The convenience associated with
shopping on-line can be compared to the idea of purchasing products from
television. One can see the product, find out a little about it, and
even buy it while sitting on the couch in their pajamas at 3 o’clock in
the morning. This convenience saves the consumer travel time, wear on
their vehicle, aggravation fighting traffic, the trouble of finding a
particular product in a department store or shopping mall, and
therefore, money. Why should anyone go through all that hassle when they
could do it at home, effortlessly? Many people now realize this, which
has helped fuel the boom in e-commerce. Recent stats show that:
"45% of web shoppers said
convenience was their chief motivation to shop online." Money.com and
also
"60% of [online] shoppers say
they shop in their pajamas." Newsweek, December 7, 1998
Another major advantage of
shopping on-line is that the user decides what products to see. Not only
what products, but they can even comparison shop, as well. If you are
looking for a specific product, such as a beanie baby, just type in
beaniebaby.com or something of that nature, and you should be able to
see just about every beanie baby ever made. Another way to find the
beanie baby (say a specific item, such as "Maple Bear"), would be to use
a search engine. Snap, Excite, and Yahoo are among the most popular
search engines. simply go to yahoo.com and type in "Maple Bear Beanie
Baby" and the search engine will list all the web sites where you can
get Maple Bear. This means the consumer has total control of their
shopping experience. Not only can they go EXACTLY to where the specific
product is located, but they can even compare prices by navigating
through the various web sites the search engine returned in the listing.
The consumer sees what product he or she wants to buy; not like in a
department store where they see what the store wants to sell you, or the
same as TV- what the Home Shopping Network has to sell is what you see,
but not necessarily what you are looking for. For these reasons,
on-line
shopping provides the ULTIMATE CONVENIENCE to the consumer!
