In recent years, online shopping, banking and booking has been on a huge rise.
To demonstrate this growth, we found that in 2016 alone, UK online retail sales hit £133 billion, a 16% rise compared to 2015. It has been revealed that people feel more comfortable shopping and banking online compared to walking into a shop or bank. This could be for many reasons including; awkwardness with human interaction, finding it easier to access a computer than go to a shop/bank (because of a disability or a living location), and even because there are more offers and a wider range of items to choose from online. For example, you could only have 10 cars on the floor of a car dealership which you can physically walk in, whilst sites like Autotrader allow you to search over 600,000 new and second hand vehicles; there’s no real comparison, if you’re looking for convenience and practicality, in this case you’re definitely going to shop online.
Businesses have also needed to develop new technologies and marketing methods to keep up with consumer demands. An example of this is how companies like apple and Spotify have seized the opportunity that has been presented to them, being that people want to stream and listen to music any time and any place. Spotify and apple music have millions upon millions of songs you can stream from your current location for something like a £10 charge monthly. Recently, you have also been able to download these songs to your device so you can still listen to your favourite artists even without an internet connection. News companies have also taken advantage of social media and the fact that people want to be able to see what is going in the world wherever they are. You can download apps or just visit their website and read the same news stories that you can read in a newspaper, but in a smaller more convenient device that you can just slot in your pocket. To really highlight the decline in these older methods of doing things, for the first time in 2014, digital streaming surpassed CD revenue for the first time in history with CDs bringing home $6.82 billion, whilst the streaming platforms made over $6.85 billion. This isn’t a huge difference on the scale I’m talking about; but this was almost 6 years ago, a lot has changed since then.
These methods of streaming and selling online have cost reductive outcomes as well; think about it, would it be cheaper and easier for the company and the consumer to keep using sites like spotify, or cheaper to buy a physical copy of every song on the site, and carry it everywhere they go.
So another big reason for online stores taking over is to do with cost reduction; for example maintenance on sites like Wikipedia will be much cheaper than making encyclopaedias and books and giving them to the millions of users that visit these sites every day. Also far more people can use online banking at once compared to all the people that need to access their accounts going into the same bank at once. This saves money as there are less people on the payroll as you may only need a team of people to keep a site up and running whilst you would need a large amount of space and a lot more people to keep the banks up and running if all the people using online banking decided to walk into their bank. (You also can’t transfer your son or daughter their dinner money at 11 at night in your pyjamas by actually going into a bank)…
Online stores are clearly more convenient for shoppers and businesses, so obviously there is going to be an increasing amount of people using online platforms to shop and run their business. But will real life stores ever become truly obsolete? Probably not. People like to see what they’re really buying too much.
