The Digital Channel:
Consumer Buying Behavior and Experience
If you wanted to buy anything in the early 90’s chances were you were at mercy of the local brick and mortar stores and distributors and what they had in stock. If you wanted something, you had to go out and get it. Until, the advent of the internet.
The internet changed the world forever. The internet undoubtabley changed how all businesses sell goods and services. This also changed how customers buy products, no longer did customers have to shovel snow to get products from town and navigate city streets or wait in long lines. Internet shopping took a while to grab a hold on the consumer. Early on, consumers preferred going to the store because they felt unsafe giving away personal information to companies via the internet.
Then, companies like Ebay and Amazon grabbed hold of the market and set new standards for online shopping, making customers safe and in control. Before Ebay was launched in 1995, shopping online was unpopular but a few months after launch, consumers and businesses alike started feeling more comfortable with the idea of buying and selling products. Ebay, is a prime example of how e-commerce has helped the spread of globalization. Before the dawn of internet shopping, getting products internationally were impossible unless a local distributor had a direct relationship with an international vendor. Today, I have the power to order naan or chapatti mix from India and receive it in two days
Prior to digital media, purchasing items came down to going to a store and purchasing what they had in inventory. At times, one could get something that was not in the store by having it ordered but this took a lot of time and often came with an extra cost. The shopping experience took more time and a customer could leave feeling that they may not have made the most informed decision. This is quite different from what the shopper experiences now with digital media. Merely typing in a description of what you are looking for produces thousands, if not millions of results. These results show variations of the items that you have searched for at different price points and options for receiving the item. One can truly research an item and its choices and feel informed about the price and the product itself before making a decision.
The internet has affected just about every industry in the world and has also had a huge impact on the automobile industry. The buyers referred to the internet before making their purchases and went to the auto websites before going
The biggest impact of the internet was that it allowed people to interact with like-minded citizens from other parts of the world. Chat groups, blogs were the earliest trend in the internet history, which allowed people from opposite end of the world to share ideas with each other. The rise of search engines and current affair sites, like yahoo, google, etc., allowed people to keep themselves updated in current affairs, and other topics of interest, as
EBay has paved the wave in this industry and being in a billion dollar industry making things happen to benefit consumers in many ways.[5]
The internet has changed the world as we knew it. The world no longer communicates, does business, or perches commodities in the same a traditional way. E-mail, instant massager and chat rooms were the first innovations to be used by the public. As time went on more and more people depended on the internet to communicate with each other. It did not take long for the U.S. Postal service to see the decline in mailed letters. With the internet being so easy to access and email being so easy to use it quickly became the preferred way to communicate with family and friends over long distances. Companies soon followed suit to better serve their clients.
The internet makes people to be more dependency. It makes people to observe more information, and to be tended to find information. People relay more in finding information in the internet today. Furthermore, people are physically involved as they try to think and find information from the internet. The internet may have small effect on people, but still it helps people.
I believe the internet has created a more competitive market. This competitive market has many buyers and sellers. There are many standardized to individualized products in this market. There are really no real barriers to market entry or exit. The Internet has become a platform that has completely changed the way a company can do business. The internet has allowed small business to become multinational operators because of the market chosen. Price and product quality decision can be made using this market because research
The internet has made possible for people to create so many other things. The internet made it possible for the creation of e-mail. Now people do not have to spend extra money or time to send a message to anyone in the world. Whether a message wanted to be sent to a person down the street or in another country, the time it takes for them to get it would be equal and much faster compared to sending a letter through the postal service. The internet has been used to upload information of any kind, and because of this people can learn about so much more. Someone can study, earn educational degrees, and develop skills just by obtaining all the information and doing the work on the internet. This cuts costs and opens up so many more opportunities for people. The internet helps make different thing more eco-friendly. So many different things that have been printed on paper are now easily found on the internet. Instead of receiving bank statements or different mail it can be requested to get through the internet. Forms, books, mail, instruction manuals and so many other things are available on the internet saving dollars and saving
There is a revolutionary change because a lot of the goods that were material before, now they are not, such us money. That leads to two possible reactions, one is to choose not to buy on-line products, and the other, and the most common one, is to start buying compulsively, which will lead to a Compulsive Buying Disorder. One of the reasons why this happens is because without actually seeing the money in our hands being reduced each time we buy a product, we feel we can buy everything that we see on the internet or TV.
The web is changing us just as the printing press changed us back in the 1300s. No one knows if it is for better or for worse. This generation seems to be always using the internet. We have changed as a culture. We can do almost anything online. Children and young adults sometimes spend their whole summer inside using various pieces of technology, like phones, tablets and laptops. Nobody has free time to do things other than use technology anymore. Just like the internet, the printing press made a huge impact on us. We progressed in literature because all the inconsistent spelling and grammar found in the different copies of books that were handwritten were now gone because every copy was the same. Print was now available to the public and
There is not a market, industry, good or service that has not been affected by the internet. Pertaining to demand the internet has changed demand in many ways, mainly due to making a lot of information available to the consumer that did not use to be. The internet offers more selections and more information on the products so the
The internet is the easier way for people to communicate with each other. It has made the world smaller by bringing people together everywhere and any time. This invention has important tools for people to contact and it has changed their way of communication in today busy world. In fact people are becoming totally dependent on the internet as a way of communication in their daily life, business and work. The limitation of old communication tools has made the use of internet for communication is wider all over the world .
Electronic commerce has been there for a long time now, and it is a practice that is practiced by peoples from Germany, France, and the US on a daily basis. Since its inception around 40 years ago, e-commerce has continued to grow as innovations, technologies and a lot of business reverting to the use of the e-commerce. The aspect of buying and selling of goods in the early 1960s was sluggish with the traditional way of mailing of documents being replaced with the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), which would later pave a way to the electronic commerce. After the e-commerce, however, the practice was not more reliable as it still had many challenges (Tsolis, 2009). For instance, it was not easy for buyers to see products from the comfort of their homes and more so, the methods of accessing the information were limited.
The Internet has changed and will continue to change how people shop and new competition through the Internet will continue to shape the market.
E-commerce is a product that has been available since the early 90’s. It is something that people are familiar with. A product that is now part and parcel of people’s lives.