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Commonly, software is sold either through online purchases or at retail stores. Each of these methods has its up sides, both from the point of view of the consumer and from the point of view of the merchant. It is to the merchant's benefit to advertise, so that consumers can learn more about the product.

There are advantages and disadvantages to advertising software in a retail store. The main advantage is the presence of a salesperson, who can field questions from the prospective buyer. The buyer may also be attracted by the medium that the software comes on, such as a CD or DVD. The main disadvantage of the retail environment is that there will be other similar products competing for the same customers.

Advertising a product online, as well as distributing it, is not the same thing as doing so in a store and requires different techniques. On the Internet specific consumers can be directly targeted. An example of this would be employing marketing software to automatically generate an e-mail to a customer who has bought the same kind of product you are selling; this is a cost-effective method for product promotion through ecommerce software.

Although the approach is much less personalized, the use of popup windows to advertise software is often cheaper than the use of costly ecommerce software because the advertiser only pays for the views received. The quantity of individuals reached via the popup window method often compensates for the reduced personal touch.

One down side to advertising online is that people who spend a fair amount of time on the Internet become inured to online ads, because they see so many of them. Because many sites use advertising extensively, even intrusively, viewers may simply block out the ads they are shown.

One can also observe a fear that has developed towards clicking on advertisements online, especially those advertising software. Surfers of the web are increasingly affright of being ripped off by accidentally installing a virus that came with the software downloaded from the web.

I personally count myself to those, who prefer to do the research for software online and then go into the store and buy the product. Therefore I am influenced by the advertisements online, as well as those in the store.