Awareness & perception of online shopping: A study of the residents of Ludhiana (Punjab)

Online shopping is buying of products or services over the Internet. When it applies to the subset of website based ad placements it is commonly referred to as Web advertising and/or Web Marketing. The Internet has brought many unique benefits to marketing including low costs in distributing information and media to a global audience. The interactive nature of Internet marketing, both in terms of instant response and in eliciting response, are unique qualities of the medium. Perception is a process by which individuals organize and interpret their sensory impressions in order to give meaning to their environment. A motivated person is ready to act. How the motivated person actually acts is influenced by his or her perception of the situation. Perception depends not only upon the physical stimuli, but also on the stimuli's relation to the surroundings field and on the condition within the individual. People's behavior is based on their perception of what reality is, not on reality itself. Perception is understood as the act of seeing what is there to be seen which is influenced by the individual, the object and the situation. Perception is the process by which an individual selects, organizes, and interprets the information inputs to create a meaningful picture of the world. In simple terms, perception is why the same universe is viewed differently by different people. The present study was undertaken with an aim of understanding the awareness and comparing the perception towards online shopping for 100 residents of Ludhiana (Punjab, India) and the customers were selected through quota sampling. The outcome of this process is discussed in this paper.