Online retailing (online retail) is an innovative and new way of online trading that enables users to directly purchase goods or services from an online seller without going to a physical location. Online retail is fast becoming a preferred alternative to traditional retailing. It offers numerous benefits and advantages. Apart from saving on costs, time, and space, online retailing also provides the opportunity for marketers to target specific communities, regions, or countries. It has also helped small-scale operators to expand their customer base.
In traditional retailing where there is no physical storefront, goods are sold or bought based largely on reputation or brand name, not on customer service, after-sales service, etc. Online retailing offers a better solution to these problems by providing a more personalized selling experience, better after-sales service, competitive prices, and superior customer service. Thus, online retail is gaining traction increasingly in both developed and developing countries, as it offers a wide range of products under a single website, has attractive discounts, and free delivery.
For example, Amazon is the leading e-commerce platform in Germany, with e-commerce net sales of 11746 million U.S. dollars in 2019. Moreover, Japan has become a rather large and very solvable market for e-commerce in the past few years. This is due to increasing internet and smartphone penetration in the country. In 2018, the Internet penetration rate in Japan was over 91%. Thus, online retailing is expected to witness huge growth due to the increasing penetration of the internet and smartphones.
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