The whole business of present giving reaches its frenzied climax at Christmas with millions of pounds changing hands right up until Christmas Day. In the USA, the time honoured tradition of Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving when retailers see the biggest increase in sales has now been officially superseded by Cyber Monday and 2009 has seen online sales grow to $900 million. The global recession has been a huge factor in accelerating this growth, as many consumers have turned to the internet to research better value purchasing. In fact many will now tell you that the physical act of going out shopping is really an advance party to check out all the prices, before the real business of shopping is done online.

However, it is not all about price saving. It is about convenience as well. We no longer have to put up with coping with opening and closing times or fighting our way into a supermarket car park, because we can get all our groceries delivered instead. The consumer is king now and the pendulum has definitely swung our way.

But for many of us, there is something else we really love about online shopping. It is like getting your very own presents whenever you feel like it. Finding a package delivered to your door is exciting isn`t it. Just unwrapping it gets our hearts racing even though we know what it is.

There another factor that has pushed more and more of us online. What about the environmental benefits of internet shopping. For many people, reducing their carbon footprint is pretty high on their agenda and many believe wholeheartedly that the net is much more carbon friendly. So, is it more environmentally friendly to shop online? The answer according to a recent study is yes. It calculated that the environmental impact of an in-store purchase is fifty times higher than that of purchasing something online. And looking at this in more broader terms, it found that the carbon emissions associated with making a purchase from a physical store represented an increase of more than fifteen times that of purchasing the item online. The study took into consideration the environmental cost of getting to and from a store, the lighting and heating and power consumed in the store and how the purchases were delivered. It excluded, however, the wrapping as it concluded that this would be the same in both counts.

There is an added complication however, as there are many retailers who have both an on and offline presence and this can certainly skew the figures. In supermarkets, for example, there are often many shoppers who are not shoppers at all. They are in fact employed by the supermarket to fill baskets on behalf of online shoppers. Currently, many supermarkets are experimenting with warehousing for their online customers which makes sense for both environmental and economic reasons.

This is all very exciting news for those of us keen on sustainable and eco friendly living and clearly an area that is becoming increasingly more serious.