Year 2009- A Boom for Online Shopping in America

After witnessing a sharp decline in the online shopping in 2008 at the time of reccession, the E commerce industry finally started picking up online sales. After a poor year in 2008, online retail spending is picking up again due the heavy discounts and offers made by the retailers to the consumers.

According to comScore, a recent study shows that in United States, online shopping rose to $3.2 billion for the last week of November-2009, which accounted more than 6% sales during the same period last year.
Internet shoppers made a slaes of $318 million on Thanksgiving Day which is 10% higher than in 2008.
Sales also rose by 11% to $595m on Black Friday, the start of the Christmas shopping season for bricks-and-mortar retailers but an increasingly important online shopping day too. Consumers continued to spend on “cyber Monday” November 30th.

According to Shopper Talk, a retail Consultancy, On Wednesday December 2nd, a new data showed that sales rose from $846m to $887m, the largest daily spend on record. But the signs of recovery offline are less clear. Shops rang up $10.7 billion in sales on Black Friday, a meagre 0.5% rise on 2008.

The above figures shows that the E commerce industry is recovering from reccession and the online sales may break records for this Chrismas Shopping period in 2009.

E-commerce- A Driving Force for Corporates

In the 21st century, a great number of companies from United States and Europe started representing their services in the world wide web. Although the E-Commerce bacame possible in 1991, when the internet was open for the commercial use but most of the companies realised its importance in the begining of 21st century. The term E-commerce refers to the process of executing commercial transactions electronically over the internet with the help of various technologies like EDI( Electronic Data Interchange), EFT( Electronic Fund Transfer), HTML i.e. Hyper Text Mark-up Language. In simple words, we can say e-commerce is buying or selling things via internet.

Doing business over internet does not only save the time but it is also a cheaper way to establish your business having benifits to both companies as well as to the customers. The best thing of doing business electronically is that there are no issues regarding the distance like a customer who is 10,000 miles away from you can also be accessible. From the customer point of view, they have a large database of products and services to choose from on the company's websites.

E-commerce has grown rapidly from the start of 21st century till present. As we can see in the above figure, by the end of 2007, US retailers e-commerce sales accounted for 3.4 percent of their total sales. This increasing percentage of e-commerce sales shows thats its going to increase more in the coming years which is a good sign for the companies.

The first largest online retailers were Amazon and Ebay, who are the first companies to allow electronic transactions. currently there are five largest and most famous global internet retailers i.e. Amozon, Dell, Staples, Office Depot and Hewlett Packard. The company like Dell which is an Amercian company has contributed a lot to the process of E-commerce.
Dell.com was launched in 1994 with just a static page, but by the end of 1997, Dell was the first company to record a million dollars sales online. The key factor of Dell's success is that Dell.com enabled the customers to choose and to control their products i.e. customers can browse the website and assemble the PCs piece by piece according to their requirements, choice and budget.

I believe that e-commerce is a way for the businesses to penetrate rapidly and a cheaper way to enter into the global world of commerce and to compete more effectively in the global business by not only cutting down the prices but also by providing more choice of products to the customers. We will surely see some more growth in e-commerce sector in the coming years.

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