The Impact Of Technology On Consumer Behavior

Social media has become an influential ground for consumers to share their opinions about a company’s brand and products. In addition, it helps in having a strong brand that produces positive relations and distinguish the brand from competitors, is a critical component for effective marketing. According to Dahlén and Lange (2009) “the quality of the product is not the evident factor when it comes to purchasing a product, the deciding factor depends on how the brand is perceived” (Para. 1). This demonstrates the importance of incorporating social media as a tool to promote brands, allow for interactions, and customer satisfaction by engaging with customers more frequently for feedbacks or reviews. Thus create an opportunity for the company to show its devotion to their customers, and initiate good reputation, which can increase sales. In other words, social media has the ability to upsurge the awareness for businesses as well as the brand.

The new advances in technology allow businesses to reach different customer bases. This includes buying and selling products over the Internet. The online shopping process is considered e-commerce. E-commerce is made up of different behaviors but for the purpose of this discussion the three discussed are consumer-to-consumer (C2C), business-to-business (B2B), and consumer-to-business (C2B). The different behaviors have different mediums to reach their targeted audience. The message for each behavior persuades a particular audience to purchase a product using that particular medium. Consumers and businesses look to the web for cost-effective ways to sell and buy products.

The first major impact of information technology, as we think of it today, was the facilitation of commercial transactions electronically, usually using technology like Electronic Data Interchange (EDI, introduced in the late 1970s) to send commercial documents like purchase orders or invoices electronically. Later, with the development of the internet, the effect of information technology on consumer behavior could be seen in the purchase of goods and services over the World Wide Web via secure servers with e-shopping carts and with electronic pay services, like credit card payment authorizations. The Internet Boom: "First we must confront the question of what happened during the late 1990s. Viewed from 2003, such an

The trend toward shopping using the Internet is growing faster than expected (Cramer, 2014). Since Internet has become popular medium for people to shop, more companies then launched online shopping platform. With this new platform, they were able to do sales directly to their customer.

In addition to creating open forms of communication and direct access to consumers’ opinions and reactions, advancing social and visual technology delivers access to technologically advanced, eye-catching, and interesting design and media tactics formerly available only to the tech savvy generation. The internet has transformed the globe and it’s lasting presence is inevitable, proving that to discount social media’s new but important role will ultimately lead to failure in the long term.

The company realizes and utilizes the social platforms as pathways to acquiring new markets and increase in growth. The well developed company websites provide all the information on products available for sale, their health benefits, recipes, and even provides sections whereby one can access tutorials on how to cook certain healthy meals. Customers can also find and receive gift cards, coupons, and promotional deals through the online platforms. The well developed web structure has also prompted the company to adopt an online shopping system. There is a growing trend on making product purchases online. Most buyers in this time and age would prefer to pay more for services so that they can save time. The online shopping system allows for purchases at any time of the day, time saving and comparison shopping.

A steady increase in the popularity of online sales has caused a major push towards e-commerce in the retail industry.

Business like Amazon wants to make buying item from their business easier for customers. This is why Amazon offers E-retailing which gives customer option to go shopping online. The internet has had impact change on consumers shopping habit as shopping online has numerous advantages which is why online shopping continues to gain popularity. Some of the advantages of E-retailing is that it’s convenient as consumers are able to go shopping at home which could help them save cost on travelling and also gives consumers an option to compare prices of different products as there are wide range of products being sold online.

E-commerce is transactions conducted via electronic means such as the internet, email and SMS. It is considered to be one of the most important aspects of the internet to appear. As a result, people are able to exchange goods and services immediately regardless of their geographic location and time. More and more businesses conduct transactions on line, with some trading purely on-line thus reducing overheads and administrative costs.

E-commerce has become a part of human daily lives whether it is at work or in our personal lives. It is by almost everyone because of the benefits it offers

The continuous development of Internet leads to the growth of e-commerce. The electronic commerce is growing constantly due to the continuously increasing number of mobile and online users in the market, primarily the emerging markets. Besides that, the development of the Information Technology (IT), such as the advance of paying processes and the improvements of shipping method also the main reason to cause the growth of electronic commerce (John Ingham, 2015). Most consumers accept e-commerce as their feasible alternative in the purchase of goods and

Social media has enabled businesses to strengthen their relationship with the customers (Evans, 2012). Businesses can have real time online connection with both their existing customers and potential customers where a company can convey information regarding its products. A strong engagement between the businesses and the customers through social media results to greater impact on sales, product improvement, customers’ satisfaction, and brand reputation.

The widespread application of internet and prevalence of globalization give rise to various influential trends in business context, one of which is e-Commerce. According to (Browne et al., 2004), e-Commerce refers to a commercial platform that allow transactions to happen via electronic devices and digital environment that requires no face-to-face or human interaction as opposed to traditional mode of purchase. E-Commerce is revolutionizing the landscape of modern business environment by offering a convenient, rapid, borderless and timely mechanism for commercial transactions. Moreover, e-Commerce provides an alternative to traditional value chain in which manufactured products need to move through multiple layer of distribution to reach the end-users. In other words, via electronic platforms, suppliers can now access their end customers directly via web-based ordering system without the needs for wholesalers

Social media has played a significant role in consumer decision making, including such areas raising awarness, sharing information and opinions as well as postpurchase experience ( Mangold and Faulds,2009). It turns out that consumers tend to trust knowledge and experience shared by other customers on social media more than those opinions reviewed by the manufacturer or the marketer of the product or the service.(Linchi Kowk,2012)

This new media may be disruptive to old business models and practices but opens the door to an enhanced and real-time consumer relations (Henning-Thurau, et al., 2010). Social media popularity is growing at an exponential rate and consumers give their opinion on products and services on electronic channels. There is no need for surveys and pols, marketers need to adapt to the new forms of consumer conversations. In the past collecting consumer opinion was timely and expensive using focus groups and surveys. Today the daunting amount of data gathered on social media is inexpensive to collect but sometimes a challenge to derive insight from. The consumer data is unstructured and thus hard to classify, summarise and derive meaning from.