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Top1. Introduction
The Internet and its applications have been rapidly growing in India over the last decade. Recent data shows that India has 302 million Internet users. The YOY growth of Internet usage in India is at present about 32 percent. What is more enthusing about India is the acceleration of Internet growth, while it took 10 years to move from 10 million to 100 million Internet users, and 3 years from 100 to 200 million, the next milestone was achieved in just a year. And if this pace of growth continues, India will reach 500 million users by the end of 2016. Of the 302 million Internet users, about 67 percent (190 million) are urban and 33 percent (112 million) rural Internet users. The frequency of usage of Internet in India has 61 percent of daily users. About 18 percent access Internet several times a day, 10 percent users’ at least once a day and 33 percent access on all days of a week. This large base of Internet users has phenomenal influence on online retail business which has seen an unrecorded growth in past few years.
Internet represents a new era in which many of the traditional marketing conventions are broken (Chaston, 2000). Coupled with that, the digital revolution has brought about a paradigmatic shift in the manner in which consumers perform business transactions (Hsiao, 2009). As such, the online platform is nearly a perfect market for performing dealings because information is instantaneous and buyers can easily compare the offerings of a variety of sellers globally (Huang, 2000). For businesses, the key to survival in the future depends on how well they can integrate this medium in their business models today. In order to sell anything over the Internet, firms have to take into account that who their customers are, what their spending habits are like, as well as the products and services they prefer, while shopping along electronic platforms (Dahiya, 2012). Online shopping may be considered a dynamically continuous innovation because it has had a significant effect on consumption patterns by modifying and improving the existing shopping Behavior (Molesworth & Suortti, 2001). It appears then that Internet-based shopping has reshaped consumers’ habits and has caused far-reaching vicissitudes to the distribution channel.
Online shopping may be defined as the process whereby consumers directly buy goods or services from a seller in real-time (the level of Internet responsiveness that is judged as sufficiently immediate) without the use of a traditional intermediary service (Hsiao, 2009). Generally, merchants sell products and services directly to consumers while in e-commerce or electronic retailing (e-tailing), the web channel is used to conduct business and also to sell products and services (Shelly & Vermaat, 2011). The idea is not only just about disseminating information, but also about building customer relationships and realizing company profits (Falk, Sockel, & Chen, 2005).
An online shop evokes the physical analogy of buying products or services at a brick-and-mortar retailer or in a shopping centre. Therefore, business-to-consumer (B2C) based e-commerce capacitates the consumer to purchase products and services online using Internet technologies and associated infrastructure (Pavlou, 2003). In some cases, consumers may use online shopping parallel to alternative retail channels such as retail stores, catalogues, mail order or TV shopping, often termed multi-channel shopping (Ward, 2008).