Every person has a diffrent reasons for buying products online but these are some of the popular ones. The main point I want to get across is that diffrent products, diffrent people and diffrent situations all impact what is important in a specific reatail experiance and it is important to understand what your target audience cares about for each product category or use case.

1. Type of Product
2. Use Case
3. Individual shopper

Price:
Price will always be an important factor when shopping for almost any product or services. It is much easier to discover the store with lowest price when on-line shopping. If you have to physically visit 10 stores in your area you will often forgo this, as it is to time-consuming to do, especially for a low price item. A visit to Google Shopping, Amazon or a quick Bing search can give you dozens or hundreds of stores selling your desired product while you easily sort by price. This also allows you to search and shop stores all over the country or world opening up price options you would not have had even if you did to choose to visit all of the relevant stores in your city.

Selection:
Selection is clearly another top reason people choose to shop on-line. This can have to do with a specific store that has thousands of products or the entire e-commerce ecosystem with 100’s of millions. No one brick and mortar store can have close to the selection of an e-commerce website.

To add an additional SKU to a brick and mortar means a larger store, a more cluttered space or eliminating a current SKU. On a website it is as simple as adding another item.

If you skip the individual store you can start your search on Google and instantly browse the entire web or start on a marketplace such as Amazon or eBay and search many trusted and vetted sellers.

When shopping online you have an ubbundance of SKUs for customers to choose from without the limitations of a traditional brick and mortar shopping experience.

Convince: 
Many people would rather do a few clicks sitting on the coach than drive around town from shop to shop. It is not always more convenient but for some people, some of the time it is convenience that can make the difference. Of course what is convenient depends on the person, the product and the use case. Many e-commerce companies work hard to make the purchasing of products as easy as possible for their target audience.

SIDE NOTE –
Amazon is doing a great job with making it so easy to shop.
1. Scan a barcode and find it on amazon – one click after that.
2. Scan the product (take a picture) and find it on amazon – one click after that.
3. Pysical Dash button – one click.
4. Virtual Dash button – one click
5. Order by voice
6. Amazon Go / no checkout line / no cash
7. Easy to see what you recentely ordered – one click after that.
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other ideas:
1. Text your your order: send me sku 12345, or send me my last order. – a link to the price and a response of YES is all it needs to be sent
2. Text “resend last order” or “send 2 boxes of the same toilet paper from the last order”

Information:
We may be able to get the information we want on-line easier than we can in the store. Again, this depends on the type of product, the use case and the individual shopper. In some cases we can not get all the info on-line.  We need to see or touch the item to know if it is for us. That said, we often can get more info including reviews, spec sheets and videos about the product right from the website or app and be able to make a better product decisions than just going to the store.

online informations it may be hard to get in store:
– Video of the product in use
– Reviews or testimonials
– Specifcation sheet data
– Information about the company