Online Buying Click, Click, Clicks With Shoppers Too Busy for Malls

After commuting to work three hours a day, fighting the traffic at shopping malls ranks low on Laura Castel de Oro’s list of things she’d like to do.

So this holiday season, she won’t.

At 1 a.m. Tuesday morning, long after her 5-year-old daughter had gone to sleep, Castel de Oro placed her gray laptop computer on the dining room table of her Rancho Santa Margarita condominium, plugged in the power cord and the phone line, and went to work on the 17 people on her shopping list.

After an hour or so, only a few gifts remained on her list and online shopping had another convert.

“I just don’t have the time to shop around the malls,” said the 29-year-old, an instructor at Los Angeles Unified School District. “I’m commuting 50 miles to work each way, and once I get home, I have a little girl and I don’t just want to drag her out to go shopping. I want us to do our own things.”

Castel de Oro is one of the millions of time-pressed, technology-savvy consumers doing their shopping on the Web this holiday season.

With the convenience of having cyber-stores open around the clock, a lack of crowds and a seemingly infinite selection of merchandise, online shopping may reach a record $3.5 billion in sales this year, more than doubling last year’s figures, industry analysts estimate.

But for every Castel de Oro flocking to the Internet, many other Web surfers have not, even those who have worked with personal computers since their youth.

“I’m not very trusting when it comes to online transactions, and it’s only recently that some of the Web sites have put privacy protections up,” said John Foley, who has had a home computer since 1982 and sits on the board of the Orange Apple Computer Club.

Such is the state of online shopping, whose sales, while booming, are still a drop in the bucket compared to the $174 billion traditional retailers expect to bring in this holiday season, according to the National Retail Federation.

“More affluent and time-crunched people are turning to the Web. It’s about convenience right now, more than price, and I would expect that to continue,” said Farhad Mohit, chief executive of Binary Compass Enterprises, a Los Angeles research firm that studies online commerce.

The average online shopper has a household income of $82,000, is married and--in growing numbers--has children, Mohit said.

Castel de Oro is definitely among those who have bought into the concept.

Since May, she has bought flowers for friends, takeout food for dinner and had groceries delivered, all from online stores.

“For things like toiletries, cleaners and juice, it’s the best,” Castel de Oro said.

Even though she does not compare prices much either online or offline, she feels that shopping on the Web--where the computer gives her a running tally every time she places an item in her virtual shopping cart--gives her better control over her budget.

A friend initially introduced Castel de Oro to cyber- shopping by referring her to an online auction, but now she surfs from one site to the next, clicking on banner advertisements and even typing in random locations just to see what happens.

“Sometimes I would just plug in names of stores to see what happens,” she said.

Many Web browsers, including Netscape Corp.’s Navigator and Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer, have been programmed to automatically go to a specific site when a key word is entered. For example, type in “toys” and Netscape will bring up the site for eToys, the Web’s largest toy retailer.

But consumers like Foley, 52, of Santa Ana, remain a hard sell.

Foley said he recently purchased a pack of high-capacity computer cartridges, which were on sale online for a price that could not be matched in a regular store. But he won’t go online to shop for holiday gifts.

“My wife is a clothing shopper extraordinaire, and she’ll find deals no matter where they are,” said Foley. “Online, I’ll buy something for the right price. If it’s there, I’ll take a chance on it.”

Convenience is not an issue for Shirley Conner because she already does most of her Christmas shopping through catalogs.

“I used to work with computers all day, and I had a stressful enough job at the daytime that I just didn’t want to come home and mess with them at night,” said Conner, 60, who recently retired from being a computer systems programmer.

But Conner, an Orange resident, was recently lured into online shopping when she found handmade collectible Longaberger baskets at the eBay Inc.’s online auction site last month. The baskets are not sold in stores and the one she bought would have been difficult to find.

“I’m going to kill the person who turned me on to this,” Conner said jokingly.

Being ripped off online, either by being charged for a product and never receiving it or having a credit card number pilfered, is no more prevalent than when shoppers go to stores, experts say. But this being the early stages of electronic commerce, flaws in the system remain.

“I probably wouldn’t characterize online shopping as great at this point, simply because everyone in the industry knows how it can be when it’s done right, and it’s not done right in many places,” said Tim Brady, vice president of production and an executive producer at Yahoo Inc. “It’s all getting easier, though, and I think in the next 18 months or so, it will get very good, very easy and very convenient.”

Sometimes, it’s just a matter of getting the basics down.

Barbara Barber of Laguna Hills is still waiting for the computer cartridges she ordered from an online store in October.

“Now, I’ve decided that I’ll just go to Fry’s, and whatever they cost at Fry’s, I’ll buy them there,” Barber said. “It was very unprofessional and they [the online retailer she ordered from] didn’t handle it as they should have.”