The Virtual Geographies of Retail Display

This article explores the commercial website as a virtual landscape of consumption, and considers how six Canadian retailers are displaying this landscape to entice a rapidly growing community of surfers. The article argues that the virtual geographies of retail display are determined by the interplay between corporate philosophies and the specificities of the market sector. In turn, the resultant ‘experiential space’ of the web store can be thought of as being framed by two broadly opposed discourses, which propose divergent levels of technological complexity in the design of the web store. However, the tension between these discursive extremities is already beginning to stabilize around a customized strategy of display, which uses real-time information about consumer behaviour in the web store to realize an appropriate balance between simplicity and interactivity at the scale of the individual surfer.