Availability, Reliability and Usability of Online Bookshops: A Study

Abstract

Purchasing books online has become a trend these days as it is more convenient to do so because of the ease oflocating and purchasing the books online.Online bookshops offer a great variety of books at low cost and customers are becoming more comfortable to purchase books online. Major advantagesof online bookshops are that these facilitate to search the comprehensive range of the books by author, title, ISBN (International Standard Book Number) or subject. They also offer much more than the bibliographic details. In this research paper a study has been done of the Indian online bookshops with an aim to check the availability of books by author; title; and image of the book cover, reliability on the basis of valid SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) Certificateand usabilitywith the help of discount offered; delivery time and shipping charges. In addition, other features have also been reviewed such as multi payment gateways; presence on social networking sites; login interface, etc.