Another thing not mentioned so far is product reviews. When I’m in wallyworld trying to buy a thingumy there’s a nontrivial chance that it’s a piece of shit that will break after a few uses. On a big retailer with lots of reviews, I can quickly determine that Brand A and B are cheap pieces of shit, Brand C is highest quality but expensive, and Brand D is a good compromise between price and my requirements. Product reviews can be gamed, of course, but for reasonably popular products they provide useful information.
I tend to only use online retailers with good return/refund policies. This includes the biggest retailers like Amazon.
Usually, if a product is defective, after a quick email or call you can put it back in its box (or any other convenient box) and slap on a pre-paid label provided by the retailer. I find the process a lot easier than with many brick-and-mortar stores, which would require me to file all my receipts, re-package an item to some salesdrone’s standards, drive to the store, and stand in line.
Between reviews and an easy return policy, IME I’m less likely to waste my money on crap with the better online retailers than with the most common brick-and-mortar retailers.
Travel agents existed simply because they had access to a proprietary network of airline booking computers. So if you wanted to fly you went to them, they typed it in & printed it out, you payed them and they took a cut. They were simply (necessary) middle-men.
Now that everyone has a computer terminal in their home (now in their *pocket *for Christ’s sake!) retail stores have become middle-men too. Customers just directly access a store’s warehouse inventory via computer, place an order, and have it delivered. And because online shopping is so prevalent shipping businesses have increased exponentially so shipping costs have dropped (considerably). Returns are not a big deal anymore both because products in general have extremely low failure rates, and because online stores go out of their way to make returning extremely easy (even at a loss).
There’s still a social aspect to shopping. It didn’t exist for travel agents at all, but people (sometimes) still like going to a mall, both for the atmosphere and to see products for real. American Dad! did a joke where they showed a sign outside a Best Buy-like store that read, “Play with stuff here before you buy it on the internet!”. It’s more & more become the truth.
I think supermarkets have been the least affected because people still have an innate discomfort with getting their foodstuffs ‘shipped’ to them in cardboard boxes delivered by strangers. Groceries are a special case of wanting to buy them ‘hands-on’ if possible.
I lived in a small, rural town for the last 25 years. It had a Wal-Mart and a small JC Penney’s. Suburban Chicago was over three hours away. St. Louis was about 2 1/2.
Online? Everything I could want, plus Europe, where I buy a couple of things each year (usually England).
So, unless I really wanted to drive, or buy everything from Wal-Mart (there was a Target sixty miles away I could go to), I shopped online.
One of the big things that online has over local retail is selection. There have been several times where I tried a few local stores and they did not have what I wanted then I go it online and find what I want quickly and easily. It does not take that happening to many times before you start looking online first.
Clothes and food are things that I don’t shop online for often.
I have generally found that the Best Buy prices are reasonably competitive with online for things like laptops. So I don’t look at stuff in Best Buy and then go online to get it some where else.
I shop both online and at brick and mortar, it just depends on the item. For smaller goods, books, music CD’s etc., Amazon will usually sell at a discount off list price so I save money even with the shipping fee. For larger goods, I don’t want to pay the high shipping. For clothing, I usually want to try it on for fit before buying.
Especially clothing for those of us who are 5’1". Petite sizes in stores are limited to nonexistent. If I don’t want to have to have everything altered, I have to buy much of it online.
I’ve tried grocery delivery a few times and I think there are just so many practical barriers that we can dismiss fuzzier consumer preferences. Refrigerated or frozen perishable groceries can’t be dropped off on your porch to sit around all day waiting for someone to come home (at least not without expensive shipping with insulated containers and ice packs or dry ice).
The big grocery chains around here offer delivery services, but you need to be home to accept the delivery. Problem is you need to give them a several hour delivery window, wait for them the entire time, and they’ll probably be late anyhow. That’s basically several hours sitting at home doing nothing that can’t be interrupted, just to save a 30-60 min trip to the grocery store. Even for the car-less city dweller, it’s often cheaper and faster to take a cab to and from the grocery store.
