Why Everyone Should be Shopping and Buying Online
November 27, 2004
20:45 PST
The reason our society is so advanced today is because we have freed ourselves from having to hunt our own animals and grow our own crops. These days only a minutely small portion of our society needs to take part in agriculture because of our technological advancement. Throughout the past few centuries our technologies have allowed us to be more productive and allocate our time to the research and development of new and better ways of becoming more efficient(saving time and money), which in turn allows us more time to find new innovations and solve more problems.
Would all the world’s greatest inventions be in existence if the world’s great inventors had to kill and grow their own food for survival?
At this point, you might be asking yourself what this all has to do with whether someone shops online or off. In fact, it is the essence of my argument. Societies always have to catch up with the technologies they produce. Most of the time, the benefits of the technology are very elusive and misunderstood. In this case, the internet is the technology; and at this time, the society, and the media that informs it, does not fully understand its implications.
The internet is the technology that is going to make our society; in fact, the entire global society, unfathomably more productive. You might ask, how?
Saving time is directly related to increasing productivity, so the less time we spend performing menial activities, the more time that is spent thinking of better ways to save even more time. The extra time we create in the process will allow us to find more cures for diseases, research better ways to create peace in the world, decrease world hunger, reduce poverty, create better race relations, or anything else good for society. Societal advancement occurs when more and more of society is doing less and less menial activities; civil society becomes more vibrant, ideas are produced more frequently and flow more easily.
One of these time-consuming, productivity killing things is going to a brick and mortar store to pick up an item that you can buy online.
By the time you get into your car, drive to the location, get out, enter, look for the item that is most of the time out of place, try gathering more information from an abrasive salesman, finally choose an item, get into a long line, pay for the item, walk back to your car, get in, drive home, get out, unload, put your stuff away, and settle in, you have wasted a lot of your day.
Let us compare this to shopping online; you go to your computer in your cozy home, go to your favorite web retailer based on what you need(and if you don’t know of one related to your need, go to any major search engine and search the general name of the item), navigate the logically organized categories until you reach a selection of what you are looking for, read an abundance of information and product reviews, choose an item, and buy it with ease. You can also go directly to the web retailer’s search engine to find items in their product database relevant to the keyword you use. You don’t have to go out in the winter cold and waste increasingly expensive gasoline; and the amount of time and money you save is immense.
Furthermore, you save money because web retailers can’t afford to try to get higher prices from you. They will be driven out of the market. And you can use a number of great comparison shopping sites that will allow you to compare the prices of web retailers item by item; so when you obtain the manufacturer product number, just put it in a search and you will find a number of competing retailers. It is no-nonsense shopping, straightforward and what you see is what you get.
For those people who like to go shopping at the malls or other shopping establishments for social recreation or for fun, keep doing it. I consider this a form of entertainment like visiting a museum. But if you are not shopping for fun, to go and play with the latest gadgets or whatever, which most of the time you won’t be, than save yourself some time and money, and shop online.
Many media commentators have been espouses the idea that the internet is best used as a research mechanism, rather than a purchasing place. The idea is you research the product online and buy at an offline retailer. The argument is that people want to touch and feel and test the products they are going to purchase. For the majority of items, this idea is quite laughable. Do you really need to go touch and feel the router, clock, lamp, fax machine, telephone, or whatever else you are going to buy? Furthermore, only highly expensive items are testable at brick and mortar locations. The images that web retailers provide online are more than enough to get an idea of what the items look like; and dimensional and weight information is provided to give you size specifications. It is safe to say that most items can be bought online with no problem, and you save time and money and increase your productivity.
I have also heard the argument that people find it hard to delay their gratification; meaning they don’t want to wait a few days to get the items they purchased. I really doubt this is a serious factor. Firstly, millions of people a day delay their gratification by buying online. Secondly, most people don’t care if they get an item in 3 to 5 days with free shipping. Thirdly, expedited shipping is available if a business or personal need requires immediate delivery. Fourthly, more and more retailers are strategically placing their fulfillment centers in a geographical area that fulfills orders for that region in an expedited manner. Lastly, most people who are buying online take into consideration when the item is going to be needed and order it in advance accordingly. For the most part, mature, credit card-holding consumers are not impatient about receiving day to day items for consumption. The value proposition of buying online far exceeds any inconvenience in delivery time.
Some might say freight charges are a problem. Any Web retailer who is any Web retailer offers free shipping with most purchases; and even if they don’t, the total price including shipping should be lower than any offline store.
It was said before that online shopping was unsafe, but this is not the case any longer, if it ever was. Some consumers still have this fear; but not only is credit card data encrypted when stored and/or transferred, the liability for credit card fraud falls directly to the web retailer that accepted a fraudulent transaction. The consumer will almost never incur the loss of someone using their credit card fraudulently.
We must get away and stay away from the notion that online shopping is mainly for books; online shopping should encompass most of what we consume today. All consumer activity can be made more efficient and easy online.
From small business owners to top executives, for business or personal, people are starving for time, so do yourself a favor and get familiar with the web and its retailers and start buying online.
Also, get broadband from your local phone or cable company; it is getting cheaper and cheaper and it saves you tons of time. I cringe when I hear people spending up to $24 a month for dial-up internet access, when some broadband service goes for $30, not including the specials some service companies have.
Let us not forget that the internet is used for more than shopping online, it is a method of communication that allows ever increasing efficiency and is the greatest information medium ever created. You literally have the world’s information at your fingertips with the search engines as your gateway. You can email, instant message, keep a calendar, make voice calls at a much cheaper rate (voice-over internet protocol), do scholarly research, research books (a search engine and a web retailer already have a service which allows you to search inside millions of books), discuss topics in web forums, make friends, do your banking and pay bills, book flights, reserve a hotel room, find a date, find a job, advertise your business, get directions, look up local businesses, get coupons, rent movies, play video games, read the news, and a million other things.
What does this all do? Yes, you guessed it; it makes us more productive; it saves us time and money.
The offline counterparts of these activities are increasingly useless and wasteful. For example, we save time and paper by reading the news online rather than getting its paper counterpart. We can search relevant categories immediately for articles we are interested in, rather than getting a whole newspaper in which we only read a few articles. Search engines specifically related to news articles allows us to search many news sites for specific content or any current event. Another example would be the yellow pages; a huge, unwieldy book that takes much time and effort to find what you need; you can search any city in the country for local businesses online by just entering the keyword and zip code. Take online bill paying as another example; instead of writing checks, paying 37 cents each to deliver them, you go online and you can pay 10 bills in literally minutes; again, it comes down to time and money.
We have reached the digital age; in which we are all connected by millions of computers and we have access to information that runs our lives on millions of servers. This reality can save us much time, but we must utilize its time and money saving capability; we must get people online and teach them to harness the internet's power.
We not only save time for more productive pursuits, but we save time for our families and friends and things we really want to do.
In this article, the productivity created through ready information is not touched upon for reasons of brevity, but we all know how much more quickly things are done or problems are solved when we have searchable databases of knowledge at our full disposal.
Also, we must find a way to bring internet access to everyone, poor or rich, and teach everyone how to fully utilize it, so we can guide our society in the right direction. Furthermore, the more people we get online, the cheaper internet access becomes.
If consumers and businesses harness the full power of the internet and begin to do everything online, including shop, the aggregate time saved will propel our society in an ever more favorable position to make ourselves even more productive and to bring us that much closer to fulfilling, to even larger degree, our most beloved needs and desires.
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