Shopping Online - An Even Better Idea When It's Minus 11 Outside

With many households owning computers, more and more of us are turning to online shopping. The recent extreme weather in particular, has encouraged many of us to stay at home and check out the sales online. This might be a new experience for some because of the following perceived disadvantages:

• You can't handle and examine the actual items, increasing the likelihood of having to return them. This is especially important for fashion items and shoes, although new technology is enabling custom-tailoring of clothes offered online which is proving very popular.
• Certain products have aspects to them that cannot be experienced online, perfume for example.
• You don't get the same kind of shopping "buzz" or therapeutic experience which some people claim they derive from conventional shopping.
• You can't have your items immediately and take them home with you.
• You have to pay by card and people are afraid their card details will be misused. Careful selection of secure sites and common sense precautions should reduce this risk to almost zero.

Notwithstanding these disadvantages, many online shoppers now rate the online shopping experience more highly than High street stores and supermarkets. New online shoppers will no doubt come to appreciate the advantages of this least stressful method of shopping:

• Online shopping means many more available options open to you if you know what you are looking for.
• It is possible to easily compare different features, costs and delivery options. Canny shoppers might check out something they have seen in a retail outlet then go online to look for the best prices or comparable items. The opposite is true too, with customers searching for products on the internet then checking out the real deal in retail outlets, a kind of symbiosis of online and conventional shopping.
• There is a paper trail in case something goes wrong and some online distributors offer "tracking" services so you can follow the progress of items from dispatch to delivery.
• Many sites offer next day delivery if you just can't wait but this usually costs extra.
• No time is wasted travelling to stores and shopping can be done at any time of the day or night; an insomniac's dream!
• There are often special online offers and discounts available. And voucher codes, of course!
• You don't have to carry items home.
• Web site newsletters keep you up to date with offers and events both in-store and online.
• You can read reviews of items posted online by other customers.
• Certain rare or specialist items may only be available online
• There are no parking fees.
• Merchants don't have the same overheads and can pass these savings on to consumers.
• There is less environmental impact; e-commerce uses less land, labour, capital and energy than conventional commerce. For example, Amazon.com uses 16 times less energy per square foot to sell a book than a regular store. Large volume logistics mean less carbon emissions per item purchased.

So by shopping online we're reducing our carbon footprint, this could mean less extreme weather in future, so no more exceptionally cold winters and we can all go out shopping again!