With the growth of the internet in recent years, more and more businesses are starting to develop a web presence and become available 24 hours a day for consumers. No longer are business shackled to the 9-5 opening hours of conventional business hours, with a web site they can be accessible whenever a customer decides they want to browse the web.
While there are still lots of customers with reservations about buying online, if trusted merchants and websites are used, there are many advantages for consumers:
1. Online stores often offer much lower prices than brick and mortar stores. Since the overhead of running an online virtual shop are so much less than running a real life store, these savings can be passed through to the consumer.
2. Online stores often offer a far great range of goods than any brick and mortar store. Many online stores show stock they can get from their suppliers and not what they actually physically have in stock. This means that they can show a far greater range of products than they would ever be able to in a real life store.
3. Good search engine optimization of a sites online store products allow customers to quickly find what they are looking for using engines such as Google, Yahoo, or Lycos.
4. Many online stores offer free shipping with low levels of purchase requirements. This can sometimes make or break a sale for a consumer. I personally would not travel to a shop a few miles away specifically to buy an item as small as a USB flash drive. Instead, I would rather shop online for it and find a deal with free shipping.
5. Shopping can be done discretely in the comfort of ones own home.
6. New technology makes shopping from quality merchants more secure than by leaving a paper trail behind in a conventional store.
7. Depending upon where you live and the nature of the transaction you may not pay
a sales tax on your transaction. This can be quite a savings on those transactions that qualify.
9. You have a choice of thousands of quality merchants located all over the world. If
you can't find what you are looking for online it probably hasn't been made yet. The visibility of your business is greatly improved with an online store. Consumers from other countries could find your site from search engines and buy products because of this. How often would this
