New Shopping Trend Could Mean the Biggest Rise Ever For Online Stores

After reading this article on tamebay 'is mobile shopping coming of age' it's got me thinking, with this recent trend of customers checking for the cheapest online price while standing in a shop, could a new offline business model for general high street stores see their online counterparts become the main suppliers to their customers? It might sound abit crazy but just hear me out...


The idea goes like this,
*using my best Movie Trailer Voice*
In the near future,
People have stopped purchasing in-store,
High street sales have plummeted,
Consumers now use hand held devices to find the cheapest price online after testing items out in-store,
Something needs to be done in order to save the high street,
This year one man will change everything... *ahem* you get the idea :)

If you're the owner of a massive Comet style store containing thousands of items, customers can walk around, physically touching the items and even testing them out (the one thing which the internet can't do!). Then rather than going to the till to pay for the item they use an in store computer / app to select a Company to have full-fill the order for them, pay and leave.
The shop takes a cut of the sale (affiliate style) and the chosen online store delivers it to your address.

This takes advantage of the rising trend of people checking online prices in-store then leaving without buying anything. I think as smart phones become quicker and easier to use while on the move we will see this trend continue to rise while in-store sales fall. So this new way of shopping could re-address the balance and give brick and mortar stores a reason for being there in the first place.

The downside of this is that, sometimes (especially when on your last minute Christmas dash) you want to take the item home there and then. So keeping some physical stock on-site could still be an option for these stores but the shopper you would be paying a higher price for the convenience of the service.

This method would dramatically bring down the cost of running these brick and mortar stores which as we have seen recently with the quick demise of best buy in the UK can only be a good thing.

This could also bring about a change of focus on the shopping experience itself into a more relaxed apple style store were shoppers are “hanging out”, trying out the latest products or watching in-store demo’s rather than the current style of get in, pay for your item and get out.

If your thinking that this would never work because the brick and mortar stores would be losing out only taking a smaller affiliate sized sale, I'm basing this in a world were a large percentage of shoppers are walking into a store, looking around and leaving without buying anything as they have just purchased their items online, on your own expensive premises. A smaller percentage of something is a lot better than a large percentage of nothing.

What do you think? Don't agree then let's hear your visions of future shopping