The folks in the fashion ecommerce world seem to be running out of ideas on how to get people off the high-street, and back on their asses in front of the PC with their credit card details to hand. So, lo and behold, just in time for the Christmas season, they have come with a way for you to have the best of both shopping worlds- all from the comfort of your own home...and laptop.

Two new "virtual mall" websites have launched this month, both trying to entice us ladies to drop that whole shopping thing, and just do it virtually.

Mallplace says that they're "the new way to shop" and describe their shopping experience as being "effortless" and positively dripping with "online discounts". They promise to have special items and all our favorite shops like Topshop and ASOS all under one, big digital roof.

After taking look and trying to *shop* in Mallplace's "mall", I found their description of being "simple" and "straightforward" a bit of an overstatement.  Myself and a lot of the women I know are all online for 10+ hours a day and get how to navigate around your average website and netowrk - but this website does my head in. I don't think it's *straightforward* at all.

Your welcome page is a nifty layout of the different shops that you can go into using Papervision3D, the new open source 3D engine that we nearly creamed ourselves over in September with Pop Candy's Twitter Comics. However, there's something about the way Mallplace uses the Papervision3D that bugs me. It just seems like Pollock New Media wanted to throw it up there for the sake of using it, without trying to be creative or innovative with it. It just seems out of place with the way the rest of the website looks and functions.

If you can figure out how to actually get to the virtual shopping mall part of Mallplace, you'll get the feeling that you've been there before. No, not because you've shopped in a mall before but because it looks eerily like The Sims.

I just get a cheap "virtual world", video game feel from it and the usability is pretty poor. You can spin around in circles and try to find a shop you like. If you find a shop you want to buy something in, you click on it, and then you're given three different columns of text and links and it becomes unclear what you're supposed to be doing - I thought I was supposed to be able to shop with ease, not be inundated with copy and a bunch of links!

That's where my journey with Mallplace ended and my mini shopping quest with MyMall began. MyMall actually launched before Mallplace, which went live (in dreaded Beta) today, on November 12th and they are very, very different.

MyMall looks like an actual mall - high glass ceilings and all that - and you start your shopping experience in an elevator...er, lift. You're instructed and shown how to choose one out of their 35 floors (unlike Mallplace where I was told I was on the Christmas floor but couldn't figure out how to find other floors) and you're set loose in a very posh, upscale, slightly American looking mall of the future.

Like Mallplace, the usability is a bit shaky. If you zip past a shop you like, like LeSenza if you're on the Lingerie floor, and you quickly click the left directional button, you'll probably miss it. How to get back to it? I'm not sure. You'll figure it out eventually, but the usability isn't exactly flawless - albeit clearer and easier than Mallplace's.

Fortunately, however, once you click on a store you like, you are literally only one click away from truly shopping in that store's online shop. Simple. Quick. Easy. Imagine! A shopping website where it's easy to actual SHOP!

Personally, although I hate Christmas shopping and I can't deal with all the morons that crowd into malls on a Saturday afternoon, I don't think I'd use these virtual malls.

While MyMall is far better and easier to use than Mallplace, I'm still not sure I see the point. Perhaps if you're not an experienced patron of online shopping and would like a website that plops you down in a virtual mall so you can essentially see the stores, this might be the thing for you.

But if you're a bit more web savvy, chances are you'll either Google the product you're looking after, or go straight to the establishment's online shop to purchase your items without needing to hop into an virtual elevator to find it.