Mark Stein

A Kentucky entrepreneur has created a new shopping experience for the $4-per-gallon gasoline world.

VirtualEShopping.com allows consumers to roam a virtual mall at their convenience and be connected immediately to the Web site of any store or product they click on.

“You can shop in your pajamas and still see (your friends) and chat,” said president and site founder Mark Stein. “There’s something really special about that. And it’s open 24-7.”

Although the site is new, his plan is to have sites unique to some 275 cities — including Chattanooga — available by the end of September.

VirtualEChattanooga.com was launched in late July and already features general links to Chattanooga attractions, theaters, restaurants and weather. Eventually, Mr. Stein said, the city’s virtual mall could have specific links to attractions, businesses and services.

Advertisers will be attracted, he said, because owners do not pay rent for their presence in the mall. Instead, their cost is pay-per-click — as low as 10 cents per click — and is similar in price structure to bidding systems used by Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Katie Reinsmidt, a spokeswoman for CBL & Associates Properties Inc., said a bricks and mortar mall won’t ever be replaced by a virtual mall. Indeed, she said, her company has found ways to use the Internet to complement the actual mall shopping experience.

She said the NearbyNow Web site (www.nearbynow.com), for instance, allows shoppers to search CBL malls on their computer or by mobile phone for specific products before they go to the mall and shop.

“People choose to shop at the mall because its a social experience, and it’s a place to gather with your family and friends,” Ms. Reinsmidt said. “It’s a social experience. I don’t think that can be replicated on a virtual mall.”

Among the advantages for consumers, in addition to having many virtual stores under one roof, Mr. Stein said, are the social networking opportunities, the chance to shop at unfamiliar stores and the impulse shopping abilities.

Friends can create personas that look like them — or completely different — to navigate the mall, he said. They then can join friends, just as they might at an actual mall, and chat electronically as they shop together in the same virtual stores.

“It’s social networking in 3-D,” he said.

As they shop, they will see stores they’re familiar with — Wal-Mart, Best Buy, L.L. Bean and Old Navy, for example — but they’ll also see stores at which they’ve been meaning to stop, Mr. Stein said, or stores they’re not familiar with but might want to be.

A click on the front door of the stores will take them to the 2-D Web site, and a click on an image, slide show or video in a store window will transport them to a featured item on the merchant’s internal Web pages.

Mall carts, kiosks and billboards also can display items the shopper might click on, and some stores may display coupon offers shoppers can click on, print out and redeem.

Retailers can spend their pay-per-click advertising dollar to secure space on any of the aforementioned interactive virtual areas within the mall or choose display advertising on the site’s main page.

The impulse shopping ability will allow people who have just tucked children into bed, for instance, to shop at 10 p.m. — complete with the sounds of an active mall (which can be turned off) — and catch up with their friends electronically, Mr. Stein said.

The site founder said he and co-workers anticipated that mall shoppers would be 75 percent women, but he said the early count is split at 50 percent men and women.

The future of VirtualEShopping.com will include the ability for MacIntosh users — it’s only available to PC users now — to navigate the site, he said, and a chance for videographers in each city to submit a city tour video, which would be displayed on that city’s virtual mall.

Mr. Stein, a professional mediator in Louisville for 20 years, said he found success online when he launched OurDivorceAgreement.com, a sort of do-it-yourself plan for splitting couples, in 2002.

That site, available throughout the United States, Canada and Australia, “fully funded the development (over two and a half years) of this event,” he said.

Vik Chada, director of technical commercialization for Greater Louisville Inc., who has consulted with Mr. Stein, told the Louisville Courier-Journal that a virtual mall may be an idea whose time has come.

The mall, he said, is “a convergence of multiple technologies in a very unique and innovative manner. This is the future.”