E-commerce or online business has revolutionized the way business is transacted. Whether an entrepreneur or customer, there are benefits to be had, whichever side of the fence you might be on. For those with entrepreneurial spirit and stuck in the rut of a job, even pulling your weight doesn’t earn you rewards that are really meaningful. Meaningful rewards are not all about the extra money, and often times the money is nowhere near the magnitude of accomplishment. What really matters is feeling a sense of accomplishment for a job executed flawlessly, a feeling of being valued. In a regular job you’d be lucky if you got a pat on your back for a ‘job well done’. Though conventional forms of business are trying to create rewards with a greater sense of purpose, there is a lot more that needs to be done. Very often, someone pursuing an online business on the side turns to it full time.

As a customer, online shopping doesn’t require you to drive downtown and go from one store to the next on foot, push your shopping cart laden with purchases, wait in long lines at the cash register for your turn. Whether its computers, health & beauty products, clothing, etc., all of this and more can be bought from the comfort of your bedroom or living room at a click of your mouse. Do all the window shopping you want without having to exert a muscle unnecessarily. Yes, the one respect in which online shopping is wanting, is that you can’t touch or feel what you’re buying. But that’s a small price to pay if you weigh the facts. There are some concerns that have to do with the safety of online transactions, like parting with your confidential credit card information online. But the probability of a dishonest cashier at a brick and mortar store duplicating your credit card number for fraudulent use is higher than the possibility of your credit card number being compromised during online transactions. All online stores employ safeguards to frustrate attempts of fraud by hackers. There are options customers can use to pay their online shopping bills when checking out. Options other than credit cards include Pay Pal, Google Checkout, Cash on delivery (though the number of online stores offering this are few and far between), wire transfer, postal money order, etc.

The online or web shopping cart is probably the best thing to have happened to shopping on the net. Online web cart software has evolved to give online
shoppers greater security and confidentiality with a view to minimizing the possibility of identity theft. Just as you wheel your shopping cart around the
store till you’ve bought all you need, when shopping at an e-store or e-shop, you can check for the description of an item and its cost before you decide to
add it to your shopping cart. A change of heart allows you to remove items you don’t need, from your shopping cart, and once you’ve done shopping, make the payment securely online.

Small business concerns too like the heavyweights want to offer customers flexibility of payment, but have their own misgivings. As misplaced as these fears might be, they persist; some of these being the cost of implementing online payment collection systems. The truth is email invoicing and recurring billing actually serve to improve the collection process. Another misplaced fear is whether customers will use this medium of payment enough for small businesses to be able to maintain it. Statistics reveal that number of households paying at least one bill a month online have increased significantly. And then there’s
the overriding concern of security of online transactions that have always made people hesitate at the time of entering their credit card number to make an online payment. Studies reveal offline transactions expose the customer to a greater chance a of identity theft unlike online payments where the likelihood of confidential information falling into wrong hands is far less. There are measures you can employ to maximize the safety of all your online transactions like getting your bank to protect your credit card, using safe options like PayPal or Google Checkout for your online transactions and monitoring your bank account closely.