I think online shopping has many advantages for the customer but it has also a couple heavy disadvantages for local economies and commerce. Online shopping allows commercial companies to stock big quantities of commercial goods in central storage facilities. Online companies often have no city shops in central city areas which have outrageously high rents. Most traditional, city shops on the other hand, in order to attract the customer need to rent a "shop window" in those expensive urban commercial areas and also employ sales staff in order to serve their customers. The high price of rent plus the sales staff salaries and insurance can be completely avoided from the online shops, which can rent a central storage facility far from the expensive center of a city, deliver the goods by post service or small decentralized outlets and those online shops are able to order and stock much bigger quantities of goods than a common city store could be able to order and store. Therefore, online retail shops, having those advantages of bigger orders, bigger stock, less employees relative to items sold and lower rent prices are able to achieve significantly lower item prices than city stores while at the same time maintain a higher profit margin than city stores are able to achieve. All those advantages of online shopping on behalf of the merchant make it a much more competitive methode of trade than traditional city market commerce. For the customer, I think, online shopping is better since the prior concern of most customers is price, lacking only the social experience of market shopping. I have to notice though that the generalized adoption of online shopping habbit will eventually shrink the city market commerce since online shopping is much more price-efficient. This commerce trend will inevitably result in the dominance of an OLIGOPOLY COMMERCE model causing smaller city and town markets to decline, a condition which in mid term will increase unemloyment cause pension funds collapse, shrink state tax income and finaly lead the traditional concept of commerce, capitalism and industrialization to it's end. I hope the next economical system will be more sustainable and base it's existence on the better education level of the citizens.