Shop' Till You Drop

The internet, in all its vastness and scope, does a wonderful job of delivering us things. Information, entertainment but also a seemingly unending stream of things to buy. Now, while I’m as guilty as the next person for my Amazon addiction, one can cast a much, much wider net. You can order food, clothes, furniture; truly anything your heart desires and your wallet allows. Whilst I (especially as a business owner myself) fully support shopping local, we do face limitations when it comes to choice. How did we get here though, to this land of endless next-day convenience in a box? How is the face of online shopping changing, and who are the real winners when we hit “Buy”?

Online shopping has seen steady growth as the internet in general has become more widespread. While there were a few predating pet projects, one of the first truly successful marketplaces to launch online was the Boston Computer Exchange in 1982. This gave people an online platform to buy and sell used computers, beating eBay to the punch by 13 years. The Amazon we know and love today was actually fairly pioneering when it comes to online shopping, opening its e-doors in 1995 as a book retailer. Today, it has grown to offer around 12 million items directly, or around 350 million if you count all of the marketplace content.

It’s a little unsurprising these huge names which dominate where we go when we’re looking to make a purchase on the internet. Amazon.com accounts for almost 40 percent of all US e-commerce sales which, when you consider their closest rival can only manage six percent, is quite telling of their success. Even when shopping in brick and mortar stores, 80 percent of us will do a price check against an online retailer before making a decision on heading to the checkout. One can even, using the Amazon app on your smartphone, scan the barcode of something to take you right to it on their site. It’s too, too easy now to keep physical stores honest with their pricing.

One method we’ve not mentioned to buy online though is by use of a pricing comparison site. Google actually offers this as a feature baked right into its search results, if you hit the “shopping” tab when searching for something. It’ll give you the rundown of places online to score your handbag, couch or gaming system along with all of the pricing data you’d need to make the best decision on where to actually place your order. Google, understandably, would love you to use this service, as it gets to integrate the data on how people make decisions on online purchases into its larger advertising powerhouse. I’d perhaps argue the convenience of having all that pricing on one spot is worth the trade.

E-commerce is still evolving, too. Shopping using your voice is picking up steam, for example. I’m guilty of using the convenience of “Hey Alexa, order trash bags!” but more than half of millennials have used a voice enabled, smart home assistant to buy online. It’s expected to be a $40 billion industry by the end of this year. A little further off (but very much approaching) will be shopping in the metaverse. Using virtual reality to browse, shop and buy from an entirely computer-generated storefront is undoubtedly going to be a jarring change of pace. I, rather more simply, just hope we get our two day Prime shipping back. Help us out, Amazon.