I have a little confession to make. I used the Internet for all my Christmas shopping; I was also a naughty elf because I tested out what I thought might be the weakest link in the whole purchasing experience -- I deliberately misordered some items.

When we (used to) see the long lines of gift receivers after Christmas in department stores, many were there to exchange a product; Aunt Nell's notion that you would like a pink sweater or slippers with Minnie Mouse hanging out of the front of them used to result in a run for the service desks. How would on-line retailers handle the process? Many of the established names in retail proudly voice online that their bricks and mortar existence makes it easy to correct errors and make exchanges. How would the .com stores fare.

What grades do you give for online holiday shopping? Email Paul McGoldrick

I ordered products from maybe twenty different companies for the holidays. The Majority were .com only stores, a few were catalog companies with a web presence and two were old bricks and mortars. I had only two problems with any of the companies, and one of those was with a B&M (I'm going to call them), which just had to telephone after receiving an order online to verify what I had ordered! Weird. The other problem was caused by me incorrectly entering a credit card number in an order to one of the more established catalog companies -- and it showed itself to be not completely converted to the web because the query for the mistake came by snail mail. All the other orders were processed correctly, invoiced correctly, and shipped securely and quickly. I had zero credit card hanky-panky and everything arrived in good condition.

Apart from the items I wanted, I also ordered three additional items from vendors for things that I did not want. All three were only part of the total order to that vendor, and I returned them within 24 hours of receiving each one. I used UPS to track the returns and in all three cases there was no fuss from the vendor, and all three processed the credit to my credit card within a week. I think that augers really well for web commerce.

Now, the things that bugged me . . .

. . . Shopping baskets where you have to accept cookies in order to place the order. I don't understand the justification for the cookies, anyway, but if they are going to do business that way then they need to warn the customer that the shopping basket is actually empty because the cookie wasn't accepted. This is particularly true on commerce models such as used by AT&T-powered vendors. As to the use of cookies at all, it kind of boils down to: If Amazon doesn't need them, why should anyone else want to dumb down their operations to drives customers away? My favorite bookstore in the world decided to use a cookie model on its web operation. I'll still buy from that store in person, but never on the web.

. . . Frustrating Forms. Why do I have to scroll down State abbreviations (particularly those really smart sites that list every Pacific atoll and military address)? I do know my State's approved USPS abbreviation. Why make me enter a credit card number while on screen is displayed ************* ? I'm sure it is supposed to make me feel better about security, but I cannot check for typos, and if someone was looking over my shoulder they could read it directly from the card anyway.

. . . Insufficient information. When I was trying to scope out a digital camera for my spouse, I had to leave shopping sites to go visit the manufacturers' sites in order to try to get enough information -- in many cases that didn't help much either! I had to order partly on gut feel and price and partly from reviews of the product: As it happens I think I did OK on that one, but my purchase, finally, of a DVD player has me kind of steamed. I know DVD; I know about Dolby formats, decoders, connectors; I know about video. There was actually little choice in the type of player that we needed, but I did have a choice from four models from three manufacturers -- two choices from my manufacturer of preference. I think I made a mistake; the product will work, it will do what it should do, but it is about a quarter-inch taller than the CD player it will replace. As a result the complete home entertainment system will have to be shuffled around. That ticks me off, and I should have been able to find out the dimensions online.

So my New Year will be spent rewiring the entertainment center -- but the results will be great.

Paul McGoldrick

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