I love to shop and very often there are specific items I’m looking for, but just as often I like shopping just for the sake of shopping.

Although I have friends that do all of their shopping online, it’s just not an activity that I find all together enjoyable and it’s not for lack of trying. I feel like it’s bordering on blasphemy in this industry to admit this aloud.

For the longest time I thought my issue with online shopping was that it didn’t give me the instant gratification or the ability to touch/feel/try on items like the brick-an-mortar shopping experience. But recently, I put my finger on what it is about buying online that doesn’t always work for me. I’m an impulse buyer and emotional shopper (which is probably not such a great thing to be, but I know that I’m not alone). And for me, online shopping has yet to replicate that euphoric feeling of walking past a store and seeing merchandise that catches my eye – a must-have item that I didn’t even know I had to have and that now I can’t live without.

Nothing beats shopping online when you already know what you want to buy. And in most cases, I can get the product at the best price on the Internet. Even when I only have a general idea or category of item I’m looking for (a new laptop, wireless speakers, a black dress for a special event), I can depend on search results to help me sort through mountains of product information, along with customer and product reviews. All of those things usually insure I get exactly what I want. I’m happy with shopping online in those cases.

But what about a scenario where I don’t really have a clue as to what I want to buy. I just know that I feel like shopping and I have money to spend. That’s what happened to me last Friday. It was the first time in a long while that my day wasn’t totally jammed with meetings. I wasn’t traveling and I had cleared nearly everything off my to-do list. That meant I had some time to take a breather.

I really felt an urge to buy myself “something.” I’m sure that if I walked a few blocks to the big anniversary sale at Nordstrom that day I would have found something that I wasn’t specifically looking for and I would returned delighted with my unexpected purchase. But I can’t just leave the office for an extended period in the middle of the day (though, I hear many people call that lunch). Instead, I opted to surf around online at look for things – anything - that caught my eye. But I never really saw any items that tickled my fancy. And that is disappointing when you want to be tickled.

I’m not sure that anyone on the Web has come close to replicating sights and sounds (the actual feel) of standing in a huge store or mall with a plethora of purchasing possibilities beautifully laid out before you…. when and if that happens, I’ll be a delighted online shopping convert.