I have to admit that I'm slightly voyeuristic. Not in any sort of perverted way, I hasten to add, but to the extent that I'm interested in people and what they do online.

Running my online business, I can see what each of my site users purchases from a variety of online stores, because we have to track their transactions so that we can credit their account with the relevant cashback amount. Last Christmas, I could easily see that online retailers would have a bumper festive season, while the high street retailers would have a rough ride.

This Christmas time, it was noticeable that aside from the usual purchases of games, DVDs, CDs, books and electronic items, a lot of shoes seem to have been ordered online. The biggest plus to ordering online is often the price and the fact that you need not wait for a spotty assistant at your local shoe shop to go to the trouble of finding a matching pair of the shoe that you quite like. However, when ordering shoes online you've obviously got the hassle of having to send shoes back that don't fit properly. Shoes are notorious for changing sizes: I seem to range from 6½ to 9, depending on the shop.

What is pleasing for someone working in e-tail, therefore, is that people are willing to deal with these hassles and save money by shopping online. It shows just how much the market has matured since boo.com, the online fashion retailer which flopped spectacularly in May 2000, with a resulting loss of confidence in e-commerce that nearly caused the entire market to collapse in on itself. I can remember being constantly at ITN that year, recording one soundbyte or another when a dot.com went bust or got sold on for much less than their hyped valuation (and yes, that included my soJewish website).

Back to Christmas (or Chanukah in my case). I did most of my shopping in supermarkets, primarily due to sheer laziness and it being easier to pick up some nice gifts at the same time as a frozen pizza or some oven chips. On the other hand, my sister chose to shop through the websites of high street retailers and combine their pre-Christmas sales prices with online discount vouchers, plus, in her case, the cashback she earned from me.

One great online retailer that I did use was the Alternative Gift Catalogue from World Vision, where you can "purchase" items for families and communities in the developing world. I was most amused with the apple tree that I bought for my Dad to give to a family in Senegal, in thanks for his help as my solicitor fighting Apple Computers over the rights to the iTunes.co.uk domain name. The website also allows you to customise the card that the recipient gets sent, so I was able to use "I hope that this family's apples aren't as sour as the ones we keep getting sent" as the greeting.

On charity, I have like just about everyone been moved and deeply shocked by the events resulting from the Asian Tsunami and have been amazed that the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) has been able to withstand the levels of visits that they have received.

I've noticed that their traffic levels have increased by some 1143 per cent since the disaster occurred. A number of unique ways of donating to the disaster have sprung up over the past few days with British Airways offering to donate £2 to a Unicef appeal for every person who joins their Executive Club and receive offers from them. In our own small way, our site is offering 15p to the DEC for every person who signs up to the service and will, by the end of the week, be offering new users the ability to donate their cash back (including their £5 sign-on bonus) straight to an appeal of their choice.

Benjamin Cohen is the founder of QuickQuid. He will be writing an occasional diary for Times Online on life for a small businessman in the tech sector

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