We can now buy anything online. Even your weekly shopping can be ordered online and delivered to your door. This practice is reducing the number of jobs in physical stores, but it is creating other opportunities.

Maintaining an online store requires staff with technology skills, dealing with customers' problems will require customer support staff, and shipping the goods means that warehouses and distribution centres are taking the place of shops.

The presentation of goods online is the new sales assistant. Instead of the personal touch, in-store companies now focus on the design of webpages and the words used to describe products. Whereas sales assistants use their intuition online, stores use vast amounts of data to inform sales decisions. Everything from what image is used to what products are displayed when customers search for goods are informed by analysis of customer behaviour.

Online stores make it easier to set up a business, whether it’s selling your own craft goods to make additional money from a hobby or a larger scale enterprise with investment and multiple employees.