Ecommerce and Online Shopping – Transforming the Future in Shopping

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I think we all can agree that technology has changed our lives in so many ways. Indeed, over the past two decades, technology has advanced at such rapid rate most individuals have a hard time keeping up with the latest trends and gadgets. It should come as no surprise then, with each technology break through, our lives are quickly transformed into new ways of doing things.

Greatly affected by technology is how we, as consumers, shop for products and services. Years ago, purchasing items in a store was the only means to obtain things wanted or needed. That is certainly not the case today! Since the advancement of technology, consumers have a whole new way to shop; online shopping. For the last 5 to 10 years, we have seen consumer behavior change from shopping in a store to shopping online.

In fact, the projected sales from online shopping are to go from $204 Billion dollars in 2008 to an expected $334 billion dollars in 2012! (Source: Forrester Research, Inc., Cambridge, MA, US eCommerce Forecast: 2008 To 2012) This expected growth shows that the trend towards online shopping is only increasing and get stronger. For most, shopping online has made consumers move from the “brick-and-mortar” model of shopping to a virtual shopping environment. Wikipedia defines online shopping as the process whereby consumers directly buy goods or services from a seller in real-time, without an intermediary service, over the Internet.

Advantages:

There are so many advantages to e-commerce or shopping online. Typically, online stores are available 24 hours a day, and with many consumers having Internet access both at work and at home, most can shop when it is convenient for them. As such, shopping online can be faster than browsing the aisles of a physical store and/or alleviate the wasted time jumping around from store to store looking for a product or service.

Shopping online also has the advantage of quick comparison shopping between products and prices. Individuals now have the ability to become savvy, informed shoppers by utilizing local search engines to quickly seek out deals for items or services with many different vendors. Search engines, online price comparison services and discovery shopping engines can be used to look up sellers of a particular product or service and provide easy access to them.

Lastly, another advantage to online shopping is the freedom a customer has to purchasing items they may, or may not feel embarrassed about in purchasing in a store. This might include some over the counter medications, personal items, mens underwear, and intimate apparel for men or women, etc. By shopping online, customers can have the privacy of product selection without feeling embarrassment of going to a register with an item they would rather keep private.

Disadvantages:

For those of us who require immediate gratification, the disadvantage to online shopping is that merchandise must be shipped to the consumer, introducing a significant delay and potentially uncertainty about whether or not the item will actually arrive before the item is needed. Moreover, in the event there is a problem with the item when it is delivered, most customers do not feel it an advantageous process to return items through the mail.

Additionally, without the ability to personally inspect merchandise before purchase, consumers are at higher risk of fraud than they would have in a physical store. So too, merchants also run the risk of fraudulent purchases by customers using stolen credit cards or fraudulent disclaiming of online purchases.

Although the benefits of online shopping are considerable, the disadvantages to shopping online can be remedied through retailer policies and procedures. It is very important for online stores to post these policies and procedures, include the returning instructions, outline the shipping details and other specific information in put the customer’s fears at ease. Customers also must make sure they take the time to read through these details thoroughly and become informed shoppers so as not to have any surprises upon delivery of their merchandise.

Some additional helpful hints for consumers to consider before shopping on the Internet include:

  • Ensuring the site is secure with provisions to protect customer information
  • Ensure online stores are not keeping or sharing billing information.
  • Ensure the stores policies on sharing personal information on your purchase.
  • Look for store reviews through customer posting on the site or elsewhere.
  • Rely on customer testimonials or referrals though friends and family.

Making the Transition to Working From Home

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As the economy and job market fluctuates more and more people are looking at trying to find opportunities where they can work from home instead of working for a traditional employer.Working from home gives you a host of benefits including paying less for gas, being your own boss, being able to spend more time with your family, and being able to make your own schedule. With all of these benefits you can see why so many people would want to move from the traditional workplace environment to a work online business opportunity.One of the most popular home business opportunities is writing articles. Since the introduction of sites like Helium and Associated Content, it has never been more accessible to the general public to be able to sell their writing online. You can choose either to write your own topics or depending on the site you may be able to build up your own list of clients to write for in a matter of a few short months.Surveys are another popular option for making extra money from home. Survey sites allow you to register and take surveys about different products and services in exchange for either points, drawing entries, or straight up cash.If you are a fast typist you may want to look at some online opportunities such as a data entry professional or transcription. Data entry professionals take client information and type it into forms or excel documents while transcription professionals listen to audio files and type what the audio said word for word into documents and submit them back to the client.Another popular work at home opportunity is reading emails. It may sound unbelievable but there are companies out there who will pay you just to read an advertisement email about a specific service that a company offers. You will usually be paid a small amount of money per email but the money does add up quickly if you keep at it.Turking is a newer opportunity provided by Amazon.com. What a turker does is verify information that a computer program or software cannot on its own. This could be doing anything from logging onto a website and seeing what pictures or headlines are where or just looking up a specific zip code. Each task has a cash value assigned to it which will be added to your account once your work has been verified.It is important to remember that in most working from home opportunities you will be a self employed contracted employee. What this means is that you will be completely responsible for things like state and federal taxes. If you make over a specific amount of money per month you will also be required to pay a 15% self employment tax. It is usually an intelligent idea to open a savings account and put away a specified percentage of your income for tax purposes for each payment you get.Whatever you choose to do, making the switch from working away from home to working from home may just be the first step towards gaining and additional income as well as having the freedom you desire, all at your own pace and on your own schedule.

