For several generations, home shopping from catalogs, and later from television shopping channels, has attracted millions of customers. Today, shopping online offers an alternative to catalog and television shopping. Electronic retailing (e-tailing) is the direct sale of products and services through electronic storefronts or electronic malls, usually designed around an electronic catalog format and/or auctions.

Like any mail-order shopping experience, e-commerce enables you to buy from home and to do so 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Compared to mail order, however, EC offers a wider variety of products and services, including the most unique items, often at lower prices. Furthermore, within seconds, shoppers can access very detailed supplementary product information. In addition, they can easily locate and compare competitors’ products and prices. Finally, buyers can find hundreds of thousands of sellers. Two popular online shopping mechanisms are electronic storefronts and electronic malls.

Electronic Storefronts

An electronic storefront is a Web site that represents a single store. Today, Internet shoppers can access hundreds of thousands of electronic storefronts. Each storefront has a unique uniform resource locator (URL), or Internet address, at which buyers can place orders. Some electronic storefronts are extensions of physical stores such as Hermes, The Sharper Image, and Walmart. Others are new businesses started by entrepreneurs who discovered a niche on the Web. Manufacturers and retailers also use storefronts.

Electronic Malls

Whereas an electronic storefront represents a single store, an electronic mall, also known as a cybermall or an e-mall, is a collection of individual shops grouped under a single Internet address. The basic idea of an electronic mall is the same as that of a regular shopping mall: to provide a one-stop shopping place that offers a wide range of products and services. A cybermall may include thousands of vendors. For example, Microsoft Shopping includes tens of thousands of products from thousands of vendors.

There are two types of cybermalls. In the first type, known as referral malls, you cannot buy anything. Instead, you are transferred from the mall to a participating storefront. In the second type of mall, you can actually make a purchase. At this type of mall, you might shop from several stores, but you make only one purchase transaction at the end. You use an electronic shopping cart to gather items from various vendors and then pay for all of them in a single transaction. The mall organizer, such as Google, takes a commission from the sellers for this service.