The Ebay Christmas Boutique: online shopping hits the high street

While you’re not about to pop out to the shops and find a Crowdstorm Superstore has replaced one of you’re local ‘special’ fried chicken outlets, we’re taking our hats off to Ebay this week for doing just that.

For one week over Christmas (December 1-5), the online shopping and auction behemoth will be taking over a store in London’s West End to offer an experimental “no queues, no bags, no stress” shopping experience for the capital’s festive shoppers. Or so it claims.

So how will it achieve this? Well, for one, by offering a very small selection of goods; 200 of Ebay’s top selling items, to be exact. So no, you won’t be able to list your old Kajagoogoo LPs and see them flying off the shelves. However, we presume you’ll be able to see/feel/test the merchandise in store.

Secondly though, you won’t be taking it away from the Ebay Boutique on the day; instead, you’ll be buying online, having it delivered to your home and all without the need to deal with any sales ‘helpers’. Bonus.

And thirdly, this is all achieved via your smartphone – or an in-store loan one provided by Ebay’s partner in crime for the experiment, HTC. This is done via quick response (or ‘QR’) codes attached to the items; these are scanned by your phone and send you direct to an Ebay billing page, where you can complete your transaction via Ebay’s website.

It’s a really interesting idea and could be a massive shot in the arm for high street retailers, if they have the wherewithal to follow it up and invest in the technology. Unfortunately, previous experience tells us this is unlikely to happen in a hurry. It usually takes a trailblazer to come along and make it work (taking most of the profit) before others tentatively follow (and pick up the scraps).

We can only hope this would move soul destroying till monkey jobs onto the shop floor, where newly empowered staff could help customers with their purchases using the expert knowledge their new found free time has let them learn. But no, we expect retailers to see this as an opportunity to replace expensive workers with cheap technology, once again looking a gift horse in the mouth to exploit their strengths in the chase for short-term profit.

But until that miserably inevitable day comes, let’s celebrate the pioneering auction website (and HTC) for bringing something a little different to the high street. Merry Christmas Ebay!