Website Shopping? Malls closing!

The problems with malls and website shopping actually relate to/parallel each other.
1. Both are impersonal. There is likely to be little to no contact between creator/retailer and customer. In the case of the mall, there can be a layer of mall management between customer and creator; with website sales, it's the website manager between the customer and seller.
2. Both are quite often organized poorly in terms of layout, content and aesthetic appeal.
3. Both encourage creators to "list and forget". That is, stick the vendor/item listing in the mall stoore/website listings and just walk away.
4. Speed is an issue in both cases - just from the opposite ends of the spectrum. Malls are too often laggy, slow to physically navigate and cluttered with crud that is not what the customer is looking for. Webstie sales are far too often too specific in terms of search engine terms (or conversely too loose), encourage impulse buying at the expense of advertising accuracy, and tend to more often misrepresent items in the pursuit of an easy sale.
5. Both have "Return merchandise" issues. You still need to contact the creator about problems - and if the first contact was via mall/website, the creator has no relationship with the customer other than his/her word that he/she has X item.

Personally, I have been to two malls in the last three months... Hated the experience. I went to two different websites with SL items for sale. This is going to sound worse than intended but - wasn't impressed. Give me a good old in-world store anytime. Give me a simple 3D-temp-rezzing vendor in Busy Ben's/beside a road in world anytime. I tend to buy when the creator is online... not spur of the moment. If I have an issue with an item, if the creator is online, I can resolve the issue within minutes of buying it.

My take, therefore, is malls were a "cute thing" that was doomed to fail from the get go as it became a saturated market with everyone clamoring to climb on the bandwagon and extract their ounce of SL-Linden$blood. Likewise, I see website sales petering out relatively quickly due to website management issues, product listing overload/contamination, and having to go "off-world" in an external browser. I happen to believe that small, coordinated groups of like-minded merchandisers and specialist stores will continue to rule the world... notice I said continue as I have yet to hear of anyone actually saying their individual store, properly run, has "failed" given a reasonable range of products and product promotions.

I think the sakes have been razed with hole sim being malls, and then there are the theme malls. That run less like a mall and more like a theme park. Go to a pj party, on-top of a few events. the place also sells pillows, pjs, beds, race car beds, flying beds. Pet animals that look like stuffed animals. Extra.

I've never really liked or used the malls. Like other people have said, most of the venders have their own store. Usually with more selection. Ones some one has found a couple good personal stores it's just a hassle to search aimlessly.

Web site encourage more purchases. before the choice was shop for hours or make it and hopefully sell it. Now it's just a matter of searching a web site for it or spend an indeterminate, but probable longer time, trying to make it.

Then Kurt, maybe malls encourage more creativity and alternatives

My vendors have all gone now. I had virtually no sales. I'm starting to use secondserver.net which still lets me easily use vendors while thesame thing sold in my vendor is sold online.

I don't intend to do web shopping for a virtual world. That's just silly. But then I don't really do malls if I can help it, either. I used to like Galleria City when it was, because it was extremely well laid out and I enjoyed browsing it. But in general, malls turn me right off, usually because bad design and management causes them to lag me to death.

There are too many malls in SL. I don't see the point. They tend to fall into two categories - the ones that just have a pile of unrelated junk you've never heard of dumped all over (ok, it's not junk... but the design and layout of the malls usually manage to make it look like a giant junk yard, enough that I couldnt even be bothered to browse just in case there might be something worthwhile there), and the mega-mall type where you know exactly what shops are going to be there before you visit, because they always are.

To be honest, I buy very little anyway - most stuff I buy is an impulse purchase for a few moments fun, and the rest is clothing, which invariably come from the one source anyway.

But if I do go window shopping, I much prefer hunting down the individual shops, and it gives me an excuse to explore a little.