Traditionally people used to go to the high street to buy all their goods, and they were limited to what they were able to buy. For example goods that were sale in certain countries were not available to people at home in Britain, if you wanted a rare edition item made in America or Japan you had a hell of a job trying to find it here, and it involved going out and seeking specialist shops.



Common foodstuffs could only be bought from supermarkets; Electrical goods could only be bought from outlets on the high street. Music and video were sewn up by the big labels, and prices were high. Admittedly the costs of having a high street store meant that they had to charge a lot to make it profitable to the labels, so at the height of the high street power, a simple music CD was normally ?15.99 or more.

However with the emergence of the internet, we are on the brink of a massive change in how we do our shopping. What the internet has done is given us more choice, in what we are available to buy, were from, and most importantly at what price. We now have the choice of searching out at the push of a button, an item we want that we would be unable to get in a normal retail store. It also provides us with a good sense of anonminity, and with the leaps and bounds in security a better sense of trust.

There is still a long way to go before we totally trust the internet to buy goods from, and I feel governments need to look at the internet retail sector, and put in place codes of conduct both for retailers, but for customers as well. The explosion in retail sales on the internet can be seen in many area's now. More and more people use Ebay to buy goods from and the sales in music and video at high street stores is shrinking. So much so that the virgin group sold off the high street stores.

People are becoming to realize that they can buy goods online at a much cheaper cost and that they have a wider choice of the goods they buy. They now can search out and find items they would not normally see in a normal retail store. A good example of this is I was looking to buy a push chair for my baby son, and when I went to a number of high street stores they were asking for a minimum of ?159.99 and all the rest of the bits and bobs I needed I had to buy separately. I then did a search on the net and found a really good pushchair at ?59.99 with more than I needed. This is the power of the internet, gone is the need to have a store on the high street, with a lot of heavy overheads and with the limitations on the number and type of stock you have. Now retailers can offer more at a much cheaper price, which makes the internet a lot more attractive than high street stores.

All this combined will in the next number of years revolutionise the retail sector, and offer people a lot more choice. There are things though that still need to be done, people and retailers must be able to feel security in there transactions. More needs to be done to combat fraud and scammers on the net. The majority of scammers incidentally come from Africa and Eastern Europe. Some of their tricks involve bogus websites, bogus offers, and cost people millions of pounds every year. The thing I would say is to buy from a trusted site, a site that has a code of conduct, and then hopefully everything will go well. We all have heard of the horror stories but with greater support and leaps in internet security, we are about to see a welcome revolution in retail that can make shopping a much nicer experience.