Year 10 Money Matters
Online Shopping
Read the article Click and save from the Sydney Morning Herald, March 16, 2006.
Online shopping is no longer only for the brave.
DURING the past couple of years, online shopping has gone from being mainly the preserve of web-centric early adoptors to a widely accepted part of everyday life.
Australians spent $2.4 billion shopping online in the three months to December 31, according to Nielsen/NetRatings Australia.
Not bad when you consider that when the dot-com boom turned to bust, online retail was largely written off as a triumph of hype over substance.
That doesn't mean Myer, Woolworths and David Jones are being driven out of business - bricks-and-mortar stores will always exist - but it does mean we seem to be over our initial squeamishness about using credit cards online.
However, our spending is not evenly spread. The most popular categories by a country mile are flights and accommodation, which account for almost half the total outlay. As a nation, we like to do our travel research online and increasingly reach for the credit card and the mouse when it comes to making a booking.
Other popular purchases include movie, sport and concert tickets, car hire, electronic gadgets, computers and software.
Beyond the pleasure of shopping at 3am wearing your Thomas the Tank Engine pyjamas without fear of embarrassment (or arrest), there is a world of difference between shopping online and real-world retail therapy.
Security is important when dealing with an organisation that exists only on your computer screen, and the way you shop is also different.
One of the big differences between online shopping and its real-world counterpart is that when buying over the internet you can't make the dozens of minute qualitative assessments of the retailer you normally do.
For instance, shopping in a store that is part of a national chain in a big mall in a swanky part of town gives you some comfort about the transaction that you may not have if you were buying from a rundown shop in the back streets.
But when you are online, no such cues are available. Just because a website looks well designed and professional does not mean the business behind it is trustworthy.
Likewise, a poorly designed, unattractive site doesn't necessarily mean you should take your mouse and credit card elsewhere - it may just be that the web designer is hopeless.
Advice from the Federal Government (http://www.consumer.gov.au) and the excellent Australian Consumers Association site (http://www.choice.com.au) advises you to get to know the business enough to be comfortable dealing with it.
It's often worth contacting a business by phone first or, if you haven't heard of the site, try Googling (http://www.google.com) the name to see if anyone has anything critical to say about it in online discussions.
If things do go wrong and you used a credit card, the card issuer could be of assistance.
Elizabeth Beal, director of the communications law centre at Victoria University, says the contract you have entered is between you and the online retailer, but card companies will often refund money if you have been the victim of a fraud, as a gesture of goodwill.
The internet is a paradise for shoppers who like to compare prices. With the click of a mouse you can compare prices at dozens of sites using services such as GetPrice (http://www.getprice.com.au), Yahoo Shopping (http://www.shopping.yahoo.com.au) and NineMSN Shopping (http://www.shopping.msn.com.au).
If you want to make yourself really unpopular, you can take the best price and goad the sales staff at a real shop into matching it - or you can just order online.
Shopping on the web also allows you to research any item before buying, using the manufacturer's information and comments from consumers at sites such as epinions (http://www.www.epinions.com) and Shopzilla (http://www.shopzilla.com). But bear in mind that some of those anonymous "opinions" could be plants from the manufacturers.
1. Draw a pie chart showing the most popular categories for online shopping.
2. List two advantages of shopping online.
3. Explain two different reasons why brick and mortar stores will always exist.
4. You should never buy from a poorly designed or unattractive website. What is your response to this statement?
5. How can you find out whether an online business is legitimate?