No matter how hard you may have tried, not many people managed to escape the ‘Big Freeze’ that hit Britain a couple of weeks ago. The whole country pretty much came to a standstill when snow and ice covered the UK, in what was some of the worst weather we’ve seen in thirty years.

Businesses and schools across the country were forced to close when roads became impassable and public transport ground to a halt. Even us hardy folk at Red C struggled to get into the office, with only those that come on foot making it here. With so many people off work, you’d have thought the high street would be bustling, but figures from Footfall indicate that shopper numbers on 5th January were down 13.5% on last year. 53 of the 285 stores in Meadowhall shopping centre, Sheffield were closed on this day, and The Trafford Centre in Manchester only managed to open half of its stores and restaurants - before closing the entire complex at 4pm. Read more…

I love shopping online. I can do it from the comfort of my home, not having to rush from shop to shop and then back to the first shop again, deal with fitting room queues or worry about buying something before closing time. If I have something in particular in mind then it’s also great being able to search for it with the whole internet at my fingertips and specify what price, colour or brand I want. And I’m not the only one! According to Nielsen over 875 million of us have shopped online, with that number increasing 40% from two years ago. And despite falls in sales on the high-street, online shopping has seen a 13% rise on 2008 with the most popular purchases being Books, Clothing & Accessories, DVDs & Games, Tickets and Electronic Equipment.

But shopping online can sometimes be a bit solitary. It doesn’t replace going shopping on the high street with your friends and picking out clothes together and it doesn’t replace the buzz you get from having loads of shopping bags full of new things that you can’t wait to try on again at home. So that’s why online shopping had to evolve into something more visually and socially appealing. And with the boom in social networking sites and niche communities social shopping was born.  OSOYOU was one of the first online shopping communities and was launched in 2007. It acts as an aggregator of fashion and beauty products with 49 of the top retailers on there. But shoppers can also create their own profile, chat with each other in forums and drag products into their own “style file” to show off their most wanted items.

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There’s nothing new about spending Saturday afternoon in town with your girlfriends, or dragging your reluctant partner around the clothes shops, but with the advent of web 2.0 and its associated technologies – are these favourite pastimes just that – a thing of the past? 

OK, so we’ve been ordering online for sometime now, content with digital versions of catalogues and directories, flicking through page turning technology and zooming in on products to work out just how they would fit us / suit us.  And then sending them back when we are disappointed with the physical nature of them.  Some forward thinking home shopping organisations such as Lands End in the early part of the century, even started to use technologies such as the Virtual Model ^TM to enhance the online ‘changing room’ experience.

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