Задание
Online shopping is now replacing shopping in the store. Do you think it is a positive or negative development?
Ответ
With the influence of the internet and information technology, the retail industry has considerably changed over the last few years. Online stores are spreading massively and putting shops out of business. These changes bring positive improvements for humans allowing them to stop wasting time during shopping, and besides, make goods a little bit cheaper.
Firstly, online shopping allows shoppers not to travel and saves their time. It is not necessary to physically go to a store and wander there to gather goods or find suitable clothes. Furthermore, the catalogues in online stores have filters and sortings, based on different criteria of traded objects, that improves user experience and significantly raises the efficiency of seeking goods in virtual shelves. Consumers will never look on the shelves with embarrassment, uncertainty and irritation from absolutely identical products.
Secondly, online stores lead to a decrease cost of products because a large fraction of the rent payment is removed from the prices. Of course, the cost of logistics and storages are still included, but it can be improved without disrupting habits and patterns of users behaviour during shopping. Besides, from the entrepreneurial point of view, e-commerce is the easiest way to open an online store for a narrow niche which has a low flow of customers, or for experiments and testing new ideas, because online stores have a sufficiently low operating cost.
To conclude, online shopping positively changes the retail industry. It improves the experience of both sides of the trade interaction, namely: saves the time and money of customers and increases the efficiency of retail business for entrepreneurs.