The world has now become a global market place because of the internet's existence. We can now buy DVDs and computer games from all over the world not to mention clothing and foreign attire. This is all possible because of transportation and advancing technology in aircraft and cargo ships.

However, the internet plays a key role in making this global marketplace run. Not too long ago, if you wanted to get specific items overseas you would have to ask a friend, who’s going on holiday to bring you some things back. If you are one those who have lots of sources then maybe you didn’t use this method but regardless of the way you got items internationally, you still had to pay through some sort of ‘international money transfer medium’.

These methods cause great hassle to both the customer and the merchant. Now though, with these old-fashioned methods still being available, retailers have realised the power of the internet and have jumped into e-commerce.

E-commerce is short for electronic commerce and is better known to the public as “buying and selling products over electronic systems, mainly the Internet”.

If you are starting out a business or already selling well in-stores why not reach out to potential customers globally. There are many advantages to having an e-commerce website and I will be explaining a few.

Websites now have software built in them that can log customer information, such as which products or web pages they viewed, and how many times they returned to the website and what they clicked on and the list goes on. They can then use this information, after some analysing, to build up a picture of the site usage.

Customer information can be used in various ways. One positive way is if a particular product or web page is being bought and viewed a lot, then you can increase the amount of stock for that product and decrease the less popular ones or even put them on sale. As for the web page you can increase advertisement costs which will add up as more profit.

When shopping in real life, some people will only stop when their basket or trolley is full. Having an e-commerce website is very advantageous for these people as the virtual basket will never get full.

Some individuals only go into shops when they are considering making a purchase and are put off expensive shops as they do not want to walk in, browse, and then leave empty-handed (this makes them feel cheap). Again having an e-commerce website will let these potential customers do all the browsing they want without the embarrassment of leaving the site with no purchases.

When shopping in a store the general rule is ‘first come first served’. You are not allowed to reserve items in most shops, probably because the retailers want to sell everything in the store as soon as possible. On-line it is a different case, this is because most of the available items on the website are kept in a warehouse and it is no problem to reserve some items. This leads me to my next point.

If you have a warehouse where you store most of your goods you can save a lot of money by directly delivering items to customers who buy online rather than shipping them to the store and then waiting for a customer to come across them.

Lastly, let’s say a customer wants to buy something at a time that suits them (after work hours) your store will likely be closed and this will go on until they get their day off. When they get their day off, most likely Saturday and Sunday, it is highly probable that your shopping will be forgotten amongst all the other shopping that they need to do.

On the other hand, if you had a website customers could buy things at times like 3am. Nothing prevents them from making an order, which is a bonus for you because it allows you to make sales 24 hours of the day. This is done by a database another advantage of e-commerce systems. The database stores all the information of their order until they are then processed by a human whenever they next log on.