Evolution of the E-market

A few years back my understanding of ‘festivals’ was confined to going to the markets with my parents and buying new clothes which perhaps is true for most of the young minds of today. And why shouldn’t it be? With the advent of Bihu, Durga Puja and all other festivals, our first priority was to get new clothes from the market. Interestingly, it is our first priority even today but we no longer need to throng the shops in search of the best suiting attires for us; the IT has made it available to us on our finger tips.

The array of online shopping sites that have come up in the recent years has made it extremely easy for people to get not only clothes but any stuff which they consider necessary by not moving an inch from the coziness of their homes and all they need is an internet connection. Flipkart, Snapdeal, Yepme, Myntra, etc. are a few of the sites which provide us with such amenities and the best thing about these ‘online megastores’ is the range of goods available; in every category there are hundreds of thousands of items and all we need to do is just scroll and select whatever we need. Earlier, one disadvantage of online shopping was the payment mode which allowed payment only through net banking and although these stores assure us of ‘secured transactions’, it is obvious that people would be apprehensive about disclosing their bank account details on the net. But with the introduction of the ‘cash on delivery’ option, even this problem has been attended to and now we have the freedom to make the payment only after our good reaches our home.

Another benefit of making our purchases from these online stores is that we get our stuffs at comparatively lower prices than the retailers thereby allowing us not just to save time but also money. Moreover, it takes not more than a week for our purchase to reach our home and as such the credibility of these stores cannot be questioned. Yet another advantage of these online stores is the obtainability of books which are not easily available in the book stalls, be it Othello, Macbeth or the latest Shiva Trilogy series.

Some people might be skeptical about the quality of the products available in these stores and might be intimidated on the probability of lack of similitude between the products shown on the net and the products which actually reaches their hands. However, these companies have taken care even of that and have given us the facility of returning the product if it does not correspond to the one displayed on their page. The opulence of these online stores depends solely on their quality of service and as such they cannot afford to indulge in any sort of treason in regards to their delivering. Moreover, these stores have linkups with multi-national companies like Wipro, Sony, Lee, Levis, etc. which is an evidence strong enough to substantiate their authenticity and reliability.

The boons of the revolution in information technology are not just limited to buying goods online; it has even greater efficacies. Today, one need not worry about finding customers for selling stuffs which he/she feels are not indispensable to him/her anymore; it is looked after by sites like OLX, Quicker, Jabong, etc. And these are user-friendly sites; one just needs to upload a photo of the good that is to be sold captioned with the tentative selling price and after that, in most cases, it’s just a matter of few days before the item gets vended. And the greatest advantage of selling our goods online is that these e-companies do not charge anything in lieu of carrying out our transactions.

The conveniences of these online stores are undoubtedly galore but concomitantly, one cannot deny the fact that their boom has led to the downfall of many small scale enterprises. Today, people have become so busy in their lives that ‘shopping’ for them has become affixed to their computer screens; they have not the time to go out to the market to buy their stuffs. A few years back, in small cities like Tezpur, the clothes’ shops used to remain ‘houseful’ on the eve of any festival but today, the number of buyers have incredibly come down and there are high chances of it declining further in the years to come. However, in the era of globalization one cannot prevent the flourishing of the IT sector and it is but the truth that online shopping is much more expedient than wasting our time in the overcrowded stores in the market.

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