The Research on on-Line Shopping

The Research on On-line Shopping

Introduction

Recently, with the increase in people's living standards more people are able to spend money on what they like, in other words, they can use more money for shopping. As a result, the tremendous increase in purchasing power in China has led to the appearance of new ways to shop, such as on-line shopping. With the development of the Internet, on-line shopping is becoming more and more popular among people especially young people. Why and what people choose to purchase on-line is an important topic for study for both businessmen and consumers. The aim of this proposal is to investigate factors related to on-line shopping. This proposal consists of the Background of On-line Shopping, Research Questions and Objectives, Methods, the Timescale, Resources and References.

Background

This research is focus on shopping on the Internet. "Online shopping is the process whereby consumers directly buy goods or services from a seller in real-time, without an intermediary service, over the Internet." (Wikipedia 2011). Dating back to 1990, when the first World Wide Web server and browser created by Tim Berners-Lee, it was only used for commercial. However, other useful functions took place with the development of technology. In 1994, from American to Germany, more and more companies began to introduce new products to the public. The German company Intershop introduced its first online shopping system. One year later, Amazon originated its online shopping site, and in 1996, eBay appeared. (Wikipedia 2011)

Accompanied by the success of an increasingly number of online shopping systems, buying things on the Internet became a tendency. Its convenience and speedy ^ offer people a comfortable situation ^ to buy what they want. And online shopping becomes a vital factor of people's life. Recording to the sale of Shoppingoh (a website), a winter hat is on the top of bestsellers ^. Recently, online shopping is popular with people, especially youngster.

This research depends on several journals that are focusing on consumption on the internet such as The Impact of Knowledge and Trust on E-Consumers' Online Shopping Activities: An Empirical Study that was publishes in January 2009.(Wang and Jiang 2009) According to these researches, one of the most frequently cited reasons for consumers' not shopping online is lack of trust. Trust is the key factor that the research examined(Method?). Our research aims to investigate reasons that contribute to the popularity of online shopping, advantages and disadvantages of shopping on-line, what kind of people benefit from it and prevalent elements of online shopping.

Research Questions

1.