سؤال قراءة ستيب محلول — فهم التفاصيل (تدريب 6874)

(1) Most of us still make most of our purchases the old- fashioned way. We go to the store, find what we want, wait patiently in line to plunk down our cash or credit card, and bring home the goods. However, consumers now have a broad array of alternatives, including mail order, television, phone and online shopping. Americans are increasingly avoiding the hassle and crowds at malls by doing more of their shopping by computer. (2) Early on, prospects for online retailing soared. As more and more consumers flocked to the Web, some experts even saw a day when consumers would bypass stodgy “old economy” store retailers and do almost all of their shopping via the internet. However, the dot-com meltdown of 2000 dashed these overblown expectations. Many once-brash Web sellers crashed and burned and expectations reversed almost overnight. The experts began to predict that online retailing was destined to be little more than a tag-on to in-store retailing. (3) However, today’s online retailing is alive and thriving. With easier-to-use and more- enticing Web sites,improved online service and the increasing sophistication of search technologies, online business is booming In fact, even though it currently accounts for only 7 percent of total US retail sales, online buying is growing at a much brisker pace than retail buying as a whole. Despite a flagging economy, or perhaps because of it, this year’s online retail sales will reach an estimated $156 billion, an 11 percent leap over the last year’s. (4) Retailer online sites also influence a large amount of in- store buying. Here are some surprising statistics: 80 percent of shoppers research products online before going to a store to make a purchase; 62 percent say that they spend at least 30 minutes online every week to help decide whether and what to buy. So it’s no longer a matter of customers deciding to shop in a store or to shop online. Increasingly, customers are merging store and online outlets into a single shopping process. In fact, the Internet has spawned a whole new breed of shopper and way of shopping. (5) All types of retailers now employ direct and online channels. The online sales of large brick-and-mortar retailers, such as Sears, Staples, Wal-Mart, and Best Buy, are increasing rapidly. Several large online-only retailers—Amazon.com, online auction site eBay, online travel companies such as Travelocity.com and Expedia.com, and others—are now making it big on the Web. At the other extreme, hordes of niche marketers are using the Web to reach new markets and expand their sales. Today’s more-sophisticated search engines (Google, Baidu) and comparison-shopping sites (Shopping.com, Buy.com, Shopzilla.com,and others) put almost any online retailer within a mouse click or two’s reach of millions of customers. (6) Still, much of the anticipated growth in online sales will go to multichannel retailers— the click-and-brick marketers who can successfully merge the virtual and physical worlds. In a recent ranking of the top 500 online retail sites, 59 percent were multichannel retailers. For example, consider Macy’s, the largest department store chain in the United States. While many Macy’s customers make purchases online, the site offers a range of features designed to build loyalty to Macy’s and to pull customers into stores, Lake many retailers, Macy’s has discovered that its best customers shop both online and offline. What reversed expectation about online retail almost overnight?