The good news for online apparel retailers is good news for just about everyone else who sells retail on the Web. I expect this story will be all over the mainstream media for a day or so: Online retail clothing sales reached $18.3 billion last year, $1.1 billion more than computer hardware and software sales.

The perceived hassles of ill-fitting clothes, tough return policies and the inability to touch the product have pretty much faded away. The boom in high-speed Internet connections and improved e-commerce technology give virtual clothes shoppers a new luxury item: the gift of time.

With work and family commitments, many consumers find they have less time to browse the clothing aisles at malls and standalone stores. Online, they can browse at their leisure, with great photos and fitting instructions just clicks away. Some even offer live chat with a store associate. Clothes shopping on the Web is today’s equivalent of our grandparent’s perusing the Sears or JC Penney catalog. In fact, the JC Penny’s online catalog is currently one of the most successful on the Web.

Many of my store-design clients are brick-and-mortar clothing shops, so you might think I’d look at online apparel sales as a threat to their businesses and mine. To the contrary. As I’ve mentioned several times in this blog, I see e-commerce and brick-and-mortar complementing each other as a permanent long-term strategy. Each one drives traffic to the other.

At some point, a given retailer’s physical sales might give way to the virtual, or vice versa. The former happened with TRIO Display five years ago. But as I mentioned recently, we’re considering complementing our WaveridersGallery.net site with a physical presence so potential clients can see and touch the artwork.

Online clothing’s dominance can only spell increasing acceptance for all kinds of e-commerce merchandise. If I can sell mannequins and display cases on the Web, you can sell high-touch, high -color clothing–and if you’re not, someone else is.