Are shops becoming replaced by online sites?

Shopping has always been a major part of every person’s life. The question is have we become too advanced in the way that we shop. The traditional way of shopping consisting of driving into the nearest town/city or whatever it may be and physically walking into the shop and rummaging your way through countless articles of clothing in all shapes and sizes. Nowadays we have online shopping, in that as long as one has access to the internet they can virtually sit on their couch and search for what they are looking for at the time.

My question to you that read this is ‘Is online shopping the way forward and will shops with physical buildings become obsolete?’

The most advertised clothing website that I have come across is boohoo.com. This is one of the UK’s fastest growing e-business websites. The timeline consists of starting in 2006 and was then re-launched in 2010 after the company got help from kudos web solutions. They provided them with a full range of services ranging from hosting, design, project management, bespoke software development to consultancy and advisory roles. These in turn won boohoo.com awards and achieve treble digit growth each year. The COO of the company Chris Bale says that the main challenges they face is agility as the target audience (17-25 year old females) tastes and likes change day to day through various social media outlets. Boohoo.com is ranked second in the January Top Growers 2011 ChannelAdvisor Facebook Commerce Index.

Interestingly the top three growers of January are Topshop, boohoo.com and New Look. From these results it looks like although boohoo.com is a strong contender but consumers are still susceptible to shopping the traditional way.

My opinion is that while websites are good to get ideas for dresses I still prefer going into the shop and trying on the clothes. Although if the shop doesn’t have the size you can always use the shops website to order the product you want. I think Topshop and River Island have the right idea having both a shop and an online store.

I think we can sleep sound that shops won’t become obsolete just yet but boohoo.com are doing a very good job in keeping us in suspense.

References

boohoo.com

topshop.com

facebookcommercestrategies.com

kudoswebsolutions.com/featured-projects/boohoocom