Tracing back shopping

Shopping is an integral part of our life and we love it in all its diversity. Today it's much more than just the activity of selection and purchase. It's a part of our social experience that has passed a long history and undergone major changes with the evolution of our society. Today we consider shopping (online, social, fun shopping) leisure activity rather than economic one.

Shopping

Shopping can be traced back to many civilizations in our history. Strange today to think that in ancient times there was no money (the first money was used over 2000 years ago). People bartered or traded goods that they had produced themselves. So fairs and markets were in operation from early times. People would shop for goods at a weekly market in nearby towns. Then shops began to be permanently established. Later they became specialized (a bakery, a butchery, a grocery etc) and then supermarkets appeared.

Online shopping

If we take the last 100 years we can clearly distinguish three major stages in the development of the shopping/trading world.

1. Customers are served by the shopkeeper who retrieves all the good on their shopping list. The goods are often delivered to the customers' homes.
2. Customers have to select goods, retrieve them off the shelves by themselves, and even pack their own goods. Customers deliver their own goods.
3. Domination of the Internet. Customers select goods (if you want to buy a used car, exclusive shoes - all you can imagine) via the net; the goods are delivered to their homes (online shopping as we know it today).

Social shopping

As the power of the Internet continued to boost, online shopping has experienced lots of changes and modifications. Merging with the power of social networking online shopping grew into the so called social shopping. There appeared numerous social shopping and group buy communities offering a new way to combine shopping with social network (considered favorite online activities for lots of people).

Fun shopping

Though social shopping is still in the stage of its active development, we can already see that new shopping conceptions like fun shopping are trying to take their niche. But what fun shopping actually is and in what way fun shopping sites are different (or not) from social shopping ones - no one can actually tell for sure.

What other alterations are ahead for shopping - time will show and we'll watch these changes, participate or even cause them.