SHOPPING & PROSUMERISM: Buying Online ... from Yourself

Every 7 seconds, somebody new buys something online for the first time. Then they do it again and again. The Web is fast becoming a shopper's paradise, changing not only how people buy, but how often, when, what, why, and from where. By 2010, the majority of us will do much of our shopping online and, as forecast in Future Consumer.Com, the Web will gobble 30 percent of retail sales.

The Web takes shopping out of the shops. In turn, of course, that takes the shops out of shopping and brings them right into your home. Your Web-connected PC becomes your shop - a virtual showroom for comparison-shopping and convenient buying. And it is stocked with everything from vintage wine to brand new cars.

The Web also launches us into a new buyer-centric, product-pull, networked, mass-customized, one-to-one "prosumer" economy. The Web boosts economic value, to the benefit of both producer and consumer. The consumer becomes the producer - what Alvin Toffler in The Third Wave called the "prosumer" - of value and wealth.

Prosumers buy from themselves and directly from other prosumers, not from product manufacturers. As the buy-direct "prosumerism" trend builds, it will de-marketize large portions of various economic sectors and will become an ever-larger part of the economy.

The biggest global movement in this direction is the exploding network or affiliate marketing industry. These global entrepreneurs of "prosumerism" are leading the way in building a meta-market industry that could become the planet's largest industrial sector within a few decades. And they are now doing it over the Internet. (See Home-Based Business section)