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Since the advent of science and modern technology (Schlesinger and Rahman, 2015), a parallel world has been taking a form which may be called ‘the virtual world’. Today it is not merely forming, rather it is extraordinarily enriched. People now possess two lives at the same time. One is the real human life and the other is virtual life. It would seem like they are more into the latter one. Internet has given a new life to almost half the population of the whole world. This new life has started from the countless options that the internet has given to us through its astonishing ability to connect the north hemisphere with the south hemisphere. The internet created so many new trends that have become the inseparable parts of human life. Without them our lives cannot even be imagined today. Some of the, influences include E-mail, online entertainment, social media, online shopping and search engine browsing.
Among these trends, online shopping has become a new option for the consumers. Today a good number of organizations have their online sales option. Beside brick-and-mortar, numerous companies are showing up as click-only. These are offering consumers a wide range of products from clothes to books to even cars. Advancement of technology has given people the opportunities to connect to the internet anytime through more than one device including desktops, laptops, smart phones, and tablets (Akhter et al., 2014). Online shopping has opened a new horizon for entrepreneurs. Internet has become a great means for them to sell their products to customers anywhere. There are obviously a lot of drawbacks for offline shopping. Numerous research studies were conducted on the comparison of these two extremes. Nevertheless, online shopping has also many advantages for customers to consider.
The use of online shopping is new to Bangladesh due to the protocol of Bangladesh government, it has become much easier for the businesses and customers to take part. It has a growing market of 2 billion BDT. The introduction of 3G sped up the growth of the online retail industry significantly. “There are a number of free classified websites and online shopping marketplaces in Bangladesh that sell almost all types of goods and services. For example, Othoba.com, Ekhanei.com, Bikroy.com, ‘Lamudi’, ‘Carmudi’ and ‘Kaymu’.” (E-Commerce Directory, 2014). “About 1.5 to 2 million people shopped online every year, and the market was growing by 15% to 20%.” (Shah, 2014).
By definition, online shopping takes place through websites over the internet. Generally online retailers can be categorized in two types: click-and-mortar and click only. The click-and-mortars are those firms that have both physical stores and online channels. These firms generally started their business physically as click and motor and when online business concept showed up, they simply adopted the new idea and created a new communication and distribution channel over the internet. On the contrary, clicks-only are those firms that only have online presence. It is clear that these firms initiated their businesses online. However, sometimes clicks-only also open their physical stores. In Bangladesh, most of the clicks-only are online superstores. They sell variety of products of different brands. Examples are daraaz.com, kaymu.bd, bagdoom.com. All of them offer different products of different brands such as, men’s wear, women’s wear, shoes, cosmetics, watches, bags, toys, and electronics. International online stores also operate in Bangladesh. A big example is Amazon.com which first started selling books and is now one of the world’s biggest business giants as a retailer of various kinds of products. Some online shops are specialty stores also. For example, some sell only saree, some sell only ‘kameez’ and some sell only books. A notable example can be rokomari.com that earned its huge reputation and revenue also by selling books. However, recently it has started offering electronics and other home products. There are also some Facebook-based retailers such as He & She, ‘Rongoboti,’ etc. Generally, the Facebook-based online stores happen to be specialty stores such as, He & She sells jewelry and Rongoboti sells cosmetics. Again, the online retailers operating through their own websites also maintain their Facebook pages through which they sell products using Facebook-authorized button “Shop Now”.