are adopting it as it has many advantages. On consumers perspective, online shopping provides low and transparent prices, comprehensive assortment of goods and services and a much more convenient shopping alternative that has eliminated such traditional shopping, inconveniences of squeezing through crowds, stuck in long queue at cashier counter, battling for parking spaces at a busy mall. Electronic consumer exhibit different buying behaviors such as; cart abandonment. The benefits of shopping also come with potential risks and dangers that consumers must be aware of.

  In online shopping,  it is expected that shoppers are more likely to associate price attractiveness and time saving with their intention to shop while in offline shopping, consumers are more likely to associate tangibility, high interactivity and enjoyment with their intention to shop. As a result, online marketers or retailers should be aware of the problems faced by the consumers and their perceived risk to increase their intention to shop in online. Designers must take note of.consumers' needs because the usability is the starting point to get the confidence and support of the consumers (Alzola et. al., 2006).