Shopping Alternative - Social Analysis 2012

English 121-02H

Social Analysis

Shopping Alternative.

        Shopping online. Everybody knows what it is and I believe everyone in class has used it at least once. Online shopping is a process of consumers purchasing goods and services over the internet. At first it seems to be quite complicated and pretty risky process of buying goods. Isn’t it easier just to go to local supermarket, choose what you need, pay for that and get it right into your hands? More and more people nowadays disprove this standard opinion.

According to the statistic results online shopping has become increasingly popular over the past decade. It grew from 72 billion dollars in 2002 to 256 billion dollars in 2011. The number of online shoppers in the USA is expected to grow from 137 million people in 2010 to 175 million people in 2016 according to eMarketer estimates. Is online shopping a trend or a fad? First, let’s define what a fad is and what a trend is. “Social trend or fad is a form of behavior that develops among a large population in a society and is collectively followed with enthusiasm for some period” – this definition is given by ethics.wikia.com. As we can see from the definition social trend and fad have the same meaning. But there is a difference between these two things - duration. A fad is a short-term event, while a trend has a long-term influence on a market.  A fad has a definite beginning and end. As for trend, it changes as it keeps growing. Appealing to the history of mid 50’s, we can find the person who was the inventor of teleshopping, Ron Popeil. The era of television had just started then and he perfectly understood what the potential the television had had. So he started to advertise his goods on the television and offered a delivery of them. Later, following the successful example of Ron Popeil, the popularity of this kind of selling had increased accompanied with the amount of teleshops. At the same time one more kind of distant shopping was created – catalog shopping. But with the appearance of Internet, these two kinds of purchasing goods converted into internet shops, which are extremely popular nowadays.

The popularity of this kind of shopping is growing rapidly. Buying goods without leaving your home sounds really alluring. But let’s look closer to the phenomenon of today’s life – online shopping. Today you can buy online everything you need: food, beverages, clothes, footwear, electronic devices, computer hardware and software, cosmetics, jewelry, flowers, tickets and even furniture! All you need for purchasing is a computer, internet access and a credit card. And you don’t even need to type the credit card information every time you purchase something; there is a service for making secure payments – PayPal. The growth of online shopping has been characterized by strong consumer demands and the increasing number and type of goods available.

        The conveniences of this shopping are evident: you save your time, gas on driving to stores, power you spend on running from one store to another; you just sit at home, drinking coffee and enjoying yourself. A recent Nielsen survey of U.S. shoppers found the ability to shop any time was the chief advantage of online shopping for 81% of consumers, closely followed by 77% who said they enjoyed the time saving from not having to navigate the traffic jams and queues of Christmas shopping.

Very often items online are cheaper than the same items selling in stores. The question which occurred in many people’s heads is why. Let’s switch on our logic. Online shopping is a rapidly developing thing, but still it doesn’t have so much customers as usual stores have, so they need to make attractive offers to win more and more customers. The effective way to make people buy something online instead of buying in stores is to give them good discounts and offers. Online stores have an opportunity to sell stuff cheaper because they ship out goods right from the center warehouse, so they don’t have to pay a rent for retail stores and salaries for additional workers.
        The next valuable feature is that before buying something you can read tons of reviews of other people who had already bought this item, you can analyze amount of positive reviews against negative and decide if the item is worth buying. As for different devices and electronic stuff, you can even watch a video review, which usually shows you the entire process of using with possible opportunities and problems.