Press Release 11-27-2002

Online Shoppers Get Plenty of Help Finding Bargains
By Leslie Walker
Thursday, November 28, 2002; Page E01

Internet shopping has gone so mainstream it's become a holiday tradition for many families, mine included. You set down your nightcap or coffee beside your PC, then click over to DealTime or BizRate to check out the latest sales. Or maybe cart your laptop to your recliner and window-shop on your wireless home network while watching TV.

But even after half a dozen holiday seasons of Internet commerce, many people still find it hard to figure out where to shop online. While Amazon.com has become the Wal-Mart of the Web, and the nation's big-name retailers run many of the leading sites, a host of top Web shops still aren't household names.
Here is a guide to holiday shopping online, an overview of sites and tools you might want to check out soon -- real soon, since there are fewer days than usual between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

If you're like most folks, you haven't found gifts for your loved ones yet and the Web is getting better at helping. In addition to gift-finding sites such as RedEnvelope, the leading portals -- Yahoo, MSN and America Online -- offer most-popular lists linking to the season's hot gifts, which means two-inch radio-controlled cars, Chicken Dance Elmos, Rapunzel Barbies, Yu-Gi-Oh cards, thumb-size computer storage drives and digital photographic gear.
More than 130 merchants offer free shipping, most tied to minimum purchases of $100 or more. You can find the offers by clicking on the "free shipping" link at Bizrate.com (which lists 137 such shipping deals) or the "bargains" area of Yahoo's shopping section (which links to 20 sellers that waive shipping charges). Electronics retailer Buy.com is perhaps the most aggressive, waiving freight charges regardless of the order size. Amazon.com is generous, too, offering free ground shipping on book and music orders of more than $25.

It generally pays to buy more than one item at a time online, especially if it will boost your order over a free-shipping threshold. Walmart.com, for example, offered Rapunzel Barbie for $3.36 less than Amazon this week but charged $6.11 for shipping. Amazon offered free shipping on toy orders for more than $99, making it a better deal if you're buying a bunch of books and electronics anyway.

Some of my favorite Web shops are Bluefly.com for women's designer clothes, TigerDirect.com for electronics, Ice.com for jewelry, MusiciansFriend.com for musical gifts, EthnicGrocer.com for delicacies and Horchow.com for (admittedly expensive) dining delights such as beef Wellington and New Zealand lambsicles. Well-known offline gift shops with strong Web offerings include the Smithsonian Store and New York's Museum of Modern Art.
For bargains, I browse SmartBargains.com, Bizrate.com and DealTime rather than hop from store to store. Those sites cull deals from all over the Web and let you search by category and product. If you're really into discount shopping, you might visit DealCatcher.com, PriceGrabber.com, FatWallet.com and ClassicCloseouts.com. For my money, the Web's best price-comparison tool is at MySimon.com, which shows far more merchants selling each item than most comparison sites. I also like BizRate's shopping tools, particularly its site reviews.

You can, of course, type the name of almost any big retailer you can think of -- Gap, Wal-Mart, Tiffany, Nordstrom, Circuit City -- in the address box at the top of your Web browser, preceding it with "www." and following it with ".com," and be whisked to its Web store. You don't have to get there by visiting a search engine or browsing the shopping section of your Internet service provider.

Yet the major portals are getting better at helping shoppers navigate the sites of different retailers when browsing in a category, such as clothes or electronics, or looking for particular products. I find Yahoo's shopping area more useful than America Online's, which is surprising, since AOL's shopping section is powered for the first time this year by technology from Amazon.com. AOL's service is tilted heavily toward the few hundred merchants that pay AOL to be featured, like anchor department stores in a mall. Searching for products on AOL can be frustrating because sellers are not always clearly identified.

While Yahoo has been running annoying video ads from Dell Computer on its main shopping page lately, it features 14,000 merchants selling 10 million items. It does a nice job of blending mass merchants with mom-and-pops, presenting prominent links to big-name retailers while letting you drill down in searches to see similar products offered by medium-size and small stores. Merchants are clearly identified, so you know where you're going before you click. While buying from no-name sellers can be risky, Yahoo is a great way to explore new shopping destinations. Yahoo also redesigned its shopping service over the summer and reports that sales jumped 44 percent after the makeover.

Another valuable tool is Google's search service for mail-order catalogues (catalogs.google.com). Google has scanned more than 1,500 paper catalogues and lets you search them by brand (J. Crew, for instance) or product type (cashmere sweater). It will display the product pages for matches. A recent search on "talking dolls" turned up 37 matching pages, from such sellers as Disney, FAO Schwarz and Lilly's Kids.