Internet Shopping During the Holidays

By now most people are comfortable using the internet to shop. How else can you explain the success of sites like Amazon and eBay? This holiday season many people choosing the internet as their shopping mechanism because it allows them to shop from the comfort of their own homes without having to deal with the long lines, cranky (and often thoughtless and rude) customers and tired sales clerks.

In that light, I thought it would be interesting to talk about online shopping tips. Everybody knows how to find bargains both online and off so I was thinking of fun ways to use the internet for gift giving. You probably have at least two or three people who are difficult to shop for, right? Here are a few suggestions for using the internet for shopping.

1. Buy someone a website! Do you know someone who has always wanted to run their own website but never had the time or money to set one up? Thanks to affordable domain registries and hosting programs and open source content platforms like Wordpress, setting a website up for someone has never been easier. A domain name and a year's worth of hosting can easily be purchased for less than one hundred dollars and will take less than a day to set up! Even better, it is a lot easier to hide the website than it is to hide a physical present!

2. Home décor. Forget about trying to find a print or a poster at the local frame shop or art gallery. Head online to sites like Flickr. Flickr's users post their photos with a Creative Commons license which, most of the time, allows for the printing of user's images to use in your home or office. Finding photographs and images that your friend/family member will like is quite easy thanks to Flickr's search tool. If you have any doubts about using the images, contact the photographer directly through his/her Flickr account. They might let you have the print exclusively in return for a small fee. To print the images in larger sizes or on better paper, save the images to a disk and then take that disk to a print shop.

3. Homemade goods. Hopefully by now you have heard of Etsy—the online shopping portal that connects artisans and shoppers. Not everything you will find in this portal is cheap, but all of it is hand made and original. Why force yourself to wade through the insanity that is a flea market or craft fair at the holidays when you can sip coffee at your desk and buy a handmade whatever you want with the help of the internet. Be careful here—some things will need to be created from scratch. Make sure that the seller knows you need your purchase in time for the holidays.

These are just three ways the internet is helpful during the holidays. Over time we'll talk about other ways the internet can help and hurt the people who use it.

For more information on the Internet, visit http://www.internetmicroblog.com and http://www.internetreliable.com.