Consumer behaviour Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words - 1

Consumer behaviour - Essay Example Despite some lingering negative issues, the number of people shopping online continues to grow as more and more people become familiar with the process and the convenience of being able to shop for just about any item they want – from homes to house wares and everything in between – at any time of the day or night that works best for them and regardless of whether what they’re wearing (or not wearing) is presentable to the public to be found at the local shopping center. While there remain certain products that consumers prefer to purchase at retail ‘brick and mortar’ outlets and several issues concerning taxes, security and information mining to be overcome, the concept of purchasing online is definitely a growing trend worth investigating. From the retailer’s perspective, the theories and fundamentals of shopping remains much the same in the online environment as it does in the brick and mortar environment. However, there are some significant factors to take into consideration in order to continue attracting and retaining customers who frequently have many more options online than offline in which to purchase their goods. To begin with, the internet provides an immediate benefit in efficient time consumption as the consumer can, with a few clicks of his mouse, compare prices, investigate product information and receive previous customer recommendations. This greater flexibility was noted in the literature as early as 1997 (Alba et al) when internet sales, still in their infancy, amounted to less than half of all retail sales in the country. According to Ruthkowski (2000, cited in Changchit et al, 2005), in response to growing trends in consumer behavior that continue to turn to the internet as a source of not o nly information, but shopping venues, the number of available hosts on the internet, denoting the range of shopping venues, has risen from 1.7 million in 1993 to