The pain of online shopping

Online shopping continues to grow - we recently learned that on Monday 10th December at 1.09pm, shoppers spent £767,500 on the internet in just 60 seconds. A new record.

These kinds of stats never surprise me, as for the past few years I've always preferred to shop online when possible. I seem to be a rare female - one who doesn't like shopping (the kind that involves traipsing round shops, getting annoyed by other shoppers and putting up with horrible service.)

Still, I wonder if, for some retail sectors at least, the worm may soon be turning. Consumers are becoming less patient with clunky websites - there's nothing like a session of grappling with poorly designed website search features to send a person scurrying back to the High Street.

And recently, my neighbour claimed that he no longer searched on the web for flight or hotel deals. He got so fed up with following links from search engine results, promising cheap deals, only to spend ages looking in vain for them on those uniformly dreadful travel booking portals.

Now he just calls his travel agent, who has all the contacts and does all the searching for him. Not only that, but he finds those elusive deals. Let's hear it for good old fashioned personal service!