Slow to Convert, A Shopper Warms To Web Bargains

If you're like me, you like nice stuff, but hate paying full price.

How's that for a retail quandary? Thankfully, the Internet is an increasingly ideal marketplace for hard-to-please people that fit into that category.

It takes a small fraction of the time it would take to find a parking spot and muscle through crowds. Plus, it costs nothing in gas, and there's no hauling a heavy coat (and scarf, gloves and hat) around the mall. Best of all: Search engines do the work of finding the lowest prices for you.

That said, I'm a relatively recent Web-commerce inductee, having shunned now-defunct sites of the late 1990s like Kozmo.com. I now buy contact lenses, books, furniture, ski vacations, and prepaid long-distance calls online, with only a little trepidation and a few misgivings, which I will get to later.

There's a kind of "everybody's doing it" mentality that's made online shopping feel less like a high-risk roll of the dice. Last year, online sales reached $23.2 billion in the United States, up 25 percent from 2003, according to Nielsen NetRatings. This year, even more holiday spending is expected to shift to online.

"You see people with far more comfort level shopping online," said Heather Dougherty, a senior retail analyst with Nielsen/NetRatings. People have tested the waters and realized it usually works, she said.

Still, it requires a leap of faith. There's no testing or fondling of products beforehand. There's no instant gratification. And there is a risk that credit card information might leak into the wrong hands. Most sites advertise their security, but hackers are always trying to find a hole.

Having had my wallet stolen out of my purse three Christmas Eves ago, I feel like I'm at no greater risk for online theft than in person. If I were wiser, I would also protect myself against online fraud by using services like ePassporte or other virtual credit cards with prepaid credit or surrogate numbers that mask credit card numbers.

Instead, I just hover over the "buy now" icon before clicking on it, because it still feels a little creepy to fork my credit card information over to sites I've never heard of. I also suffer more prosaic worries: What if it's broken? What if it's not what I ordered? Then I'd be out shipping costs, return postage, and the time it takes to call customer service or stand in line to mail the thing back. For the bigger purchases -- over $100, let's say -- the process can be a little nerve-wracking.

Take my recent quest for a Cuisinart food processor, for example, which I decided I need to make cranberry relish.

I went to Bloomingdales.com because I figured it would have pretty pictures and a list of up-to-date models. Who knew a food processor could cost $350? For cranberry relish?! On the other hand, the 14-cup brushed chrome one looked so good, and it was marked down to $199.

I was tempted to pull the trigger, but I knew from searching Shopping.com, a price-comparison site, that the same thing was available elsewhere for as little as $153, not including shipping fees. One listed at $155 at Compuplus.com looked especially promising, but who's heard of Comp-U-Plus?