Home shopping is the electronic retailing and home

shopping channel Shopping channels (also known in British English as teleshopping) are a type of television program or specialty channel devoted to home shopping. Their formats typically feature live presentations and demonstrations of products, hosted by on-air pr ...

s industry, which includes such billion dollar television-based and e-commerce companies as

Shop LC Shop LC, formerly known as Liquidation Channel and The Jewelry Channel, is an American cable television network based in Austin, Texas, which mainly specializes in selling jewelry. The network is a subsidiary of the Indian-based Vaibhav Global ...

HSN HSN, an initialism of its former name Home Shopping Network, is an American free-to-air television network owned by the Qurate Retail Group, which also owns catalog company Cornerstone Brands. Based in the Gateway area of St. Petersburg, Flo ...

Gemporia Gemporia is a British television and online jewellery retailer. The main television channel operated by the business is Gems TV, a reverse auction jewellery shopping channel, the first dedicated reverse auction channel in the UK. The channel is ava ...

, TJC,

QVC QVC (short for "Quality Value Convenience") is an American free-to-air television network, and flagship shopping channel specializing in televised home shopping, owned by Qurate Retail Group. Founded in 1986 by Joseph Segel in West Chester, Pen ...

eBay eBay Inc. ( ) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995 and became ...

ShopHQ ShopHQ (formerly ValueVision, ShopNBC, Evine Live, and Evine) is an American cable, satellite and broadcast home shopping television network and multi-channel video retailer owned by iMedia Brands Inc., in which Comcast holds a 12.5% stake in th ...

Buy.com Rakuten.com/shop was an e-commerce marketplace based in San Mateo, California. Previously known as Buy.com, it was founded in 1997 by Scott Blum. In 2010, it was purchased by Japanese company Rakuten, and rebranded as Rakuten.com.Claire Cain M ...

and

Amazon.com Amazon.com, Inc. ( ) is an American multinational technology company focusing on e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It has been referred to as "one of the most influential econo ...

, as well as traditional

mail order Mail order is the buying of goods or services by mail delivery. The buyer places an order for the desired products with the merchant through some remote methods such as: * Sending an order form in the mail * Placing a telephone call * Placing ...

and

brick and mortar Brick and mortar (also bricks and mortar or B&M) refers to a physical presence of an organization or business in a building or other structure. The term ''brick-and-mortar business'' is often used to refer to a company that possesses or leases r ...

retailers as

Hammacher Schlemmer Hammacher Schlemmer is an American retailer and catalog company based in Niles, Illinois. History Hammacher Schlemmer began as a hardware store specializing in hard-to-find tools in the Bowery district of New York City in 1848. Owned by pro ...

and

Sears, Roebuck and Co. Sears, Roebuck and Co. ( ), commonly known as Sears, is an American chain of department stores founded in 1892 by Richard Warren Sears and Alvah Curtis Roebuck and reincorporated in 1906 by Richard Sears and Julius Rosenwald, with what began as ...

Home shopping allows

consumer A consumer is a person or a group who intends to order, or uses purchased goods, products, or services primarily for personal, social, family, household and similar needs, who is not directly related to entrepreneurial or business activities. ...

s to shop for goods from the privacy of their own home, as opposed to traditional shopping, which requires one to visit brick and mortar stores and

shopping malls A shopping mall (or simply mall) is a North American term for a large indoor shopping center, usually anchored by department stores. The term "mall" originally meant a pedestrian promenade with shops along it (that is, the term was used to refe ...

. There are three main types of home shopping: mail or telephone ordering from catalogs; telephone ordering in response to advertisements in print and electronic media (such as

periodical A periodical literature (also called a periodical publication or simply a periodical) is a published work that appears in a new edition on a regular schedule. The most familiar example is a newspaper, but a magazine or a journal are also example ...

s, TV and radio); and

online shopping Online shopping is a form of electronic commerce which allows consumers to directly buy goods or services from a seller over the Internet using a web browser or a mobile app. Consumers find a product of interest by visiting the website of the ...

. The study shows that home shopping are continuously preferred by the customers especially for those teleworkers and busy working class.

History

The possibility for merchants to show their goods through the world was the first usage of the "electroscope" (some kind of television apparatus) imagined by the author of the hoax published in the ''

New York Sun ''The New York Sun'' is an American online newspaper published in Manhattan; from 2002 to 2008 it was a daily newspaper distributed in New York City. It debuted on April 16, 2002, adopting the name, motto, and masthead of the earlier New York ...

'', 30 March 1877. The first such attempt at broadcasting shopping news occurred on February 1, 1927 with the establishment of WASN radio in

Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...

; owned by John Shepard III, WASN boasted reports from fifteen different department stores in

Greater Boston Greater Boston is the metropolitan region of New England encompassing the municipality of Boston (the capital of the U.S. state of Massachusetts and the most populous city in New England) and its surrounding areas. The region forms the northern a ...

every two hours, mixed with pre-recorded and live orchestra music. Due to technical issues, the format was dropped after five months, and the station eventually merged operations into co-owned WNAC, today known as

WBIX WBIX (1260 AM) – branded Nossa Rádio USA – is a commercial Brazilian Portuguese radio station licensed to Boston, Massachusetts, serving Greater Boston. Owned by the International Church of the Grace of God, the WBIX studios are ...

. The first experiments at broadcasting home shopping on television occurred in the UK as early as 1934. The home shopping/electronic retailing industry was created in 1977, when

small market In the terminology of professional sports in North America, teams are often said to be based not in a city but in a media market. The size of the media market is usually a good indication of the potential viability of a major league team. A smal ...

talk radio show Talk radio is a radio format containing discussion about topical issues and consisting entirely or almost entirely of original spoken word content rather than outside music. Most shows are regularly hosted by a single individual, and often featur ...

host

Bob Circosta Bob Circosta is an American businessman and television host. He is television's first ever home shopping host and has achieved over one billion dollars in personal product sales on live television. His offices are in Clearwater, Florida, just a f ...

was asked to sell

avocado The avocado (''Persea americana'') is a medium-sized, evergreen tree in the laurel family ( Lauraceae). It is native to the Americas and was first domesticated by Mesoamerican tribes more than 5,000 years ago. Then as now it was prized for ...

green Green is the color between cyan and yellow on the visible spectrum. It is evoked by light which has a dominant wavelength of roughly 495570 nm. In subtractive color systems, used in painting and color printing, it is created by a combi ...

-colored

can opener A can opener (in North American English and Australian English) or tin opener (used in British English) is a mechanical device used to open tin cans (metal cans). Although preservation of food using tin cans had been practiced since at leas ...

s live on the air by station owner

Bud Paxson Lowell White "Bud" Paxson (April 17, 1935 – January 9, 2015) was an American media executive. In 1982, Paxson and his business partner, Roy Speer, co-founded the Home Shopping Club (now called the Home Shopping Network). He later established Pax T ...

, when an

advertiser Advertising is the practice and techniques employed to bring attention to a product or service. Advertising aims to put a product or service in the spotlight in hopes of drawing it attention from consumers. It is typically used to promote a ...

traded 112 units of product instead of paying his advertising bill. Hesitant at first, Circosta reluctantly obliged – and to both men's great surprise, all 112 can openers sold out within the hour. Paxson sensed the vast sales potential of home-based commerce, and founded the world's first

cable television Cable television is a system of delivering television programming to consumers via radio frequency (RF) signals transmitted through coaxial cables, or in more recent systems, light pulses through fibre-optic cables. This contrasts with bro ...

, later launching nationwide with the Home Shopping Network (rebranded as

was America's first-ever TV

home shopping host A home shopping host is the on-air host that partners with guests on television shopping channels, such as Home Shopping Network, HSN, QVC, Jewelry Television and ShopHQ. The job of a home shopping host is to introduce new presenters and guests to ...

, becoming one of the most instantly recognizable salesmen in the United States. Over the next three decades, Circosta sold over 75,000 different products on

, netted over 20,000 hours of live, on-air TV selling, and achieved personal product sales in excess of one billion dollars. (The story is disputed; there is some record of Paxson having unsuccessfully tried a similar format in 1969 on one of his earlier TV stations, WNYP in Jamestown, New York.) The classic television-based home shopping industry quickly became a major player in the retail industry. The two most successful shopping channels –

and

– generate a combined total of over 10 billion dollars in sales every year. And

Jewelry Television Jewelry Television is an American television network specializing in the sale of jewelry for both men and women. On-air and online, the network is mainly branded by its jtv initials in lower-case letters. It has an estimated reach of more than ...

is the largest gemstone retailer in the world.

began as an online

bookstore Bookselling is the commercial trading of books which is the retail and distribution end of the publishing process. People who engage in bookselling are called booksellers, bookdealers, bookpeople, bookmen, or bookwomen. The founding of librar ...

in 1994, created by Wall Street computer scientist

Jeff Bezos Jeffrey Preston Bezos ( ;; and Robinson (2010), p. 7. ''né'' Jorgensen; born January 12, 1964) is an American entrepreneur, media proprietor, investor, and commercial astronaut. He is the founder, executive chairman, and former preside ...

. In addition to books, Amazon eventually added

video games Video games, also known as computer games, are electronic games that involves interaction with a user interface or input device such as a joystick, controller, keyboard, or motion sensing device to generate visual feedback. This feedbac ...

computer software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

electronics The field of electronics is a branch of physics and electrical engineering that deals with the emission, behaviour and effects of electrons using electronic devices. Electronics uses active devices to control electron flow by amplification ...

, apparel, and more to its sales repertoire. The company now generates over 200 billion dollars annually. In Europe, more than 150 home shopping channels were identified in activity in February 2018 by the European Audiovisual Observatory.
MAVISE database, European Audiovisual Observatory, retrieved 20 February 2018

Direct response

Direct-response marketing is often considered to be a part of the home shopping/electronic retailing industry. The Electronic Retailing Association, when totaling the combined revenues from all the home shopping companies, estimates that in 2005, the industry generated over 320 billion dollars. Direct marketing is a marketing where buyers will give direct response to the sellers and seller will immediately take an order.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Home Shopping Mass media occupations Shopping networks Non-store retailing