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The Dominance Of Online Shopping

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The predominance of online shopping is becoming a fact beyond dispute. Many people agree that online shopping can be quick, handy and convenient. Tenacious shoppers find aggressive discounts online as many vendors compete to offer the best retail price and quality. According to McKeown and Brocca (2009), 13.4 million purchase transactions were made online in Canada in 2001.The enormous growth of technology and its hefty impact on online shopping have had a direct impact on the rapid popularity of e-commerce. Statistics show that 8.4 million Canadians at the age of 16 years and up made 70 million online orders in 2007 (p.8). Most of these transactions were implemented using popular shopping websites like eBay, Amazon, or Expedia, for instance. However, this unprecedented increase of online shopping has spawned an ongoing escalation of technological risks like scamming, hacking, cybercrimes, and fraud which put shoppers’ privacy in jeopardy. Consequently, the personal data that online customers impetuously disclose are closely monitored and sometimes misused by marketers or other data gathering agencies.
Consumers’ awareness of the susceptibility of personal information security measures is alarmingly low. Privacy intruders can easily come up with tricks to track customers ' online shopping and internet surfing habits and build extensive personal profiles by simply observing the Internet Protocol (IP) address of their computers, and often through digital ‘cookies’ or

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