Commercial Growth Of The Internet

Commercial Growth Of The Internet

eCommerce

eCommerce is the buying and selling of products or services online. Over the last 10 years it has become very popular and has developed into something that everybody uses. With the help of large firms such as Amazon, eBay and new technologies such as mobile phones, eCommerce has enabled the average consumer to shop when and where they want to.

eCommerce has both advantages and disadvantages, these are both for the consumer and owner of the online business. The advantages that eCommerce can bring are numerous, if you are a late night shopper then this type of business is definitely for you. You can now easily shop at whatever time you like, as online sites are literally open 24/7.

As well as this, as a customer you have a very wide choice in the businesses that you use for your spending needs. The amount of shops online is vast and you can find just about any product you can think of, which isn’t exactly true for the high street. This means that you can buy everything you need from the comfort of your own home.

On the businesses side of things, an online site is a lot cheaper to host than renting a shop in the middle of town. There are initial start-up costs, and of course the fee for hosting the website and other small payments, but this is far less that having to pay for a physical building.

QR Codes

QR Codes are a marketing tool used by companies all over the world. They can be placed anywhere, from magazines to billboards, to bus stops. All you need to access the information that QR Codes hide is a smartphone or tablet that has a QR Code reader app. This works by reading the black squares on a white background, which gets converted into a URL address or text.

eMarketing

eMarketing is the marketing of products using online procedures. eMarketing is usually sent as offers in an eMail that promotes new products that shops have in stock.

This works with both online stores and shops in the high-street. When you sign up with a store (e.g Amazon) or give your eMail address to a physical shop, then you are put onto a mailing list. This then means that you will get sent eMails featuring items similar to ones you have bought recently or with new products or special offers.

Google Ads

Google is a largely used Search Engine and because of this everybody that has used it will have seen a Google Ad at some point, even if they didn’t know what it was.

Google uses what you search for to find appropriate ads that would seem to suit you. For example, if you search for PC Monitors the Ads will be for the websites: Dell, PC World and Misco.

This type of marketing has aided the commercial growth of the internet, because it means that popular and successful websites will appear as the best places to buy what you want as they are ‘recommended’ by Google.

Online Auctions

Online auctions allow users to bid for items against other people over the internet with millions of different items being available at one time. The biggest and most well-known auction site at the moment is eBay.

eBay is a giant in this industry and it has been said that it will be an unstoppable force that will never be overtaken by any other online auction site. This is thought to be the case because the features that it has are too good to be out done by others. It also has a very large member base and is acknowledged as the best place for auctions by a lot of people.

Online auctions can allow you to save money as you can bid on items, which could mean that you can get a product for less than the original value since you can bid at the last minute.

Geo-Marketing

Geo-Marketing is another new way of eMarketing, as more people are starting to use phones, companies can track these devices and send push notifications to the user dependant on their location. This means that wherever you are you could receive an update which you could potentially not want but something which would catch your attention. For example if the user was located near a Pizza Hut and the users smart phone contained an app to do with this shop, then it could potentially suggest meal deals and updates for the customer. This enables people to advertise their offers without drawing the customer towards premises.

However, there are also disadvantages when it comes to electronic commerce. When using an online account where you have to input your details, e.g name, address and credit card information, you have to be careful, as eCommerce is an easy place where fraud can be committed because your details are sent over the internet.

Also, when buying something from an online shop, you cannot actually get a good representation of what the product is. You may at least, only have one picture of the product, or maybe even a few images taken at different angles. This, I think is especially evident in clothes shopping, you don’t know what the material feels like, or what size it is and you can’t try it on, which can lead to dissatisfactory results when your parcel arrives.

eCommerce Timeline