Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Shopping Online in Holiday Reason

It’s interested that major holidays of all countries and all religions are celebrated in the winter - Christmas, Chinese New Year etc. Scholars believe that the cold weather in the winter has kept people away from work in farms traditionally and they have more to enjoy and celebrate what the year has brought to the families and communities. But Christmas is the birthday day of Jesus Christ. I always wonder what the world would like is Jesus was born in July or August. Or maybe, our ancestors just combined the birthday of Jesus with winter celebration.

A holiday season is always a shopping season. What a holiday would be like without shopping? In the major retailing stores in US - Macy’s, Best Buy, and even discount stores like Walmart, consumers are lined up for hours to grab gifts for family and friends for the Christmas celebration. What many people may not noticed is that there’s another wave of shopping happens in front of computer screens - online shopping.

Online shopping has become more and more popular and the sales of consumer portion of e-commerce has reached tens of billions of dollars. It’s still small compared with the amount of money that people spend in malls. The history of commerce dated to at least 40 years ago when businesses conducted EDI (or Electronic Data Interchange) in 1960 long before the Internet was conceived. Some schools trace the commerce history back to the invention of telephone more than a hundred years ago. This depends on how we look at commerce definition. The e-commerce in consumer market wouldn’t enjoy its success today without the popularity of the Internet and the Web in middle 1990s. In just a few years, consumers flocks to the net for convenience of shopping among the things of other benefits of commerce. It’s fascinating to see what the e-commerce landscape would be like 10 years from now.

0 Comments: