Many customers already discovered the advantages of the mail orders. Instead of driving into the shopping centres, spending hours looking for a parking, in order to finally queue up in long lines, they already order their commodity in the Internet or in the traditional mail order catalogues. Who hasn’t already spent hours driving just to find out that in the shop that the desired article is sold off? The advantages of mail orders for the customer are obvious. The disadvantages are somewhat more difficult to pin down. A disadvantage is that one can not test the products prior to buying it.

In online software retailing, a rather new business field, this disadvantage does not exist. This is because a regular shop does usually also not allow to test software prior to the sale. Online software retailing is particularly innovative for another reason. In some cases one can legally download the programs that one orders directly on the Internet site. This saves much time in comparison to the normal 3 day delivery time it takes to send a CD in a package. Next to that, the choice offered by online software retailers is usually larger than that of the traditional retailers. As the structure of online retailer stores is usually very efficient, prices are usually comparatively low. With the purchase in the Internet, one basically saves on the money that the traditional retailer spends on the rent and the high personnel expenditure.