Continuing strength of worldwide online shopping

There is increased level of sophistication as well as comfort amongst consumers who do online shopping. And these consumers cut across all age groups. In addition, the social media is being used by both consumers as well as retailers in order to drive brand awareness and promote worldwide online shopping.

In fact, many feel that bricks and mortar shops will be gravely threatened by online shopping. Basically, the growth of online sellers is at the expense of these physical shops. Not to be missed is the fact that these shopping sites are keen to experiment with ways of using the internet. Many have introduced a virtual fitting room. Here, customers are able to try on digital representations of all those clothes they choose through getting their reflection in a virtual mirror that can be shared with friends too on Facebook. Next, the virtual mannequins are being tried out. All this indicates that a vast majority of retailers can counter the rise of worldwide online shopping by creating real strong internet options of their own.

Many of the brick and mortar retailers are trying to sell through social media. But the fact remains that people tend to visit social networking sites in order to socialise with their friends, and not to do worldwide online shopping.

Shopping by smartphone has become the latest in online shopping. It is quite clear that personal computing is going mobile. This is why people are buying more through online shopping with their smartphones.

The latest in worldwide online shopping is when you order online, but go to pay for it in a store. In fact, there are many free-riders who tend to come into well stocked shops in order to check out their products and to get some advice from helpful assistants. After that they buy them for much lesser online.

But it is not easy for many traditional retailers to succeed in this internet age. This is because they have to balance their investment between their staff, the locations, maintaining inventory as well as doing online operations. In case of expensive products, they need to have a low inventory, but do a much bigger investment in their showrooms, as well as have elaborate online operations along with well qualified and trained sales people. But in case of commoditised items, the retailers need to have a big inventory rather than having a flashy display of them in their showroom.