How will we buy online 5 years from now?

As I sit back today and reflect on the last few days to see what new things I saw at the conference, there is a lot. I can choose to believe in all the predictions or try to predict myself.

I go for the latter. Firstly I do not think shopping in the malls has changed drastically in the last 40 years. There have been improvements for sure but nothing drastic. We still go to the stores in the mall, select the products we want to purchase and then make the payment. Not all of us like this process of shopping but there is not many different options available out there. You can go to a store that sells everything so that you can buy everything at one place. Or you can make a 'shopping appointment' at one of the fancy stores like Nordstorm's or Bloomingdale's and leave it to the shopping assistant to find what you need.

Now coming to the world of online shopping, the shopping process is a whole lot different in terms of doing multiple things at the same time. There are tons of comparison shopping sites out there that help you find what you need at the lowest price, or the nearest location, etc. As a customer all I need is a single site (just like a single store) that can help me find what I need at the best price. It could be a shopping search engine where I enter. I need a 300GB Hard disk. It could ask me a bunch of questions: Would this hard-disk be internal or external? Do you have any price range in mind or just find the lowest price? Is it okay to find a hard disk bigger than 300GB if it cheaper (that's possible)?, etc. And then based on my answers to these questions say, there is a 350GB Seagate hard disk available for $110 at the Circuit City located next to my home or it can be shipped for $8 within 1 day. That would be great. Maybe there is something like that out there but I have not seen it. So if you know about a site like this, please enlighten me.

The future will change the way products sell. Wherever anything can be sold will be sold. We have already seen ads showing up in games, online experiences and chat rooms like Second Life, blogs, etc. This would mean that the next big online site or application will have features to sell products. What will this be is hard to predict but that is where the answer is. Any thoughts?