Taxation on Internet sales were bound to happen.

As of this weekend, new taxation laws on e-commerce will be implemented. The lack of sales taxation has been a great advantage to online retailers and will now pose the challenge of figuring out how to keep their costumers by balancing out fair prices, shipping costs, and sales tax. Big online retailers such as Amazon could be greatly impacted by now having to charge sales tax on all orders because many of their costumers’ reason for shopping online is that they can avoid sales tax on items such as electronics. There is a possibility that they would lose many customers who would rather purchase products at a physical store and avoid paying for shipping and waiting for their products to arrive. In an age where people rely on the internet for most of their daily activities and obligations such as paying bills, searching for information, and, and shopping; I believe retailers will be able to make up for the sales tax by having more warehouses all over the country/world in order to lower or eliminate shipping costs.

I recently coordinated a fashion show and ordered most of my decoration and other supplies online because of the convenience of being able to search the items and find them quickly online and because it saved me time by not having to travel to a store to buy anything. For most of the events I have coordinated and also events others around me have planned, we have resorted to online research and shopping for the necessary products. The convenience of being able to purchase things from the comfort of your home or office will continue to be an incentive for people to buy online despite having to pay a little more for shipping.

I believe it is very likely for Amazon to resort to establishing physical stores in order to continue their business by offering their low prices and avoiding shipping costs but I think their main market will continue to be e-commerce. On Anthony Miyazaki’s post titled “Will Amazon be the next Walmart? New tax laws may be the catalyst.” on http://www.sensibleemarketing.com/ , Miyazaki writes : “ Even in an internet world, face-to-face has often seemed sensible. I agree with this quote but in this internet world, e-commerce will continue to thrive and overcome any changes or obstacle.

Marketing events and interacting with clients.

Online marketing feed off of interactivity. Facebook, Twitter and other popular social media and applications are great ways to gain new costumers and help maintain your relationship with current costumers.  Interactivity is very useful when it comes to event planning. Through social media, event planners can reach out to their audience in a quick and efficient way. I am the coordinator for a fashion show and Facebook has made it very easy for me to interact with my sponsors, models and guests. Many of the sponsors I was able to get for the show were convinced because of the amount of marketing we are doing in order to sell tickets. The fact that their logo would be exposed through our social media was a big selling point in order to get them to work with us. In the past when social media was not as big as it is now, maybe it would not have been as easy to convince sponsors to work with us or promote my event. Through Facebook I was able to market to many different organizations in a way that I knew they would notice rather than through personal emails which are harder to get and are often ignored. It is easier and more convenient for costumers and marketers to spread the word through social media which could be a very bad thing if the word is negative rather than positive. Even if costumers express negative feelings through social media for the world to see, they might be pointing out something that marketers did not notice and can then work on. This would only be a positive thing if the people in charge of the media are always alert and responding to costumer complains in a timely matter.

A blog post in Sensible Marketing by Anthony Miyazaki, makes great points on his view of  how much interactivity does online marketing need. I plan and coordinate events and online interactivity is a great tool for what I do. The con's of online interactivity outweigh the negatives when it comes to planning and marketing events. Facebook helps he have an idea of how many people will be attending my events and also helps promote a positive image and reputation for my parties. In my case, the more interactivity, the better.