E-commerce is one of the most significant aspects of the internet. Having emerged recently and growing at a steady state, it becomes essential to look at the advantages and disadvantages of e-commerce.
Advantages
Like any other business activity, electronic commerce can benefit owners and consumers. The main advantage of E-commerce is reducing cost. It gives the customers the opportunity to choose for cheapest and highest quality products. Many people nowadays prefer to do shopping online to get lower cost products comparing with the visual shopping malls.
Today, e-commerce allows you to purchase goods and services online in every country around the world. E-commerce provides 24\7 online customer services that give detailed information with less error about payments and shipments with a high-quality product (e.g. Cybermall, e-boutique). Merchants can communicate and contact costumers to help them and answer their questions using e-mails and social network.
E-commerce allows people to compare between online store prices, better services and item's quality and speed of delivery. Customer convenience is one of the most important advantages of e-commerce that helps customers to save time.
Furthermore, e-commerce provides reviews that other customers posted about their purchases. E-commerce website collects customer's information to develop their market process and send customers the recommended list of new items and products.
The rapid development of technology proved that e-commerce has many advantages in compare to the visual shopping malls which shows that many people move to purchase online instead of wasting time to get high quality products and cheapest costs with having good services from physical malls and stores.
Disadvantages
Although many people are familiar with using Internet and technology however, they don't trust e-commerce websites. E-commerce websites should include detailed information about their business to build customer's confidence.
Security is the major threat e-commerce. E-commerce should show customers that the company has been in a business for a long time and use trusted program to attract customers. Obviously, with e-commerce customers can't feel the product, such as fabric nor determine if the clothes fit them. That makes customers prefer to get their products immediately from malls.
E-commerce is not always suitable for all business sectors such as food, furniture and products with high amount of money.
Untrusted e-commerce websites and security are threatening the development of e-commerce though there are many people nowadays are familiar with using Internet and technology which necessitates e-commerce websites to show consumers the company's efficiency in that field.
To end up, e-commerce has advantages that outweigh its disadvantages. A proper development is needed to solve these issues and build up customers trust. These developments will eliminate the disadvantages of e-commerce and help it to have a major impact globally.