The development of the first World Wide Web browser and server, by Tim Berners-Lee, saw more and more businesses taking their services online. Online banking was one of the first services to appear, as well as Pizza Hut’s online Pizza shop, both of which came about in 1994. There were worries over the security of transferring data online, but this was quelled by Netscape’s introduction of The Secure Sockets Later Protocol (SSL), which let people encrypt the data they were sending, and so became a hugely important part of internet shopping.
Early on, the target market of online shopping was dominated by men who were young and relatively wealthy. Wealthy and young males were among the only people that could afford the necessary computing equipment and credit cards, while also having exposure to and knowledge of the technology, and so they constituted the early demographic profile. Indeed, there is still a positive correlation between wealth, education and exposure to technology, and the acceptance of online shopping. Yet the fact that more and more people are exposed to technology and changes in social values means that there is now a much more varied demographic.
The benefits of online shopping are immediately apparent. It is much cheaper for a company to list their products on a webpage instead of having to print and distribute brochures and the like. Customers are also given an advantage in that they can browse many different retailers from one place and compare prices. Customer reviews are often only a click away, too, and especially for technology, films, CDs and books, this plays a large part in influencing which product consumers buy from and which retailer they buy it from.
Now constituting a healthy part of the UK economy, as well as in other countries, Internet shopping has grown at an alarming rate. 7.2 percent of GDP, that’s about 100 billion, was its recorded contribution to the UK economy in 2009. Construction, transportation, Utilities didn’t match this. But such GDP centred figures do not capture the extent of the internet’s influence on commerce in general. 40 billion per year is supposedly added by non-internet purchases that were previously researched online, and a further 3.5 billion per year from internet advertising.
The online shopping market is still growing. Given its increase of about 10 percent per year in the UK, it is estimated to reach 10 percent of GDP by 2015. Increased broadband availability and the greater general acceptance of the internet as a secure and convenient place to shop, will make a large contribution to this growth. Internet shopping has grown massively in a short amount of time, and it will carry on doing so for the foreseeable future.
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