Grocery deliveries using standard delivery, like Amazon Pantry, only offer a fraction of the groceries anyone needs. I still have to go to the grocery store to get the perishable stuff, so it’s not worth my time to figure out what can be ordered from Amazon just to possibly save a dollar here and there. And at first glance, the selection and prices are underwhelming.
If you go grocery shopping by cab, how does the driver charge you–if he/she waits while you shop? Or do they? We live two half-blocks from a supermarket; the waiting time might be more profitable to the cabbie than the short trips to and from the store.
I buy musical instrument gear from my local store, and they have a policy of price matching whatever I can show them online.
Likewise, I buy photographic gear from one of the last good camera shops around–they always match the NY prices (they check BH prices at time of sale).
What I don’t do is support retailers that play games with “our online presence is a different entity–we don’t even know them” while at the same time reaping the benefits of the valuable brand.
Example: I found a photography book at a Barnes & Noble store that I liked, but it was $55. On their own website it was $34. I showed this to the manager and she simply stared through me as she quoted stuff about building costs and the benefit of getting it immediately. I said “but this is your own website” and she blathered on with the party line. If she had offered any discount I might have gone for it, but she didn’t. I could not justify paying a $21 surcharge on a book, plus tax.
Sorry, but I don’t want to feel like a chump today.
For the urban grocery stores I went to, there was usually a line of cabs waiting outside to take people home with their groceries. I usually walked or bussed to the store and only took a cab home if I had too much to carry. If I took the cab there I wouldn’t need them to wait and they’d probably pick up someone else for the trip home.
I started out buying parts for a antique tractor online. Now I buy almost all my parts for my tractors and lawnmowers online. The local shops are limited selection and high prices. One example, I needed a fuel pump for a Kohler motor. The local shop would sell me a used pump, for $10. It wasn’t a Kohler part, just one that should work? A new, Kohler pump was $8. With Amazon prime, shipping was free. And the local shop is a 20 mile round trip. The Amazon delivery showed up in 2 days. I recently started buying clothes online. If I don’t like it, send it back, no cost. I think I will be buying a lot more online.
Another rural resident here. Except for groceries and bulky items like motor oil, online has saved me huge amounts of money and changed life for the better.
Yeah…riding the bus there is a breeze–there’s a stop just outside our mobile-home park, and the next one is at the curb, down the street, just outside our supermarket ’ s lot. I wonder what a cabbie would charge us.
My neighborhood doesn’t have a lot of porch theft, either, so the packages are usually left on my steps. But when they aren’t (usually because they need a signature ), they’re delivered either to a neighbor or to a UPS Access point two blocks from my house. (there are at least 15 within two miles of my house.)
On-line? the selection. My wife and I were watching the World Rugby on TV and saw the NZ’ers wearing sheep hats. A quick google later, find they are actually Welsh team props but adopted by some New Zealanders. Order within an hour from somewhere in Wales, for $12 or so each.
If I’d gone looking for that even in a big Canadian city, I likely would never find it in a store, and would have spent days in futile wandering all over the metropolis, and if I did find an imported item like that, probably $30 each. Instead, they arrived from Her Majesty’s Post within a week, in time for Halloween.
In parts of North Dakota even back in the days before the internet they figured easily 30% of all shopping was thru catalogs. Better variety than they could get from any local store.
Mostly people have listed the advantages of online shopping, so just to balance:
In conventional stores you can try on stuff
Conventional shopping can be a social activity (Although I might be a bit behind the times on shopping social apps. I buy things online for my SO and she buys stuff for me, but we’ve never bought anything together, that’s only happened in physical stores)
You have the item immediately
You might notice an item you didn’t actually set out to buy (this can happen with online shopping too…and I guess which media such jumps are more likely to happen depends on how much of a “jump” we’re talking about).
This was the first holiday season where I didn’t make at least one shopping trip to a big enclosed mall. About 80% of the gifts I bought were purchased online, the rest at a couple of stores in a small shopping center.
Being able to avoid large germ-ridden crowds and having to wait on line is priceless. And shipping costs (for those items that don’t feature free shipping) are minimal.