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Filtered’s online shopping poll

December 19th, 2005 by mhjones

This time of year produces enough online shopping stories to stuff the proverbial stocking, but even so the anecdote in this story has me thinking. There are some people out there who must now routinely do 100% of their gift shopping online.

But there are countless others, like yours truly, who simply leave their run too late and are unwilling to trust the postal system when you’ve got two weeks or less until C-day. And so the usual Christmas shopping madness follows. My wife and I were brave (that’s code for very silly) enough to venture into Chatswood, on Sydney’s North Shore, last Saturday with our very active two year old. Let’s just say it wasn’t pleasant. But we did tick off the rest of the gifts on our list, and there’s nervous waiting by the letter box.

In our case, I reckon we bought about 10 percent of gifts online this year, which was actually down from last year because we’ve been too busy to get organised and buy stuff online when you really think about these thing in, say, September.

Over to you: what percentage of gifts did you buy online vs in person? If I get some interesting answers and you’re happy to go on the record (I’ll follow up offline) I’ll see if we can work it up into a story for the paper.

(n.b. yes, sorry, that will mean you have to register on TypePad to comment. It’s only a little bit painful, you only have to do it once, and has saved me from the comment spam deluge.).

Tagged: Online
Comments: 4 Comments »

4 Responses to “Filtered’s online shopping poll”

  1. Shane Williamson Says:
    December 19th, 2005 at 6:08 pm

    Well I’m 80% old fashioned bricks & mortar retailing and 20% online, but that’s a lot due to leaving it to the last minute as well.

    I use the Internet 100% to do research for shopping though.
    Shane

  2. Cameron Reilly Says:
    December 20th, 2005 at 4:50 pm

    As usual, I’m Shane’s opposite (but we already knew that… I’m better looking, smarter, wittier, logical, etc… he’s richer though… damn his more years at Microsoft!). I researched stuff OFFLINE and then bought ONLINE, thereby saving money. I did 100% of the shopping for my wife and I online (including buying a camcorder priced at $1650 in local stores for $1100 on Ebay) but the kids presents were bought by my wife in stores cuz her megative experiences with Coles Online five years ago put her off online shopping (except for the DVD box set of EXTRAS Series One which she ordered from Amazon).

  3. Cameron Reilly Says:
    December 20th, 2005 at 4:51 pm

    “megative” in the last comment should read… er… “negative”… although mega would also describe how BAD the experience with Coles Online was… mega bad. Maybe “megative” is a new word I’ve just coined? Someone call Oxford. Could be the word of the year in 2006.

  4. MartinAungle Says:
    December 21st, 2005 at 2:33 pm

    Very little bought online this year, but it was great to do some price comparisons. I had a David Jones gift voucher to use up, and as they don’t have an online store (I do wonder why the department stores have struggled with this concept for so long) most of my shopping was done in the shop. Found a couple of great things online that I was struggling to find in the shops – football world cup qualifier tickets as an early Christmas present for my nephews, a Michael Franti DVD for my wife, and a tiffin carrier for my mum. Shhh! Please don’t tell anyone… I got a real kick out of buying online for my mother – she is a big technophobe and I will get great mileage that I bought her present over the Internet!

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