Buying online is becoming increasingly popular recently. Although it has a lot of benefits regarding environmental aspect and the careers needed, it has some considerable drawbacks in these fields.
To begin with, the impact of shifting toward cyber shopping on ecosystem cuts both ways. The carbon footprint is decreased as people reduce their car transportation to reach the stores, this results in less emission and pollution. Moreover, most of online companies deliver their goods to many costumers on a single rout and others use electric delivery vehicles, thus these actions lower the carbon footprint. On the other side, environment is badly affected when the buyers choose the speedy delivery or purchase items from different places, this can contribute to rising in carbon footprint. Also, pollution that caused by wastes from returned items mostly are ended up in landfills, since some online retailers offer free return when they send the same item with different sizes to the costumers to pick what suit them and other items are returned back, some retailers suggest it is cheaper to throw away the returned items instead of paying to separate the damaged goods from the unwanted ones ending up in landfills where releasing carbon levels are high.
Another point to consider is how jobs type is affected by virtual shopping in terms of both merits and demerits. One advantage is that new opportunities have been come to existence like digital marketing, web development and customer online support, these new kinds of jobs usually offer higher salaries for the employee for example, people who work in digital marketing through social media platforms get their salary with hard currency, consequently this enhances their quality of life. In contrast, online purchasing overtakes the physical stores forcing the owners of these places to downsize. This can contribute to an increase in unemployment rate, unless investments are made to improve E-commerce skills of the staff and to cope with the recent online business competition.
In conclusion, Online retailing is growing markedly which might have advantages for the environment and kinds of occupation; however, it has some disadvantages to be considered.