Question

What are the disadvantages of E-Commerce to a consumer?

Answer 1

The pros and cons of E-Commerce affect three major stakeholders: consumers business organisations, and society.

The following are the disadvantages of E-Commerce for a consumer.

• Disadvantages:

1. E-Commerce is often used to buy goods that are not available locally but from businesses all over the world. Physical goods need to be transported, which takes time and costs money. In traditional commerce, when we walk out of a shop with an item, it’s ours; we have it; we know what it is, where it is, and how it looks. But in E-Commerce, we should wait between placing the order and having the product in hand. Some E-Commerce companies handle this by engaging their customers in updating the status of their shipments.
2. Unlike returning goods to a traditional shop returning goods online is believed to be an area of difficulty. The doubts about the period of returning, will the returned goods reach the source in time, refunds, exchange, and postage make one tiresome.
3. Privacy issues are serious in E-Commerce. In E-Commerce generating consumer information is inevitable. Not all companies use the personal information they obtained to improve services to consumers. Many companies misuse the information and make money out of it. It is true that privacy concerns are a critical reason why people get cold feet about online shopping.
4. Physical product disputes are a major disadvantage in E-Commerce. E-Commerce purchases are often made on trust. This is because we do not have physical access to the product. Though the Internet is an effective channel for visual and auditory information it does not allow full scope for our senses. We can see pictures of the perfumes, but could not smell their fragrance; we can see pictures of a cloth, but not it’s quality.
   If we want to inspect something, we choose what we look at and how we look at it. But in online shopping, we would see only the pictures the seller had chosen for us. People are often much more comfortable in buying generic goods (that they have seen or experienced before and in which there is little ambiguity) rather than unique or complex things via the Internet.
5. We couldn’t think of ordering single ice cream or a coffee from a shop in Paris. Though specialized and refrigerated transport can be used, goods bought and sold via the Internet need to survive the trip from the supplier to the consumer. This makes the customers turn back towards traditional supply chain arrangements for perishable and non-durable goods.
6. Delivery ambiguity. Since supplying businesses can be conducted across the world, it can be uncertain whether they are indeed genuine businesses or just going to take our money. It is pretty hard to knock on their door to complain or seek legal recourse. Further, even if the item is sent, it is easy to start bothering whether or not it will ever arrive on time.