Online shopping is the process consumers go through to 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.
Online shopping is a type of electronic commerce used for business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) transactions.
Benefits of online shopping
1. Bargaining power of consumers. They enjoy a wider choice
2. Supplier power. It is more difficult for consumers to manage a non-digital channel.
3. Internet increases commoditisation
4. Threat of new entrants. Online means it is easier to introduce new services with lower over-heads
5. Threat of substitutes
6. Rivalry among competitors. It is easier to introduce products and services to different markets
Logistics
Consumers find a product of interest by visiting the website of the retailer directly, or do a search across many different vendors using a shopping search engine.
Once a particular product has been found on the web site of the seller, most online retailers use shopping cart system to allow the consumer to accumulate multiple items and to adjust quantities, by analogy with filling a physical shopping cart or basket in a conventional store.
A "checkout" process follows (continuing the physical-store analogy) in which payment and delivery information is collected, if necessary. Some stores allow consumers to sign up for a permanent online account so that some or all of this information only needs to be entered once.
The consumer often receives an e-mail confirmation once the transaction is complete. Less sophisticated stores may rely on consumers to phone or e-mail their orders (though credit card numbers are not accepted by e-mail, for security reasons).
Payment
Online shoppers commonly use credit card to make payments, here are the different credit card payment methods which may be used at our developed shopping online system:
1. Master Card
2. Visa Card
3. American Express
4. Dinner Club
5. Paypal
6. Paymate
7. DPS Payment System
Product delivery
Once a payment has been accepted the goods or services can be delivered in the following ways.
1. Download: This is the method often used for digital media products such as software, music, movies, or images.
2. Shipping: The product is shipped to the customer's address.
3. Drop shipping: 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.
4. In-store pickup: The customer orders online, finds a local store using locator software and picks the product up at the closest store. This is the method often used in the bricks and clicks business model.
5. 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.
Shopping cart systems
Simple systems allow the offline administration of products and categories. The shop is then generated as HTML files and graphics that can be uploaded to a webspace. These systems do not use an online database.
A high end solution can be bought or rented as a standalone program or as an addition to an enterprise resource planning program. It is usually installed on the company's own webserver and may integrate into the existing supply chain so that ordering, payment, delivery, accounting and warehousing can be automated to a large extent.
Other solutions allow the user to register and create an online shop on a portal that hosts multiple shops at the same time.