Online Shopping – Just (don't) add to cart!

In this day and age, the average person works one or two jobs, five or six days per week. Many families find it difficult surviving on a single income and even when combining incomes, there just never seems to be enough money to get from one payday to the next.

Survival is a basic instinct and in order to ensure one has access to the basics required for survival (water, food, shelter and warmth) you need money.

Once survival is achieved, we seek comfort and convenience. The technological age has brought both of those aspects to us in leaps and bounds. The technological age, the digital age and the information age are all geared to help us find both comfort and convenience.

Online shopping started in 1979, but only became popular with the launch of e-commerce sites like Amazon.com and eBay. Now, more than three decades later, e-commerce makes up 20% of all retail sales. Of these e-commerce sales, approximately 50% of them are done via mobile phones. According to eMarketer.com: “Worldwide Retail Ecommerce Sales will reach $4 trillion this year.”

With the surge of online shopping one needs only click a few buttons and the transaction is complete. There is no need to wait for the weekend to wander through shopping malls or search for that perfect parking space. Online shopping has offered increased shopping opportunities literally at your fingertips.

Have you ever noticed that whenever you are online, no matter which website you open up, you find yourself bombarded with adverts for something that you recently researched, or a product or service that may have come up in the course of your research? This is all part of e-commerce and bringing in the customers.

Whilst online shopping may present mounds of opportunities to find the latest and greatest products from around the world, it may be best to steer clear from online shopping for a while if you have debt to repay .

The ease and convenience of online shopping an also very easily become an addiction. Make sure that the purchase is part of your budget and a necessity, otherwise let it go.