Online Retail Up 16%. On Track for $211 Billion This Year.

A new Forrester Research study highlighted in Internet Retailer shows online sales 16 percent ahead of last year’s pace. The research also predicts online purchases should hit $211 billion in 2006. The second quarter results at internet behemoth Amazon were even more impressive with sales up a substantial 37 percent over 2005 figures.

One of the key advantages of shopping online—if you know what you want to buy—is the ability to compare price, packages and features. This can be done by navigating to your favorite sites or by using price comparison sites such as Shopping.com or Pricegrabber.com. However, now there are some new entrants onto the Web scene that offer new ways to select items (story here). One of these sites is Mpire. Launched this summer, Mpire permits shoppers to see and compare the most recent selling prices of an item on eBay, Amazon, Craiglist and Overstock. As Mpire’s CEO Matthew Hulett said, “I wanted to create the Kelly’s Blue Book for everything.”

Another site, Slide.com, looks like a cross between a shopping engine, an RSS news reader and Flickr. It requires you download software to your computer and then offers to bring the shopping experience to you rather than you having to go out and look.

According to Fast Company, the growth in ecommerce is also prompting some changes to both virtual and physical retail environments. For years, the trend was to make online customers feel at home by using physical store analogies: shopping baskets, aisles, departments, etc. Now, however, online shopping innovations are beginning to drive changes in brick-and-mortar stores. As the Fast Company article points out, this could include sampling music before you buy, or it could mean being able to see comments and recommendations from other consumers about an item that is actually on the shelf.

With the fast growth of ecommerce, we may see more of this “tail wagging the dog” type of thing.