Billions of people love to shop online - and why not? It's convenient, safe and usually cheaper.

1. It Saves Money: One can easily save up to 50% of money by shopping at online websites as they sell items at a discounted price compared to physical stores. Further, there are too many online websites offering same range of products and the competition amongst them usually benefits customer.

2. It Saves Your Time. If you are a busy person and have little time for shopping, then online shopping is the best for you. Also, with online price comparison websites like Google product search (Froogle), Abebooks, E-bay et cetera, it has become very easy to compare prices offered by different shops.

3. It Saves Cost of Gas: Online shopping also saves the sky rocketing cost of Gas. The cost in gas alone would cover most shipping costs.

4. Your Money is Safe: Most of the online e commerce websites offer Google Checkout and Paypal as payment method. These are the most secure payment methods and it guarantees that your money is safe and that you will get the item you purchase. So, you can purchase items from less established e-commerce websites without any fear.

5. Ideal for Sending Gifts: Online webstores do ship orders directly to the recipient of a gift and hence saving your time, postage and gas cost. Some websites also offer the service to send anonymous gifts so that the recipient just keeps guessing about the sender of gift! Some websites also offer the option of getting items gift wrapped for small amount of extra money.

6. You can Pre-order Items: Items with high demand like Harry Potter series, go out of stock very quickly after they are released. Pre-ordering such items is another feature that most of the online stores offer. This way you can reserve a copy for yourself without being worried about the release date.

7. Items can be Returned Mostly, all e-commerce websites offer the facility of returning items if found to be defective or in-compatible. However, these websites usually put a time limit by which items must be returned in order to get full refund. Hence it is advised that you read the returns policy of a website before purchasing the item and if the item received is defective, the matter should be brought to the notice of seller website immediately.