As far as there can be a tradition in something as young as internet retailing, it is this: set up your business/website, source your materials/products as cheaply/widely as possible and keep your prices/overheads down to the point where the high street cannot compete.

Moreover, as the chill wind of recession blows tumbleweed through a shopping precinct near you, online retailing is surely only going to get stronger, even if the rate of growth in its sales figures is slowing for the moment. Businesses will sit back, arm themselves with a mountain of stamps and wait for the orders to come in, won't they? Not a bit of it: increasingly, retailers and suppliers are looking further, using the internet to change the nature of their relationship with customers. Procter & Gamble (P&G), for example, has bought a stake in Ocado, the online grocery delivery company. The American consumer goods giant said that it regarded the £5 million 1 per cent stake, its first in a retailer, as a “huge research opportunity”.

Nor is it stopping there. P&G has set up a website - theessentials.com - which provides an online store exclusively for its day-to-day goods, such as toothpaste and deodorant.

Mothercare, under Ben Gordon, its chief executive, is also pushing at the boundaries, rather going against the grain of its (arguably) dowdy and out-of-date image. And, again, it is using the internet: Mr Gordon has introduced the odd notion of online shopping within bricks-and-mortar stores, allowing mothers to try different types of buggies in store and turn to a computer terminal for a greater selection. Then the choice will be delivered, which was rarely possible before. Mothercare has also tried to capitalise on the huge success of social networking websites, such as mumsnet.com, by creating a standalone equivalent - gurgle.com. Mr Gordon's logic is that Mothercare may have been born in an age when new mums turned to their own mothers for maternal advice, but in the internet era nobody, not even Granny, has a monopoly on knowledge.

Of course, you can have too much of a good thing. These are interesting times for price comparison websites. William Glass, president of Shopzilla, the third-largest comparison site, argues that the market is still in its infancy, because many users simply do not understand the proposition. Yet Kelkoo, one of the biggest in Europe, was sold this week at a huge loss by Yahoo!. Last week Kelkoo introduced a price comparison toolbar that will further embed shopping into internet users' web surfing - or will provide an unwelcome intrusion to what should be inviolable screen space.

The etiquette of personal space has long been established in physical world; retailers may be about to find out the hard way where the limits lie on the internet.

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