By 2020: vCommerce will be the norm and the delivery of Web hosting will change significantly.

It’s a day at the shopping mall – strolling along busy shops, scanning windows until something catches your eye. You see a great product, so you turn and enter the store. The shopkeeper greets you and you take a good look at the item from all angles. You sample it, try it on, decide to buy it, and then you’re on your way. It’s a seamless, comfortable shopping experience – but it’s all done on the Web, in a virtual shopping mall, with virtual items, and a virtual you. It’s vCommerce and it’s only 13 years away.

This bold new prediction is all part of a recent study commissioned by Rackspace entitled, Life online: The Web in 2020. The report claims that this virtual reality will revolutionize the way we shop, while eCommerce – as we know it – will dwindle and fade away.

It’s the third and final study by Rackspace, in a series of reports, examining the future state of the Web. The Social Issues Research Centre (SIRC), an independent, non-profit research organization, conducted the research using participants in the United Kingdom. Their conclusions are based on months of in-depth interviews, in-house qualitative research, a representative online survey of 2,500 adults and existing social trends and data on the Internet.

In the report, Rackspace and SIRC come to a remarkable conclusion for eCommerce by 2020: vCommerce will soon be the norm and the delivery of Web hosting will change significantly. Fabio Torlini, Marketing Director for Rackspace, told TopHosts that the study reveals an end to the current state of eCommerce. In the near future he says we won’t be visiting individual, static websites seeking out specific items that we need. Instead, we’ll shop around, compare and examine products in ways that closely mimic our physical shopping world.

“The study shows that the online shopping experience will change completely,” Torlini said. “It won’t be a question of looking online, but instead we’ll be shopping online, in virtual shopping malls, for 3D items… in a much more leisurely way.”

The report states that this transformation will come about thanks to the growing predominance of Generation C – C standing for content, connectivity, creativity, collaboration, communication – and an ‘always-on society’. The demands of this new generation will make Web hosting providers and data centers vital hubs through which this new ‘alternative economy’ functions.

More processing power, improved online graphics, and enhanced Web aggregation abilities will also fuel the emergence of vCommerce. All technologies we currently lack, but a natural progression of the always-on society, according to the research. Glimmers of this can be seen through sites such as Secondlife.com, or popular gaming sites such as World of Warcraft.

Torlini explained that these virtual shopping malls will one day function on advanced aggregation systems, or Web spaces capable of grouping distinct data parts (separate online shops) together, at the same time. The virtual shopping mall’s aggregation system will hold these merchant stores together, while each runs separately on their own Web hosting infrastructure.

Web hosting providers will therefore exist on the back end of these virtual malls, Torlini said, separately supporting their merchant customers on unified aggregation systems. Faint examples of this can be seen on today’s auction sites or “virtual High streets” that allow businesses to compete on an equal footing.

If these virtual malls of the future are to work, Web hosting will have to take on a whole new level of reliability and accessibility.