Web shopping or online shopping suggests, purchase products or services over the Internet. An online shop, eshop, e-store, internet shop, webshop, webstore, online store, or virtual store evokes the physical analogy of buying products or services at a bricks-and-mortar retailer or in a shopping mall.
The metaphor of an online catalog is also used, by analogy with mail order catalogs. All types of stores have retail web sites, including those that do and do not also have physical storefronts and paper catalogs. Online shopping is a type of electronic commerce used for business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) transactions.
Electronic commerce offers significant benefits to consumers. It offers greater choice, enforce competition among suppliers, and allow businesses to develop a win win situation with their customers . It also offer a cross-border shopping dimension of the internal market. While e-commerce is growing, obstacles to consumer confidence remain.
Consumers like to make shopping at home rather than physically go to market. It’s less time consuming, cost effective and have the option to choose the best one among the wide range of products. So in recent years, online shopping has become popular; however, it still caters to the middle and upper class.
In e shopping , one must have to access a computer, posessing a bank account and a debit card. Shopping has evolved with the growth of technology. According to research found in the Journal of Electronic Commerce, if we focus on the demographic characteristics of the in-home shopper, in general, the higher the level of education, income, and occupation of the head of the household, the more favourable the perception of non-store shopping. An influential factor in consumer attitude towards non-store shopping is exposure to technology, since it has been demonstrated that increased exposure to technology increases the probability of developing favourable attitudes towards new shopping channels.
Credit card very popular in online shopping to make payments. However some systems enable users to create accounts and pay by alternative means, such as: Debit card, Various types of electronic money, Cash on delivery (C.O.D., offered by very few online stores), Cheque, Wire transfer/delivery on payment, Postal money order, Reverse SMS billing to mobile phones, Gift cards.
After completing the payment system the goods or services can be delivered in various ways according to type of the goods. In case of software, music, movie and images the download methods are used. Other cases the product is shipped to the customers address or the order is passed to the manufacturer or third-party distributor, who ships the item directly to the consumer, bypassing the retailer’s physical location to save time, money, and space.
In the case of buying an admission ticket one may get a code, or a ticket that can be printed out. At the premises it is made sure that the same right of admission is not used twice.