Research Methods Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Research Methods - Essay Example Consumers are having a great experience of being able to shop anywhere, anytime and with any device and this have resulted in retail shop owners to be challenged with respect to their sales and footfall as many are in favour of online shopping. The key question that the research paper is set to answer is how is the increasing amount of online retailers affecting the footfall in retail shops and sales? Research Problem How does online shopping affect retail business?   Hypotheses i. Increased online retailers and shopping has both substitution and complementarity effects on traditional in-store retail shops. ii. Increased online shopping reduces footfall in retail shops and sales. Online retailers have the capability to replace traditional retail stores/shops. Today, technological advancements have resulted in changes in the way operations are carried out in the business world, how and where people work, shop as well as the lifestyles of different people across the globe. Various su ccessful research attempts have been made to explain the impacts of technology on how and where people work and how this affects their travel trends. Most recent developments have focused on e-shopping/online shopping/online retailers due to its unparalleled proliferation. A 2007 US research by InternetRetailer.com (2008) revealed that the number of online shoppers in the country had increased with their estimated spending rising by a 19 percent margin as well, recording a figure in the regions of 136 billion US dollars in 2007. Despite this increment, online shopping accounted for only 4 percent of the country’s total retail sales. Another Netherlands research showed similar trends with respect to online sales; increasing from just below 200 million Euros in 1999 to just above 1.5 billion Euros in 2004 (Farag, 2006). Online buying could be dominant in certain specific future markets like digital assets. In essence, online shopping could be a substitute for traditional shops. For the purposes of this research, the use of the term online shopping refers to online retailers as well as online searching or rather product information search, unless stated otherwise. Literature Review Many studies have been conducted in the technology field with respect to e-shopping yet little empirical studies exist that relate to e-shopping and the number of shoppers entering traditional shops on a given business day and or the sales made by traditional retail shops. In the context of e-shopping, Mokhtarian (2004) reveals that substitution refers to the replacement of the physical trip to traditional shopping stores with online transactions. Furthermore, the concept of complementarity emerges with respect to information search where e-shopping results in the emergence of new demands for trips to traditional stores. Another research conducted by Anderson, Chatterjee and Lakshmanan (2003) revealed that online shopping does not change the number of people visiting a store, in stead it alters the trips’ characteristics, for instance chaining and timing. According to a study by Sim and Koi (2002) involving a sample of 175 online shoppers from Singapore, 12 percent reduced their trips to traditional stores. Another duo of researchers found that some users of the internet in the Knoxville metropolitan region of the United States had reduced their travel trips to traditional stores. A study by Weltevreden and Van Rietbergen (2007) in the