E-Commerce Week #1

The Wall Street Journal

Online Retailers Dangle Free Shipping Discounts

Author: Christopher Lawton

The article Online Retailers Dangle Free Shipping Discounts in the Wall Street Journal discusses the recent topic of e-commerce in the biggest retail season of the year. Everyone has heard of Black Friday, the big shopping day each year where retail stores and chains provide the biggest deals of the year and many early-rising shoppers take advantage of the opportunity to try and save some bucks. With the growth of online retailing, retailers have created their own day of super sales on the Monday following Thanksgiving weekend, otherwise known as Cyber Monday. Retailers bring out all the stops with free shipping and massive discounts, encouraging customers to shop at their convenience within the comfort of their own homes. While this method has continued to grow with sales being up 21% from last year alone (making sales up to $730 million in one day), the overload of shoppers taking advantage of these offers has caused a mass amount of traffic online which in turn has led to sites going down, which really hasn’t slowed down the usage rates of customers. Online shopping is beginning to mirror the brick-and-mortar version of retail shopping, and with free shipping on top of discounts, customers are deciding to stay at home rather than venture out into the craziness of the Black Friday shopping experience. The results of Cyber Monday, combined with the retail efforts of Black Friday, provide an approximated idea of how the online shopping season will pan out for retailers and while many are seeing increased sales, surveys are showing that the economy continues to hurt e-commerce sales. While Internet retailing is becoming a strong force in the retail market, different retailers see a variety of results at this time of the year. Some see increased traffic but at the dismay of the retailer, consumers are spending less per order than they used to. Others notice they are having more activity on Black Friday and over the Thanksgiving weekend then they do on Cyber Monday, and others see that customers come to the stores on Friday, but wait and make their purchases over the weekend. Online retailing will continue to grow as our society becomes more and more technology dependent and I see this method of shopping only expanding over the next decade. Who knows, some day retail shopping may take over the market and what we know as the term “going shopping” will no longer be getting in the car and heading to the mall, but rather sitting down in front of the computer and web surfing away. To me, it seems to take the fun out of a shopping experience, but to others, online shopping is all they have time for.

What I found interesting about this article is that this past week, I was one of the customers that decided to make an online purchase because of the free shipping offered along with a discount, and experienced the overload of customers doing the same thing as me. I’ve only purchased a couple things online before, usually books, but one of my favorite stores made an offer I couldn’t refuse and I was suckered into what I thought would be an quick and easy way of online shopping. However, the mass amounts of shoppers worldwide that were obviously thinking the same thing and were also on the same site made my quick and easy hopes a lot more difficult then expected. The site was so overloaded that it was constantly going down. As I was confirming my purchase, the site went down for about the 25^th time and left me unsure about whether or not I had just made a purchase. I proceeded to call the company and was left on hold for 50 minutes on the phone waiting to talk to a customer service agent about the status of my attempted purchase. Luckily, everything went through which eased the frustration I felt, but it goes to show that sometimes even though millions of other people are doing the same thing, retailers have found ways to bring customers in with many offers that are hard to resist for anyone.