In the same article Christopher Kelly of Forrester Research, Inc. in Cambridge predicted that 8.5 million households will use the Web this Christmas. With numbers like these, one has to wonder about the possibility of e-commerce eventually replacing traditional shopping. The range of predictions people make about e-commerce is interesting. A friend of mine recently said he thought that the only difference between e-commerce and mail order was the medium. Another friend of mine believes that e-commerce is all a big novelty, and that once the novelty wears off, traditional shopping will reinstate itself.
Statistics do show that web neophytes are fueling e-commerce's geometric growth.
Whether these neophytes mature to become habitual e-commerce users, however, is an open question. Other people I know use the context of a hypothetical question to make their predictions. These might be good questions, but I find a different kind of question works just as well. Sometimes they purchased things, but oftentimes not. While they were walking around, they would sometimes meet someone they knew and stop to talk to them.