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What happened to the day where you had to get in your car, jump on your bike or walk to the local mall to purchase your every day needs, your wants or in some case like grocery stores, the necessities of life? What typically was a daylong event, especially during the late summer for preparation for the start of the new school year or the need to get the week’s or month’s groceries can now be down in less time and from your computer. It’s amazing how far technology has come these days and what kinds of purchases can be made that allow you to stay in the comfort of your own home. Internet technology has presented a vast amount of opportunity in today’s society and among these opportunities; internet shopping has changed the way many people shop thus making many local malls ghost towns.

Since the emergence of the internet and when it was first opened commercially (ecommerce-land.com), many people these days rely on ecommerce sites for their every day shopping needs. So what are the predominant reasons for shopping online and why do people choose to use their computer for grocery shopping, Christmas shopping or even for purchasing their school clothes for the upcoming year. If I would ask the diehard shoppers what would “Black Friday” mean to them, most if not all would reply, “that’s the day after Thanksgiving.” This is typically known as the biggest shopping day of the year but with the internet, it allows those that don’t care for long lines and crowded stores to finish their Christmas shopping from their computer. Of activities, shopping has been noted as one the most popular activities that people do online (ecommerce-land.com).

One of the biggest reasons today that people are choosing to shop online is because of convenience. Unlike traditional “brick and mortar” stores or mail order catalogs, the internet offers easily searchable items through a large database giving the end-user basically a larger store to choose from (ecommerce-land.com). Along with larger virtual stores, ecommerce sites typically spend less on advertisement due to the fact that their customers are coming from other search engines or advertisements from sites and this allows many vendors to sell items for less, not passing the additional costs that stores tack on for the high price of physical advertisement. Along the same lines, having a physical store requires additional costs for the establishment as well as all that goes a long with maintaining a storefront so this can lower the end costs and eventually ends up in the shoppers pockets as savings. Another advantage to the shopper and virtual store owner alike is the ability to offer more or different items from the same site. The ability to track customer preferences and deliver individually-tailored marketing plans is also advantageous to the online stores (ecommerce-land.com). Larger stores that first started as your brick and mortar store, like Wal-Mart and Target, are good examples to this because the variety of items that are offered allowing the customer to shop for all their needs online.

Most people today know that you can purchase just about anything on the internet but when did ecommerce get its start? Everyone typically links ecommerce to the internet and as stated above, most online shopping started when the commercial launch of the internet happened. But it even dates back further when the telegraph was first invented and it dates back to the mid-1800s with the railroads and when people ordered goods and services remotely with a promise of goods and services to be given at a later date. There were also early days of money transfers in which money was later expressed to cover the funds (Klein).

But ecommerce as we know it really first came about with the commercial launch of the internet in 1991 (ecommerce-land.com). At that time, the internet community was quite small. One of the largest milestones for the ecommerce age was the launching of the World Wide Web in 1995 (Klein). Companies like AOL, Prodigy, CompuServe and some smaller ISP’s added internet users by opening up the World Wide Web for browsing and informational sites. This paved the way for vendors to start putting items up for sale online. And for this, a large milestone that opened up the ecommerce age was met back in the 1950’s when credit cards became used and accepted. This is and along with virtual checks is extremely important to ecommerce and moving forward with online shopping (Klein).

So how many people were actually shopping a decade ago. It definitely wasn’t as prevalent as it is today because until the last seven years computers were predominantly used by computer people and many that owned computers didn’t know how operate them as effectively and the internet community was still relatively small. Recently, there has been a trend of putting more and more available on the internet. For example, if you’ve lost your license, would you rather stand in line for your whole lunch hour waiting for your turn to purchase a duplicate license from the department of motor vehicles or would you rather type in your username and password on the DMV site and order you duplicate and have it arrive at your doorstep five to seven business days later (Klein). It boils down to the first advantage вЂ" convenience. And that convenience is why more then 65 million people shop online today and that total is expected to double within the next five years (internetbasedmoms.com).

With online shopping becoming more popular each day, why is it that many people still shy away from purchasing something online? As the internet grows, the need for secure transactions grew as well. People are still refusing to purchase items or services online because the fear of their identity and account numbers being stolen. Was this a problem before the internet came about? Of course, but in today’s digital world and with credit card numbers, social security numbers and bank accounts numbers being stored in many different places, it has become much easier for computer savvy people to steal the identity of a person. So do you blame people for not wanting to give their credit card number over the internet? Identity theft is the fastest growing white-collar crime and this is due to the emergence of a new technology called Phishing (aarp.org). Phishing is basically capturing information from your computer that you have stored when visiting a site or operating a program on your computer and sending this information back thru the internet. Security on the World Wide Web has come along way since the beginning and many ecommerce vendors today use Secured Socket Layer (SSL) technology to secure transactions.

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