Online Shopping Habits and Consumer Behavior

Master's Thesis from the year 2013 in the subject Business economics - Marketing, Corporate Communication, CRM, Market Research, Social Media, grade: 64.6, University of Lincoln (PG-Business School), course: MBA, language: English, abstract: In the last few decades, the internet has been a powerful tool. The advent of internet has removed major industry barriers and made shopping much more easily. The development of internet from last 5 years has significantly increased the web-users which are due high speed data transmission and other technology developments have created an advantage for the firms to promote themselves more significantly. In the current era of internet customers use internet for varied purpose and activities; searching information about products/ services, companies, product features and prices, availability of the product, selection of products, placing order and paying them online ensuring a smooth transmission of the complete process. According to the UCLA centre for communication policy, online shopping has become the third popular internet activity which further followed up by e-mails and web browsing. Many researches have indicated that the internet shopping particularly in B2C has risen and online shopping become more popular to many people. According to The Emerging Digital Economy Report, in some companies the weight of e-commerce sales is high (Dell computer reached $ 18million sales through internet). This advent of internet has made the marketers to realise that the consumer behaviour transformation is unavoidable and thus they have to change their marketing strategy.