The high-tech way to do your Christmas shopping

With the busiest shopping weekend of the year receding into memory, so, too, perhaps, is the romantic notion that holiday shopping is a wholly magical event. But these days the weary consumer can take solace in a new alternative to crowded department stores and the persistent shortage of parking spaces: "cybershopping" on the Internet.

For the first time since the hyping of the Internet began, shopping on the World Wide Web is easy, efficient and full of many more finds than your average shopping mall. And also for the first time, making purchases on the Web is a relatively safe proposition, as long as you take certain precautions.

During the last year, many leading retailers and catalogue companies have opened Web "stores," where consumers can browse through thousands of virtual aisles and view millions of items. Last week, Saks Fifth Avenue (www.dreamshop. com/saksfifthavenue) opened for business on the Web with a limited but varied selection of merchandise, from red silk lingerie to a Ralph Lauren link bracelet. And this year, F.A.O. Schwarz (www.faoschwarz.com), Eddie Bauer (www.ebauer.com) and J.C. Penney (www.jcpenney.com) were among the many venerable retailers opening Web sites. And Amazon.com, an on- line bookseller, claims to have a larger inventory of book titles than any actual store in the country. Perhaps the biggest advantage to cybershopping isn't the absence of a line at the cash register, but what an hour of browsing can turn up. True, many of the items are also available in catalogues, but who has that many close at hand? Without even leaving home, consumers can purchase an authentic turn-of-the-century rocking horse from Windmill Antiques (www.classicengland.co.uk/collect/windmill/windmill.html), a London antiques broker; a gift pack of seven-ounce portions of Beef Wellington from Omaha Steaks (www.omahasteaks. com), and for sports collectors, a personalized Louisville Slugger baseball bat (www.slugger.com). On the Internet, you have 24-hour-a-day, seven-days-a-week access to a wider variety of hard-to-find items than even the most tireless shopper could turn up. "Where else can you shop in your pajamas after midnight?" said Wendy Taylor, an editor at PC Computing magazine. Private on-line services like America Online and Compuserve also offer electronic stores, but the Internet has a far greater variety. There are thousands of antiques shops, electronics stores and cyberboutiques on the Web; some emanate from as far away as Japan. If anything, too much shopping is possible on the Web. This year, consumers will spend $1 billion on purchases on-line, almost double what they spent in 1995, according to Jupiter Communications, a market research company in New York. But that's a small fraction of the more than $50 billion total that Americans will spend this year shopping from home -- by television and catalogues. The security issue One reason for a lingering reluctance is the widespread impression that giving your credit card number over the Internet makes you highly vulnerable to fraud or theft. While this was once the case, for the most part, it is no longer true. Though no credit card transaction is entirely secure, cyberstore owners and industry analysts are quick to point out that the risk of fraud on the Internet is no higher than when you give your credit card number over the phone or hand your card to a salesclerk. "You face a greater danger, as a consumer, of having your credit card information stolen when you go out to eat at a restaurant than you do on the Internet -- by a factor of 10," said Joshua Tretakoff, manager of alternative media at the Sharper Image, the high-tech novelty shop. "At a restaurant, you blindly hand your credit card to an individual who you know absolutely nothing about, and he or she disappears with that card." On the Internet, however, a card number follows a prescribed path and is turned into a code from the moment it leaves your computer, he added. Yvette Debow, a vice president at Jupiter, said: "The possibility of fraud over the Internet is only as likely as fraud from a transaction in person or over the phone, since the fraud is usually done at the end point." And if your credit card number is stolen, both Visa and Mastercard offer on-line transactions the same protection that they do for other credit card fraud: the consumer is liable for only $50. To insure your card information is coded, however, you must make sure the Web browser you are using is a "secure" one, meaning it supports the coding standard for making transactions. The current versions of Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Explorer, the most popular browsers, use what is called Secure Socket Layer technology, affording transactions the highest level of security possible on the Internet. And if you are still wary of sending your credit card number off into the ether, you can usually find an "800" number on the store's Web site and call or fax in your order. More catalogue than store Shopping on the Internet is more like catalogue shopping than cruising department stores and malls, despite the sudden glut of "cybermalls" that try to mirror the experience of walking down a store-filled aisle. Most home computers, for example, don't display photographs that have the quality of a glossy print in a catalogue. And there's no substitute for picking up and touching an item before you buy it. Some stores, including Sharper Image (www.sharperimage.com), say their Web sites offer a larger inventory than their stores or catalogue, while several department stores offer a much smaller inventory than their real-life counterparts, using the Web as more of a showroom than a fully stocked store. The Saks Fifth Avenue Web store has only 28 items in its women's section. In a typical Web shopping site, you click on the name of the item to view a photograph or drawing and get a detailed description and price. Some sites allow you to rotate the item to see it from different angles, in different colors and, if it involves sound, listen to a sample of it. Many book-selling sites allow you to read the latest reviews of popular titles, learn something about the author or browse categories of books. Amazon.com will even offer suggestions based on books you have bought there in the past. Compact disks are perhaps the most popular merchandise sold on the Web -- and are in some ways the best suited to it. CD-Now (www.cdnow.com), the most popular music store on the Web, has the largest inventory of CDs. Tunes.com (www.tunes.com) lets you hear 30- second samples of thousands of songs. There are several ways to approach cybershopping. If you know wha you want and what store carries it, it would be best to go directly to the Web site of your choice. Strolling the cybermalls Another approach is to shop in one of the dozens of cybermalls, which assemble a selection of stores into one master site. Cybertown(www.cybertown.com), for example, has a vast assortment of services, chat rooms and unusual stores, which include classic mall shops like Museum Classics, which sells reproductions of ancient art. The Internet Mall (www.internet-mall.com) is a huge pointer site to an eclectic collection of small boutiques and specialty shops and can serve as a good starting point for browsers. But Cybershop (www.cybershop.com) is more a store in itself, offering a searchable data base of brand-name products. One of the best laid out, though still evolving, shopping malls on the Web is Dreamshop (www.dreamshop.com). Owned and operated by Time- Warner Cable, it includes the new Saks site, plus Eddie Bauer, 800 Flowers, Godiva Chocolate, Omaha Steaks, Spiegel and others. Among the more interesting malls on the Web is Classic England (www.classicengland.co.uk), where you can find all sorts of English merchandise. And not surprisingly, there is a Web version of television's QVC, called Interactive QVC (www.iqvc.com), and it preserves the quirkiness of the original. But as with conventional shopping, many of the best bargains and most interesting merchandise can be found in tiny boutiques located off the beaten path. For example, there's the site called Sovietski (www.sovietski.com), produced by an importer in San Diego, with items from the former Soviet Union. Other sites cater to collectors of baseball cards, comic books and stamps. If you are just starting out, probably the best way to find merchandise is by connecting to one of the Web's search engines or directories, like Yahoo!, Infoseek or Excite. If you are looking for a specific store or type of store, you can type in the store name, or the subject, and with patience, find the Web address. Still, finding what you are looking for can be both difficult and time consuming, and many newcomers to the Web will tire of having to jump from site to site and item to item, an experience that has earned Net shopping the reputation of "Death by 1,000 clicks." Others will enjoy the adventure and find it like window shopping, without the sore feet.

Copyright 1996
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