The fact of the matter is that if you’re going to Lowe’s for your laminate flooring needs you’re likely going to end up paying more money for a lesser product.  Thanks to lower overheads and more competitive pricing better deals can be found online.  And if you’re thinking about buying any high end flooring products then it’s much more cost effective to purchase them online. In order to back up my claim I searched through Lowe’s website to find a product that was sold at FloorMall.com.

For those of you who don’t know, FloorMall.com is one of the leading online retailers of flooring. For this post I decided to look at the Armstrong Classics Gunstock Laminate Flooring.  Lowe’s has a box of this flooring, 20.58 square feet, going for $71.42.   FloorMall offers the exact amount of the identical product for only $49.80. And I’m confident that further price comparisons would lead to similar results. Lowe’s is a fine store and has been in business in one form or another since 1946. But when it comes to flooring there are just better options out there for internet savvy shoppers.

One third of people that shop online use a search engine to find what they are initially looking for and about one fourth find websites by word of mouth. Word of mouth has become a leading way by which people have most recently been finding shopping websites, which has only increased in usage as additional consumers are engaging in e-commerce. When an online shopper has a good first experience with a certain website, sixty percent of the time they will return to that website to make additional purchases. One reason for the rise in popularity, online floor shopping provides more freedom and control than shopping in a store. From a sociological perspective, online shopping is arguably the most predictable way to shop. One knows exactly what website to go to, how much the product will cost, and how long it will take for the product to reach them. Online shopping has become extremely routine and predictable, which is one of its great appeals to the consumer. So how is the initial sale made? Consumers find a product of interest by visiting the website of the retailer directly, or do a search across many different vendors using a shopping search engine.

Once a particular product has been found on the web site of the seller, most online flooring retailers use shopping cart software to allow the consumer to accumulate multiple items and to adjust quantities, and at times make special changes to the actual product. A “checkout” process follows in which payment and delivery information is collected, if necessary. Some stores allow consumers to sign up for a permanent online account so that some or all of this information only needs to be entered once. The consumer often receives an e-mail confirmation once the transaction is complete. Less sophisticated stores may rely on consumers to phone or e-mail their orders, in which case, credit card numbers are usually not accepted for security reasons.

Online shoppers commonly use credit cards to make payments, however some systems enable users to create accounts and pay by alternative means such as debit card, C.O.D., check, wire transfer, postal money order, PayPal, Google Checkout, reverse SMS billing to mobile phones and gift cards. Some sites will not allow international credit cards and other require that the billing address and the shipping address have to be in the same country in which site does its business. Other sites allow customers from anywhere to send gifts anywhere. The financial part of a transaction might be processed in real time or might be done later as part of the fulfillment process. While credit cards are currently the most popular means of paying for online goods like laminate flooring, alternative online payments will account for 26% of e-commerce volume by 2009 according to a recent study.

While newbie online shoppers tend to cling to the familiar, and they are 81 percent more likely than experienced shoppers to shop only at sites they’ve shopped at in the past, they will in time venture outside of this comfort zone and expand their purchasing to larger items such as home flooring, electronics and valuables. Nevertheless, willingness to shop at new sites increases among users with more experience online. In addition, as experience and comfort grows, spending also increases. The survey data shows that roughly 75 percent of current online shoppers are willing to try a new Internet merchant. Contributing to the ability of consumers to find new online stores is the increased use of search and comparison shopping. This has provided added visibility to unfamiliar flooring manufacturers and their respective sites. Just a few years ago, the search engines were much less technologically advanced and as a result, the search results they displayed were lacking, to say the least. Things in this regard have changed, which has greatly impacted online shopping and the consumer’s ability to find the e-tailer they are seeking. This has also resulted in the following trend - the growth in online spending is fueled by more transactions per user, as opposed to more total users. It comes as no surprise, the experienced buyer will spend more online and they will do so more often.

Plus, at a virtual store you won’t have to put up with what Consumer Reports calls “a prime irritant” of in-store shopping: the pitch to buy extras. Research shows you are three times more likely to buy extras if you shop at a walk-in store. This indicates the level of pressure often used to push these additional products onto the consumer. Even when shopping for flooring online, check around, price match, review return policies, company contact information, warranty specifications and additional fees. And while you are there, take advantage of the sites’ great information such as how-to installation videos and hundreds of educational articles covering everything from upkeep to design. As a last reminder, some sites sell third-party products, so it might be useful to also scope out the manufacturer’s home site.

One of the greatest concerns folks have when considering making an online flooring purchase surrounds the question of privacy and security. The question of privacy simply refers to who on the other end is receiving information such as your name, mailing information and other demographic details. People often have these concerns regardless of if they are sharing any financial information; however, the level of concerns seems to drastically increase when an exchange of funds is to take place.

To define a secure system, it is one that accomplishes its task with no unintended side effects. In the software industry, security has two different perspectives. In the software development community, it describes the security features of a system. Common security features are ensuring passwords that are at least six characters long and encryption of sensitive data and to protect against attacks rather than specific features of the system. The weakest link in the chain determines the security of the system. Security has three main concepts: confidentiality, integrity and availability. Confidentiality allows only authorized parties to read protected information. For example, if the postman reads your mail, this is a breach of your privacy. Integrity ensures data remains as is from the sender to the receiver. If someone added an extra bill to the envelope, which contained your credit card bill, he has violated the integrity of the mail. Availability ensures you have access and are authorized to view such resources. If the post office destroys your mail or the postman takes one year to deliver your mail, he has impacted the availability of your resource.

Obviously, we care about the same concerns as you, check out a recommended hardwood flooring website and review our e-commerce system for yourself!

For anyone living under a stone, e-tailing is the selling of retail goods and more recently of services via the Internet. Short for “electronic retailing,” and used in Internet discussions as early as 1995, the term seems an almost inevitable addition to terms such as e-mail and e-business. E-tailing is synonymous with business-to-consumer (B2C) transactions but also includes some B2B (business-to-business) transactions. This is becoming more and more prevalent as businesses are learning that many of their needs can also be met online. This is a logical transgression, since businesses are run by people, people who have been using the Internet to satisfy their personal needs, and have since figured out that there is no reason they cannot take that same efficiency into the office. E-tailing began to work for some major corporations and smaller entrepreneurs as early as 1997 when Dell Computer reported multimillion dollar orders taken at its web site. While Dell has seen some contraction in its business in the last few years, they will certainly go down in history as pioneering that business model. Now, FloorMall has done this for the laminate flooring industry.

The success of Amazon.com hastened the arrival of Barnes and Noble’s e-tail site. These sites were then followed up by the now enormous and prevalent ebay.com. This was just another step and layer in the process because here was the emergence of sites that allowed individual people to in a sense, e-tail on their own with no company to speak of. This has more or less become a glorified yard sale all from the comfort of your own home without having to invite strangers into your garage and without having to post those silly newspaper ads and neighborhood signs.