ReadWriteWeb

Clothes for a cause are a time-honored trope on the Web. The mass production of garments became synonymous with exploitative labor in the 20th century, but the tone has changed in the 21st. Now that the Web has reduced the cost of retail and made international, 24/7 business possible, clothing companies can use their spare change to do some good.

Sevenly is one such company, and it uses the Web with aplomb. It has only been around since June, but it has raised over $175,000 for charities so far. Sevenly chooses a different charity each week, and it sells limited-run t-shirts and hoodies for that charity for seven days only. The hype is driven by Facebook and Twitter. "About 85% of our sales come from social media," Palmer says. The campaigns work by putting the cause right at the top.

Shopping is overwhelming enough, especially around the holidays. The leading consumer Web companies are falling over themselves to make it easier using all the innovative technologies at their disposal. As they figure it out, though, that only leaves consumers with even more options. Do we shop in person, on our desktops, our phones or our tablets? Do we go to a website or launch an app? Which one? How do we pay?

These questions have to be answered before we even get to choosing what to buy. They all make shopping easier, though, whether through giving us more information before we buy or by speeding up the process. Here are three kinds of Web-powered innovations that will contribute to the future of shopping.

How do you keep track of what you want? Do you use Amazon wish lists? Do you share them with your friends? How's that working out for you? Get any good gifts lately? Moreover, what do you do with items that aren't sold on Amazon?

Enter Whimventory. It's an app for making and sharing shopping wishlists. You click a bookmarklet or browser extension on any shopping page, and it saves a link, an image and the price. It will solve problems for anyone who buys things (or wants things). It's simple. That's all I have to explain. But Whimventory is too high-quality to leave it at that. I want to show you more.

Google just put a futuristic spin on shopping catalogs. The company launched an iPad app today that takes traditional catalogs for things like apparel, jewelry, beauty and home goods and adds a layer of rich interactivity, including letting you purchase items on each vendor's website.

Google Catalogs features the most recent catalogs from retailers like Eddie Bauer, Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie and Crate & Barrel, but every item in each photo is adorned with a small tag icon which, when tapped, reveals details about that product.

Have you been waiting for more practical implementations of augmented reality (AR) technology outside of gaming and marketing initiatives? So have we. That's what makes the technology Zugara is launching now so interesting. It has teamed up with U.K.-based online clothing retailer Banana Flame to offer a virtual dressing room of sorts which lets online shoppers "try on" the clothes featured on the retailer's website.

Using the computer's webcam and Zugara's AR e-commerce software dubbed "Webcam Social Shopper," shoppers can immediately see what clothes look like on them and can ask friends for an opinion via Facebook and Twitter.

Did you know that men aged 30 to 49 do more mobile shopping than their peers? Or that 50% of Groupon's business over the next 2 years will come from mobile devices? Or that Starbucks has seen over 3 million micro-payment transactions? These are the sorts of tidbits of information that a new infographic on mobile shopping and e-commerce trends helps to visualize.

Location-based media company JiWire has released a new report detailing the mobile shopping trends among the "on-the-go" audience, which JiWire defines as people using tablets, smartphones or laptops away from their home or workplace. According to the study, 79% of these users are becoming more comfortable making purchases on their mobile devices, even for big ticket items over $1,000.

It also found that these consumers are heavily engaged with local deals services like Groupon and LivingSocial, for example, and had a high demand for tablet computers.

My wife and I thought that once we bought a house, our love of looking at homes for sale would be over. Turns out it's just plain fun to look inside, at the backyards, around the neighborhoods and at the prices of houses available for purchase. I enjoy it, at least, and if you do too - you should check out the free iPad app released by Realtor.com this week. (iTunes link) I think it's my favorite in the field. I wish we'd had it when we bought our house in Portland, Oregon.

Visa is launching its own version of the location-based discount, in a move that rivals Facebook Places Deals, Foursquare and other mobile social networks hoping to capitalize on a shopper's physical presence in order to offer them bargains. But in Visa's case, no "checkin" is required. In fact, neither is a smartphone.

Instead, the credit card company is experimenting with SMS text messages containing offers which are sent users who opt-in to the new program. In its initial phase, clothing retailer The Gap is Visa's only partner. Discounts are sent to consumers in predefined zip codes and demographics after qualifying transactions are made with their Visa cards.

Like the popular flight-finding service Kayak, a new startup called Sparkbuy, launching at the Web 2.0 Expo today, wants to make the process of finding the perfect gadget easier using a similar simplified interface. Although consumers already have a number of gadget-shopping services at their disposal, including everything from Google Product Search to Amazon, Sparkbuy is innovating through its easy-to-use website design and its manuallymcurated collection of data.

The result is a gadget-shopping site that even the most woefully un-tech-savvy consumer could use, while still appealing to gadget geeks looking for an easier comparison shopping tool.