THE CUTTING EDGE: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : For Shoppers, Internet Beats Big Online Services

With Christmas fast approaching, what better time to go shopping on the Internet?

You’ll recall that last week in this space I made fun of the slim pickings offered to cybershoppers on CompuServe, America Online and Prodigy. Since then, I’ve set out to learn whether the wild and woolly world of the Internet offers more in this department.

The answer is an unqualified yes. In fact, cruising only the World Wide Web, I can report that the Internet offers a staggering array of goods and services, many of them quite interesting. In that respect it beats the Big Three hands down. But I’m still not sure it offers all this stuff effectively enough to eclipse the mail-order catalogs that I find so convenient.

First things first. The Internet offers nothing if not quantity. A search of “chocolate” in the well-known Yahoo index (https://www.yahoo.com), for instance, turned up 77 matches. You can use the Internet to purchase Godiva chocolates, Hershey’s chocolates, chocolates containing rain forest nuts and triangular chocolate Gay Bars from lesbian chocolate makers.

But that’s nothing. A search of “T-shirt” on Yahoo turned up a staggering 232 matches, and almost all of them appeared to be in the business of selling this classic geek garb. Unlike the Big Three, all the ones I tried offered pictures of their wares too.

Internet merchandise goes far beyond chocolates, T-shirts and, of course, computer hardware and software. You can buy flowers, insect repellent, fancy Frisbees, compact discs, sporting goods, diapers, obscure beers, good wine, even coffins (try https://shops.net/shops/ and search “funerals.’)

As should be evident by now, shopping on the Internet is lots more fun than shopping the commercial online services. While the Big Three emphasize some of the same old retailers you’d find at the most boring suburban shopping mall--are we near Denver? Dallas? Washington? who can tell?--the Internet offers an experience much more like shopping in a great and distinctive city, with the base and the exalted all spread before you in a giant smorgasbord of possibility.

Unfortunately, the mall analogy has another dimension. On the Big Three, shoppers are reasonably safe. You make purchases in an electronically secure environment, and you’re often dealing with reputable, established merchants of the caliber of J.C. Penney or Eddie Bauer. It takes money to set up shop on CompuServe, for instance, and you can be sure that CompuServe tries to weed out any fly-by-night operators.

On the Internet, the barriers to entry are minimal. Internet shopping isn’t always like buying from a street vendor, but a good deal of caution is in order. World Wide Web browsers should all contain a little code that flashes the words caveat emptor on screen before any transaction can be completed.

You probably know by now that it’s not safe to transmit your credit card number by e-mail, although I suspect it’s probably no more dangerous than laying it on the counter in a store. Nevertheless, you should only use your credit card when you’ve telnetted to a vendor’s computer, or when you’ve connected with an Internet browser that supports secure transactions, as Netscape does. (Without a huge effort on your part, Netscape can encrypt your payment information to hide it from prying eyes.)

And you should never buy without using a credit card. In other words, don’t send cash or check. Once you’ve sent your money to a vendor on the other side of the country, what recourse do you have if he turns out to be a crook? Credit cards, by contrast, offer some excellent consumer protection in this department. Just make sure you don’t pay the charge until the product arrives and works well.

A bigger problem sometimes is bandwidth. Even with a 28.8 bps modem I found accessing various Web sites tedious. Popular shopping sites can be quite busy, and graphics rich pages take a long time to wriggle through the phone line.

On the other hand, you’d be amazed what you can stumble across. For instance, sheerly by accident I wandered into the wonderful Todd & Holland Tea Merchants “shop” on the World Wide Web, where I discovered the biggest selection of teas I’ve ever seen outside of London. They have so many that they’re organized by region: Darjeeling, Yunnan, Ceylon, Assam and so forth. There are countless blends and shadings (Earl Grey, Earl Grey with double bergamot, Earl Grey with Lavender, etc.), and they will even make custom blends. You can visit Todd & Holland via the Branch Mall at https://branch.com.

In fact, there are several of these Internet “malls,” where a variety of vendors can be reached. Others you might want to visit include the eMall at https://eMall.com, and TravelShop, at https://www.travelshop.com.

In contrast, the Internet Shopping Network (https://www.internet.net) struck me as poorly organized and sometimes made me think of a guy in a bad rug hawking cubic zirconia on TV. Consider this verb-starved description, which I lifted verbatim: “The Tazmanian Devil and timeless quality blended into one precision writing instrument. Great collectible for today, an heirloom for generations to come. Taz and pen come in polished gold-plated finish.”

Since the Internet is so vast, browsing can be difficult, but Internet shopping is particularly effective when you already have some idea of what you’re looking for, thanks to the increasingly powerful search engines available (you can access many of these via Yahoo as well).

The Net is an especially good place to buy books. Several Internet booksellers have enormous inventories, and some offer attractive discounts, gift-wrapping, links to other book sites and more. My favorites include Amazon.com, at https://www.amazon.com/, which boasts an inventory of one million books--basically, every book in print. (Actually, this seems to mean that they will order stuff they don’t have, although they still have a lot, and their database is not a bad stand-in for Books in Print.) Other good book sites include Book Stacks Unlimited at https://www.books.com/ and BookSite at https://www.booksite.com.

To arm yourself with consumer information, you might want to try Consumer World, at https://www.consumerworld.org. And if you still think catalogs are the way to go, check out Catalog Mart at https://catalog.savvy.com/

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Daniel Akst welcomes messages at Dan.Akst@latimes.com. His World Wide Web page is at https://www.caprica.com/~akst/

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Shopping Tips

For a good look at Internet shopping, try visiting Web Review (https://gnn.com), where you’ll also see an excellent example of how the World Wide Web can be used to publish a new kind of magazine. For a fuller treatment of what you can buy in cyberspace, there’s Jaclyn Easton’s “$hopping on the Internet and Beyond!” (Coriolis, $19.99), which is as breathlessly enthusiastic as its title, but extensive and fun nonetheless. It comes with coupons too.