One-Stop Shopping Online

Are you old enough to remember the good old days, when, if you needed a pair of tennis shoes, a tube of lipstick, a notebook, and a pair of sunglasses, you had to get in your car and drive to five different stores? What a waste of time, energy and effort, to say nothing of gas, and wear and tear on your car.

Fast forward to today, and the picture is quite different. Not only can all of these items be purchased online from a so called "one-stop shopping" site, where all your needs can be met in one place, but this can typically also be accomplished within minutes of accessing the site.

Of course, the granddaddy of them all is eBay, where you can find just about anything. Other examples would include such sites as shopzilla.com, dollaritem.com and the relatively newer Indian site, www.autsun.com.

While it might take you a while to get used to shopping in a virtual environment, the rewards will be obvious in short order. Not only can you purchase tangible goods such as food and clothing, but you can also sign up for foreign language lessons, buy plane tickets to China or locate an accountant to help you with your Quick Books problems.

Of particular interest may be the so-called consolidator sites such as pricegrabber.com, where you can enter the words "memory foam mattress" and the site will return pricing information at various outlets in descending order. It doesn't get much simpler than this. One-stop shopping online is the new way to run your life.