Health and Fitness Software, What Should Be in It? Part 1

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Let’s keep the answer simple; everything that is related to your health and you can record it in a database.The most important indicators for your state of health can be measured though your vital signs, like blood pressure, cholesterol level, heart beat, body mass index etcetera. The major input that influence these health indicators are what and how much you eat and drink, smoke, medication use, life style, daily activity and air quality.Beside our genetic disposition, we are what we eat, drink and breathe.A good health and fitness software program should be able to capture the above mentioned input and correlate the results with the output, or health indicators. This way you create a cause and effect system that the user can analyze and consequently take corrective measures and improve his or her overall health.The bigger picture teaches us that an effective health and fitness software program contains modules that can monitor our food intake, record our body measurements and vital signs. Furthermore it should track our daily activities and convert them into calories burned. Also it should keep track of our medicine and supplement intake and monitor our overall health level. For the sport and bodybuilders we need additional modules that can keep track of our workout activities, sport results and fitness testsLet’s start with food intake.Most of the time we eat together with our family therefore a health and fitness software program should never be restricted to one user.People tend to repeat the recipes they cook and meals they prepare on a regular interval. For most people this interval is between 20 and 30 days. Furthermore people tend to buy more or less the same ingredients for their meals. For this reason a fitness or diet program boosting databases with thousands of food items will be more of a hindrance than a benefit. The reason that I say this is because it will be very time consuming to pick an ingredient for a recipe or meal plan from a list of thousands of ingredients.Look for a program that has the basic ingredients to build your recipes and allows you to add food items that are specific to your taste.A food’s nutrition facts change depending on how it is conserved, processed or cooked. For example a cup of canned spinach that is cooked will have totally different nutrition facts than a cup of fresh spinach. Look for a program that can make a distinction between these food properties.The cost of buying special diet foods can be a lot more (up to 2.5 times) than what the average American spends on food. It is a plus if a health and fitness software program can keep track of the food cost by recipe, meal and day. It is really a bonus if the program can compare grocery prices between shops and help you budget.A recipe module is imperative to a good health and fitness system. This is the place where you can experiment and adjust your recipes to your diet’s nutritional fact limits. The recipe should calculate its nutritional facts per portion depending on the weight ratio of each ingredient that has been added to the recipe. Naturally you should be able to print the recipe and see the total recipe cost and the cost per portion. Having the ability of adding recipe pictures is a plus.You should also have the ability to create multiple meal plans in the system. Maybe you would like a separate plan for the kids or baby. Or for a partner that has a cholesterol problem, high blood pressure or diabetes. Or you simply want to change diets. These meal plans should repeat over a certain amount of days. The timing of the meals should be more then just breakfast, lunch and dinner. Many diets ask for many small recipe portions during the day. The food items that you select on the meal plan should come from the ingredients as well as from the recipes. For instance you can add a raw apple to your meal plan, which is an ingredient to make an apple sauce recipe. The apple sauce recipe or the raw apple can each be added to the meal planAs you would expect, the software program should be able to calculate the meal plan cost and nutrition facts by day and for the whole meal plan.How are you going to keep track of what you actually ate on a particular day and how do you know how to stick exactly to your plan? You do this by printing a meal plan worksheet for a particular day and you note the actual differences from the plan.We don’t have much time in today’s busy society; therefore you should be able to register the actual daily food consumption in less then 30 seconds. A system that forces you every day for every meal to select your food items from a list of thousands records is not going to make it in 30 seconds. Only select a system that automatically populates your meal plan for that day and you only update the actual differences from the plan.Just adding your daily food intake to a database is not going to benefit you. It will create a “data cemetery”, data that is never examined. The food data needs to be analyzed and correlated to other types of data like your body measurements or calories burned. Click on the calorie analysis hyperlink to view an example. The chart makes it very quickly clear that the calorie intake line is under the calories spent line and consequently you will lose weight.Next article I will talk about activity calorie counting and the factors involved…