Everybody loves to shop! Shopping is a major recreational activity. It is all too human to become absorbed in the details of selection, purchase, and display behavior. When you shop, you buy things, when you need to buy things, you head off to the market. You can find everything in the market!

A market is where you buy and sell stuff. You buy and sell things in a market putting into consideration the things you need and the things you want. You buy and sell stuff at a certain price.

The prices of the goods may fluctuate depending on the time of the year. The market for roses increases during Valentine's. You can get Christmas cards and Christmas trees and all things Christmas-y at half the price after the Yuletide season.

Marketplaces and street markets. A marketplace is a physical location where goods and services are exchanged. A mall is a market.

Bloomingdale's is a market. Sephora is a market. From your high-end mall to your salvation army, all these are markets.

The traditional marketplace is a city square where traders set up stalls and buyers browse the merchandise. This kind of market is very old, and countless such markets are still in operation around the whole world.

In the US, such markets fell. But the renewed interest in local food has caused the reinvention of this type of market, called farmers' markets in many towns and cities.

In continental Europe, especially in France, street markets, as well as "marketplaces" (covered places where merchants have stalls, but not entire stores) are common. Both resellers and producers sell their stuff to the public.

Markets are often temporary, with stalls only present for two days a week ("market days"), however some (such as Camden Market in London, UK) are open every day of the week.

Such markets are normally specialist-the various stalls of Camden Market, along with the shops associated with it, sell a variety of alternative lifestyle products ranging from clothes and jewelry to CDs, instruments and furniture.

An example of a large market is Chatuchak weekend market in Bangkok. It covers over 35 acres and contains upwards of 15000 stalls. It is estimated that the market receives between 200,000 and 300,000 visitors each day.

Most stalls are only open on Saturdays and Sundays. The market offers a wide variety of products including household items, clothing, Thai handicrafts, religious artifacts, collectibles, foods, and live animals.

But now that we have the Internet and the World Wide Web, the market is right at your finger tips! It makes everything so much more easier, buying and selling a thousand and one items can be done at home. The e-Bay web site is considered a market.

e-Bay.com is the major auction service on the Web. eBay popularized the concept of buying and selling online, and both individuals and commercial enterprises list items for sale.

Everything there is for free (at least the posting, browsing and bidding of items) If an item is purchased, the seller pays eBay an additional fee. Millions of items are offered, and in 2002, nearly $15 billion worth of merchandise was sold through this service.

Another example of an online market is Amazon.com. The largest online shopping site and one of the most widely known e-commerce sites on the Web. Amazon started out as an online bookstore, constantly making news with the number of titles it offered for sale.