Shopping frenzies are periods of time where a burst of spending occurs, typically near holidays in the United States, with Christmas shopping being the biggest shopping spending season, starting as early as October and continuing until after Christmas. Some religions regard such spending seasons as being against their faith and dismiss the practice. Many contest the over-commercialization and the response by stores that downplay the shopping season often cited in the War on Christmas. The National Retail Federation also highlights the importance of back-to-school shopping for retailers which comes second behind holiday shopping, when buyers often buy clothing and school supplies for their children.
A retailer or a shop is a business that presents a selection of goods and offers to trade or sell them to customers for money or other goods. Shopping is an activity in which a customer browses the available goods or services presented by one or more retailers with the intent to purchase a suitable selection of them. In some contexts it may be considered a leisure activity as well as an economic one. In modern days customer focus is more transferred towards on-line shopping, worldwide people order products from different regions and on-line retailers deliver their products to their homes, offices or wherever they want.
The B2C business to consumer process has made it easy for consumers to select any product on-line from a retailer’s website and have it delivered to the consumer within no time. The consumer does not need to consume his energy by going out to the stores and saves his time and cost of travelling. A woman shopping at a shopping mall in the United States in December 2005, The shopping experience can range from delightful to terrible, based on a variety of factors including how the customer is treated, convenience, the type of goods being purchased, and mood.
The shopping experience can also be influenced by other shoppers. For example, research from a field experiment found that male and female shoppers who were accidentally touched from behind by other shoppers left a store earlier than people who had not been touched and evaluated brands more negatively, resulting in the Accidental Interpersonal Touch effect. According to a 2000 report, in the U.S. state of New York, women purchase 80% of all consumer goods and influence 80% of health-care decisions.
Seasonal shopping consists of buying the appropriate clothing for the particular season. In winter people bundle up in warm layers and coats to keep warm, while in summer people wear less clothing to stay cooler in the heat. Seasonal shopping now revolves a lot around holiday sales and buying more for less.
Stores need to get rid of all of their previous seasonal clothing to make room for the new trends of the upcoming season. The end-of-season sales usually last a few weeks with prices lowering further towards the closing of the sale. During sales items can be discounted from 10% up to as much as 50%, with the biggest reduction sales occurring at the end of the season. Holiday shopping periods are extending their sales further and further with holidays such as Black Friday becoming a month-long event stretching promotions across November.
These days shopping doesn’t stop once the mall closes, as people have more access to stores and their sales than ever before with the help of the Internet and apps. Today many people research their purchases on-line to find the cheapest and best deal with one third of all shopping searches on Google happen between 10:00 pm and 4:00 am. Shoppers are now spending more time consulting different sources before making a final purchasing decision.
Shoppers once used an average of five sources for information before making a purchase, but numbers have risen to as high as 12 sources in 2014. The pricing technique used by most retailers is cost-plus pricing. This involves adding a mark-up amount or percentage to the retailers’ cost. Another common technique is manufacturers suggested list pricing. This simply involves charging the amount suggested by the manufacturer and usually printed on the product by the manufacturer.
A shopping hub or centre, is a collection of retail, entertainment and service stores designed to serve products and services to the surrounding region. Traditionally, shopping hubs were called bazaars or marketplaces which were generally an assortment of stalls lining streets selling a large variety of goods.
The modern shopping centre is now different from its antecedents, the stores are commonly in individual buildings or compressed into one large structure Mall. The smaller malls are often called open-air strip centres or mini-marts and are typically attached to a grocery store or supermarket. The smaller malls are less likely to include the same features of a large mall such as an indoor concourse, but are beginning to evolve to become enclosed to comply with all weather and customer preferences.
The modern phenomenon of shopping is closely linked to the emergence of the consumer society. Most of the time was devoted to justifying conspicuous consumption and private vice for luxury goods for the greater public good. Often, prices are fixed and price discrimination can lead to a bargaining situation often called haggling, a negotiation about the price.
Economists see this as determining how the transaction’s total economic surplus will be divided between consumers and producers. Neither party has a clear advantage because the threat of no sale exists, in which case the surplus would vanish for both. Window shopping” is a term referring to the browsing of goods by a consumer with no intent to purchase, either as a recreational activity or to plan a later purchase.
Practice of examining merchandise in a traditional brick and mortar retail store without purchasing it, but then shopping on-line to find a lower price for the same item, has become an increasingly prevalent problem for traditional retailers as a result of on-line competitors, so much so that some have begun to take measures to combat it. When shopping on-line, it can be more difficult to negotiate price given that you are not directly interacting with a sales person. Some consumers use price comparison websites to find the best price and/or to make a decision about who or where to buy from to save money.