What are the Advantages and Disadvantages of Online Shopping

Shopping is done every day. You can always see people that go to the supermarket to shop for grocery items. You can always see people that go the wet market to buy fruits, vegetables and meat. You can always see people that go to the mall to shop for clothes and accessories. With these, businesses keep on creating or optimizing technologies to have a more efficient way of shopping. There are now credit cards, ATM cards, Net banking, mobile wallets or e-wallets, and many others. Aside from these, there is now what we call online shopping.

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Online shopping is done via the Internet. This means that consumes have to visit a particular website to look for the items that they want. Today, the most popular online stores are ebay.com, amazon.com, and a lot more. There are now also people that start their businesses through online stores. You can find online stores that sell cakes, shoes, organic products, mobile phones and many others.

With these, are there advantages consumers can get from online shopping? What about the disadvantages? Read on below to help you out.

Advantages:

• Very convenient. Unlike to traditional way of shopping, you do not have to go to any actual store with online shopping. This means that you do not have to commute or take your car and spend on expenses such as petrol. You also do not have to bear the heavy traffic jams and the other hassles of going to a store. The best thing about this is that you do not have to go from store to store just to look for the item that you want. With online shopping, you can just visit the different online stores via their websites. There are now also online store owners that set up their online stores on social networking sites such as Facebook and Multiply.
• Easier to find items that you want. Again, since online stores rely on the Internet, consumers can easily look for the items that they want. By just doing some clicks on the mouse, the items that they are looking for will instantly show on the screen. For example, if you are looking for an affordable house, there are many websites about housing that will appear on search engines such as Google and Yahoo.
• Easier to find discounts. Shoppers would definitely love to have discounts on items that they like. With online shopping, looking for discounted items is easier. It is actually one of the reasons why more and more are shopping online. They can find products with high quality at very cheap prices. The best thing about this is that there are online stores that do not charge any shipping cost.

Disadvantages:

• Delivery takes days. When you shop in an actual store, you get the item that you want, pay for it at the cashier, and you are good to go. With online shopping, however, you need to wait for days for the shipping. This is very impractical if you need something urgently.
• Expensive shipping cost. This is particularly true for online stores that do not have local stores; you can expect a very expensive shipping cost. There are times that the shipping is even higher than the cost of the item. Usually, this is true for furniture and bulky equipment.
• Defective items: Sometime you may get defective items because of courier transit or faulty piece.  No doubt you will get it replaced from the sender but it will take time.

Conclusion:

With these, more and more stores are now going online. They readily adopt technologies such as getting their own Facebook profiles, updating customers through Twitter feeds, integrating with Smartphone or tablets, and many others. They have found clever ways to optimize the Internet for e-commerce.