Rather, people make purchases simply by taking merchandise off shelves after scanning their smartphones into a reader to enter the store. Facial recognition is used to match individual shoppers with their credit card data on their mobile phone. In contrast, Wal-Mart has closed stores, built up its e-commerce web site, and purchased Jet.com, presumably as a vehicle for distributing products ordered online in the United States. In 2018 they acquired Flipkart Pvt Ltd, the largest online commerce site in India and an Amazon competitor there. Currently, the Amazon Go store is not available to people without a smartphone with a credit card www.TechnicalPDF.com associated with it. Roughly 67 percent of the population had smartphones by early of 2018 according to consulting firm Statista. But, per Statista only 23.16 percent of retail sales were paid for using mobile payments. FOSTERING CIVIC PARTICIPATION AND ENGAGEMENT-ONLINE FORUMS Not all web activity is designed with a profit motive. Many blogs and mailing lists are started to further social causes or provide support and information to communities. Numerous online forums are non-profits: They generate no profit to people that start and support them; they simply disseminate information on topics of interest. For example, new mothers living in Brooklyn, New York, organized a neighborhood mailing list using the Google Group application to set up the mailing list and invite people to join. The list quickly grew to 120 mothers who all had babies around the same time and who lived in the same neighborhood of mostly townhouses and a few apartment buildings. Town E-Mail Lists to Keep Communities Informed Other examples of e-mail lists that provide a community forum are those organized around city and local services. One New England city, Framingham, Massachusetts, uses E-Democracy software to support citizen discussions. E-Democracy forums now host 50 forums in 17 locations across three countries: the United States, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. The first one, a foru