Shopping Online----Culture

Online shopping Welcome to Culture Bridge! Free talk: I’d like to ask you guys a question. Which way do you prefer, shopping in a physical store or shopping online? And your reasons. Online shopping is a form of electronic commerce which allows consumers to directly buy goods or services from a seller over the Internet using a web browser. Consumers find a product of interest by visiting the website of the retailer directly or by searching among alternative vendors using a shopping search engine, which displays the same product's availability and pricing at different e-retailers. As of 2016, customers can shop online using a range of different computers and devices, including desktop computers, laptops, tablet computers and smartphones. Free talk: Which online store is your favourite? And what products do you usually buy online? We are not alone. Statistics show that in 2012, Asia-Pacific increased their international sales over 30% giving them over $433 billion in revenue. In a December 2011 study, Equation Research surveyed 1,500 online shoppers and found that 87% of tablet owners made online transactions with their tablet devices during the early Christmas shopping season. So, today we will recommand some practical online shopping store to you. Amazon: Amazon is an American electronic commerce and cloud computing company that was founded on July 5, 1994, by Jeff Bezos and is based in Seattle, Washington. It is the largest Internet-based retailer in the world by total sales and market capitalization. Amazon.com started as an online bookstore, later diversifying to sell DVDs, Blu-rays, CDs, video downloads/streaming, MP3 downloads/streaming, audiobook downloads/streaming, software, video games, electronics, apparel, furniture, food, toys, and jewelry. The company also produces consumer electronics—notably, Kindle e-readers, Fire tablets, Fire TV, and Echo—and is the world's largest provider of cloud infrastructure services (IaaS and PaaS). Amazon also sells certain low-end products like USB cables under its in-house brand AmazonBasics.（敏敏） eBay: eBay is a multinational e-commerce corporation, facilitating online consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales. It is headquartered in San Jose, California. eBay was founded in 1995, and became a notable success story of the dot-com bubble. Today it is a multibillion-dollar business with operations in about 30 countries. The company manages eBay.com, an online auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy and sell a broad variety of goods and services worldwide. It previously offered online money transfers , which was a wholly owned subsidiary of eBay from 2002 until 2015. The website is free to use for buyers, but sellers are charged fees for listing items and again when those items are sold. （馨媛） Dangdang: Dangdang is a Chinese electronic commerce company, founded by Peggy Yu and Li Guoqing in 1999. It is headquartered in Beijing and its main competitors are Amazon.cn and JD.com. The competition escalated into a price war in December 2010, with each retailer marking down a wide range of items, especially books. Dangdang's main product categories include household merchandise, cosmetics, digital, home appliances, books, audio, and dozens of clothing and maternal and child categories. There are over 10 million new registered customers per year in Dangdang .More than 100 thousand people buy things from Dangdang each day. There are about 30 million people a month browse different kinds of products each month. The monthly sale of goods in Dangdang is over 20 million. Dangdang sells over 200,000 kinds of books and 10,000 kinds of software and audio products, which make up 90% of the category in China mainland. There are about 3,000 employees in Dangdang, and its customers are among 50 countries, and over 40% B2C customers in China have shopping experiences with Dangdang. （蓝蓝姐） Tmall: Tmall is a Chinese-language website for business-to-consumer online retail, spun off from Taobao, operated in China by Alibaba Group. It is a platform for local Chinese and international businesses to sell brand name goods to consumers in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan.（敏敏） Taobao Marketplace had more than 5 million registered users as of June 2013 and hosted more than 80 million product listings. It facilitated approximately RMB 200 billion in gross merchandise volume in 2009. In September 2013, Taobao ranked 12th overall in Alexa's internet rankings. For the year ending March 31, 2013, the combined gross merchandise volume of Taobao and Tmall.com combined exceeded RMB 1 trillion.（馨媛） After today’s recommandation, you may be more familiar with these online shopping mall. We hope that you can get some useful information from it. This is the end of today’s programme.