E-commerce has become a force to be reckoned with. There was a slight doubt about online shopping and other commercial activities because analysts weren’t sure whether users would be comfortable buying things without physically checking them first. Time has shown that all such fears were unfounded and people are doing more commercial activities online than ever before. eCommerce has been the norm for more than a decade now but the way it functions has changed a bit.
The Beginnings
In the beginning, online stores were akin to catalogues. You could go to a website, see some products, and put in a purchase order. Amazon and most other big stores on the internet all got their start this way. There wasn’t much of an incentive for people to buy things online and most people still preferred to go out and buy stuff from shops. At this time, Amazon was a book store. It started to become popular for people to buy items which didn’t need to be checked physically. Items like books and electronics were some of the first things which found a market online. By this time, the world was still divided into two types of people – those who used computers regularly and those who didn’t.
The Smartphone Revolution
Smartphones have changed the way we live. Everyone loves the fact that we now have a camera and an internet connection with us all the time but most people do not realize how profound an effect smartphones had on the general population. See, unless your job required it, you could live without actively using the internet and computers. Most people from the older generation were not into sitting in front of a computer to use it. They never bothered to get comfortable with it.
Smartphones made having a computer in our hands normal. Suddenly everyone was online. People who never really bothered to use computers were not sitting on their sofas just browsing websites and checking out items on the internet. The smartphones brought the internet to everyone – not just those who were technologically literate. It is not a coincidence that eCommerce has blown up after the release of smartphones. People are doing more things online now than ever before because the general population is now completely comfortable in spending money online.
This has also changed the game for ecommerce professionals. Previously, you needed a big website to attract people. These days, people are opening niche stores and are promoting them through social media and SEO technologies. The small business is finally online and it has proved to be great for entrepreneurs. In most cases it takes much less money to open an online store than it does to open a brick and mortar store. eCommerce is thus now open for business for everyone who is willing to put in some time and effort into it. As technology develops further we can expect to see more and more entrepreneurs looking to make their mark online.