Further research: -
My second form of research will be to look at existing online shopping sites in an attempt to see what are the best sites to buy from and to give me some idea of what sort of shopping sites there are and what they offer in terms of appearance, navigation and products that they sell.
The table above summarises the sites that I visited. A wide range of sites was visited from supermarkets to sites, which specialise in gifts. I looked at 10 sites and rated them on appearance, navigation, product information and functionality.
Below shows how many points I gave for each of the thing I rated them on: -
- Appearance 3 points
- Navigation 3 points
- Product Information 2 points
- Functionality 2 points
From this area of research I have discovered that tesco.com is the best place to buy online. Normally you would associate Tesco as a supermarket but it seems that they have tried to lift their appearance by offering a wider range of product online than you can buy in one of their retail stores. One drawback from tesco.com is they sell their products at their usual retail price, but they make up for this with special offers all over the website where you can save loads of money if you are buying something like groceries.
The best site I found for value for money was play.com. This site specialises in entertainment such as videos, dvd’s and video games. As they don’t charge for delivery this add to the overall savings. Most products on this site are very cheap compared to retailers and they also have a very wide range of every type of product they sell.
Final research: -
For my final part of research I looked through books and searched on the Internet to find information on the history of online shopping, the most popular sites, how they were started and the security of shopping online. The information I found can be found throughout this report.
The books I reed and the Internet sites I visited to get the information of this report can be found in the bibliography on the second page after the table of contents.
Cost compared with high street shops: -
Shopping online has many advantages. I have researched one advantage, which is the cost. Many sites offer products at much lower prices than high street shops. They do include postage and packaging but even with this added on, it could still be cheaper to buy online than in a normal shop on the high street.
The products I have decided to research are playstation 2 games. I have decided to compare the prices of these because they can be very expensive in high street shops e.g. Comet, electronic boutique, Dixon’s. The games I have decided to research are as follows: -
- Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
- Fifa Football 2003
- The Lord Of The Rings: The Twin Towers
I decided to research these games because they are the latest out and are all expected to top the PS2 charts. Because of this it is very unlikely that high street shops would have put them in a sale, which if they did would affect my results.
Below I have created 3 tables to show the prices of buying online, buying on the high street and the price differences of them both: -
Table 1 – Fifa Football 2003 price comparisons
The table above shows the comparisons in prices for Fifa football 2003. On the left are the web sites I visited and the prices they are selling the game at and on the right are the high street shops I visited and the prices they are selling the game at.
The following two tables are the results I got when I compared the prices of two other games.
Table 2 – The lord of the rings, price comparisons
The table above shows the comparisons in prices for The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers.
Table 3 - Grand theft auto, price comparisons
The table above shows the comparisons in prices for Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.
As you can see in the tables I have highlighted all the lowest prices for each product in red. Play.com turned out to be the best place to buy each game being the cheapest for every product that I researched apart from Fifa football 2003 where Amazon.co.uk could only match their price. Also an added bonus with Play.com is that all prices from the site includes delivery where as all the other sites add delivery charges onto the displayed price. Where delivery charges are not normally more than £1.50, they do not mention this until you are about to buy the product, so when you think your saving money your not really saving as much as you think.
How secure is Online Shopping: -
There has been many questions asked about shopping online, but the most common question asked has to be “is it safe”? Lots of time has been put into trying to make shopping online as secure as possible and many well know sites like Amazon.co.uk and Tesco.com would have put maximum effort to make sure that information like your credit card details or address that you send through their severs cannot be hacked.
Below is web site architecture that these sites are likely to have to make sure that your information is secured: -
Fig 1 – Possible Online Shopping site architecture
Figure 2 shows what the hardware would look like. Below I have created a diagram to show you what it would look like for the user of and Internet Online Shopping site and the receiver, which is the retailer.
Fig 2 – What the users see
Figure 2 shows the user on the left sending information to the receiver on the right. Her information is encrypted using a special software that scrambles and her information so it unreadable. When the receiver on the right receives this information he uses the some software to unscramble her information.
The software set so the use can scramble the information how he wants (i.e. change all P’s into &’s, etc) so if a hacker doe’s get hold of the information being sent and also has a copy of the decryption software they can still not unscramble the data.
How easy is it to buy online: -
I have produced a walkthrough to show what it is like to buy a product online. I have decided buy something from the most popular site from my research, which was amazon.co.uk.
Below I have created a simple walkthrough to show what it is like to buy something online.
Click here to proceed to
checkout
I found it very striate forward and easy to buy a product from amazon.co.uk. Looking for the product was made easy by the quick search option, and paying for it was even easier through the secure server. When giving credit card detail you must make sure that the page is secure when typing you number in. You know when you are under a secure page when you can see the lock symbol at the bottom of your web browser.
Below is a picture of what you should be able to see: -
The lock to show you
are on a secured page
History of online shopping and where it is going: -
The word wide web first properly hit off in 1991 and by the following year the first e-commerce site was established. At this point there were as little as 1,000,000 hosts using the Internet, and these were only the very well off part of the population. Internet shopping didn’t really properly take off till 1996 when then was approximately 40 million people connected to the Internet and more than £1billion pounds a year changing hands on internet shopping sites world wide, and only 1.5 million of this was from Europe.
The main stake in this £1billion revenue came from the USA, and still to this current day 87% of all business to customer revenue is from the USA. This is because most online shopping sites were established in the USA. Site such as Amazon (founded by Jeff Bezos) was American before it was brought to Europe in an attempt to expand.
From this time to the present year things have hugely increased. The chart below shows the increase in
Evaluation: -
Appendix A –
