High street retailers and supermarkets have been hard hit by the recent cold weather with fewer people venturing into town centres and retail parks, preferring instead to pop out to the local corner shop for essentials. Some smaller high street retailers have even had to close for short periods, partly because of customers staying at home and partly because of branches having to close due to staff absences. John Lewis reported a drop in high street sales of 30% during the week ending 9th January this year. In the same week their online sales increased 56%! Tesco Direct reported a 50% increase in the six week period to 9th January with online sales growth of almost 20%.

Some online shops, or etailers, have admitted that in spite of overall record sales in recent weeks they did experience a drop in sales during the worst of the weather. Tesco.com reported a drop of 0.5% over a six week period and Ocado experienced a 5% dip in sales during the worst week. These online grocers will nevertheless have impressed many new customers forced by the weather to shop online instead of doing a supermarket run.

In the early days, consumers' experience of online shopping was disappointing with complaints of poor delivery and returns policies. Since then, etailers have taken up the challenge and made huge improvements in these areas, such that consumers are now rating the online shopping experience more highly than department stores and supermarkets. Many consumers forced by the exceptional weather to sample etailing for the first time, will have had their low expectations met and exceeded by the online shops' ability to get their deliveries through. There are reports of some Tesco.com staff using their own 4x4 vehicles for deliveries in Glasgow, whilst staff in Hereford actually walked through the snow to get to disabled customers! Ocado Chief Executive Officer Tim Steiner said: "Whilst we did cancel a small number of deliveries due to snow in the lead-up to Christmas, our staff worked tirelessly to contact customers and we were able to offer all of them a re-delivery before Christmas Day."

Many online stores took advantage of their exemption from the legal ban on opening on 25th December and launched their sales on Christmas Day, or even Christmas Eve, instead of the more traditional Boxing Day. IMRG, the industry body for global etailing, reported that shoppers spent £102 million on Christmas Day last year and the total is expected to be even higher this year.

Resistance to e-commerce has been highest amongst older consumers who tend to have a natural suspicion of cyberspace, in some cases with good reason; high profile scams in the guise of "Web loyalty" programmes perpetrated by marketing companies were the subject of a Senate hearing only last November. "Safe-shopping" has become a priority for the big name sites, however and coupled with antivirus software and greater consumer awareness of the dangers and how to avoid them, this means that cybercrime is much less of a worry than in the past.

First-timers to online shopping will have found directory-type, market place and price comparison sites making it easy to pull together details of etailers. In some cases these sites offer money-saving voucher codes for the produce and services offered. Once the weather improves, many of these new customers will remain.