Shop Online by Richard Seltzer

Copyright © 1999 by Richard Seltzer.

First published by Macmillan as "Shop Online the Lazy Way".  The rights have reverted to the author.

Business on the Internet changes quickly. New companies apear, and old ones disappear. Many of the companies names and URLs pointed to no longer exist. But the underlying principles and advice discussed in this book remain true.

Part One covers aspects of online shopping that apply to all purchases.

• Chapter One     Online Stores
  
• Chapter Two     Use Search Engines, Price-comparison Sites, and Auctions
• Chapter Three  Advanced Techniques: Becoming a Creative Online Shopper
  

• Chapter 4     Books, Music, Videotapes
• Chapter 5     Computers and Software
• Chapter 6     Travel
• Chapter 7     Food
• Chapter 8     Banks, Loans, Insurance, and Investments
• Chapter 9     Cars
• Chapter 10   The Virtual Way to Shop for Real Estate

Chapter One: Online Stores

Also, thanks to the heated competition for your business, the situation keeps improving to your benefit. Selling online is a new experience for these companies, just as shopping online is for you. Most online stores are still learning how to attract visitors to their Web sites and how to turn the visitors into buyers. They are trying every imaginable innovation to get your attention, win your trust, earn your loyalty, and get your sales dollars. What one store sells for profit, another may sell for less than cost or even give away as an incentive for you to "join" or to buy something else. Once you learn your way around the online shopping world, you should be able to quickly find the products you want--even rare ones--and at prices that you'd probably never see in the physical world. In the process you may also find yourself engaging in and enjoying activities you never considered before--like chat, auctions, and online trading--and making friends with other shoppers who have common interests.

As you take these first steps, expect change. In addition to describing today's shopping sites, this book will provide tips and general principles to help you find newly opened stores and services, and as well as finding alternatives to some stores mentioned here that may have gone out of business by the time you read this--victims of the fierce competition.

The surviving Internet businesses will probably look different than the screen shots captured here, and they will no doubt have changed their prices and terms of sale. On the Internet, you can change your store with a few computer keystrokes--reorganizing everything, re-pricing everything, adding new and improved features. The flexibility on the Internet means that online stores can rapidly and easily respond to customer complaints and requests, continually refining and improving their Web sites. To benefit, you should be flexible as well, continually learning from your online experience.

In this chapter, we'll cover the basics of the online shopping experience and explain how to find stores by the fixed paths that merchants have laid out for you. In Chapter 2, we'll help you become more independent, introducing you to search engines, comparison shopping sites, and auctions. In Chapter 3, we'll cover advanced techniques that can help you become creative members of the online shopping community.

It's a Click: Mastering Browser Basics

That works just fine for "surfing"--checking out Web sites for the fun of it. But for a more serious endeavor, like shopping, you'll want the control that comes from a better understanding of what you can do with your browser.

Playing Favorites

When you arrive at a page that you want to be able to return to easily, click on "Favorites" (the Microsoft term) or "Bookmarks" (the Netscape term) and then click on "add." To return to that page at any time in the future, click once again on Favorites/Bookmarks, and then click on that site name in your list.

For instance, when you are shopping for gifts for Christmas, birthdays, or graduation, you might browse through many stores before focusing on what kinds of things you want to buy and where you might want to buy them. You also might occasionally window shop for things that you cannot yet afford or don't yet have a compelling need for. In either case, you should bookmark the promising sites that you find, saving yourself the trouble of duplicating that search work later.

No sooner do you start to enjoy the power of this feature than you find the list has grown too long to be useful. Then it's time to edit your list.

If you use a Netscape browser, click on Bookmarks, then on Edit Bookmarks. The full list includes numerous pre-selected sites that were built into your browser (a form of advertising). It also includes the "personal" ones that you added in your travels. With your cursor and mouse, highlight the line or lines you want to edit, then use the commands in the pull-down File and Edit menus to copy, cut-and-paste, add blank separator lines, and even put groups of items into folders. By doing so, you are creating your own personal "shopping mall," with the URLs of the stores and other sites you particularly like, organized the way you want them. If you use Microsoft Explorer, you can also edit your Favorites list. Click on Favorites, then Organize Favorites.

Home is Where Your Default Is

If you use America Online (AOL) as your Internet Service Provider (ISP), you have the software that connects you first to their proprietary cyberworld, populated with news, stores, chat rooms, etc. From AOL, you can chose to venture forth into the Internet, with aol.com as your home base. You have no choice but to start in AOL's world.

For people who use other ISPs and have Microsoft, Netscape or other browsers, "home" is whatever site the software is set to, and most people never change the default.

If your Web browser came pre-installed on your new computer, the manufacturer may have set that page. If your Web browser came from your Internet Service Provider (ISP), that ISP may have set up your browser to display the ISP's own home page. In most cases, the default "home" is the main site of Netscape or Microsoft, which means that millions of people return again and again to those sites and depend on the navigation choices they see there. Those choices, whether for search engines or shopping sites, are paid advertising, and as such act as mini-yellow pages. Yes, the links are organized for your convenience, but they do not represent the full range of what is available or even a judicious editorial selection of sites. Even the order of the items and their position on the page sells for a price.

Of all your bookmarks/favorites, which is the one that you would really like to start with every time you launch your browser? You can make that page your "home."

Neither Netscape nor Microsoft goes out of its way to make it easy and obvious for you to change this setting. In the past, they have moved that option with each new version of their software to a location that you would least expect it. But you can track it down with "Help," looking for "preferences" in Netscape and "Internet options" in Microsoft.

With Netscape's V4.5, go to the page that you want to use as your "Home." Click Edit, then Preferences, then in the list of Categories on the left, click on Navigator. In the middle of the screen to the right, you will see the address of your current default Home page. Click on Use Current Page and that address will change to the one of the page you are now on. Click OK, and you're done. (In V3.0, click on Options, then General Preferences, then Appearance, and type in the Web address of your preferred page.)

With Microsoft's Explorer V5.0, likewise, go to the page you want to be your new "home." Click on Tools, then Internet Options, hen the "General" tab. In the Home Page area, click on Use Current. Then click on OK. (In V3.0, click on View, then Options, then Navigation).

Don't be confused by offers to "create your personal start page." For instance, in recent versions of the Netscape browser, you can click on "My Netscape." That takes you to the Netscape Web site, where you see an orderly arrangement of paid-for links to news and other Internet services. You can customize your arrangement of the pieces and some of the choices, and then click to change the setting in your browser so the resulting page will be your starting point.

Remember, you can change your "Home" again and again, as you find new more useful Web pages that you'd like to be your regular starting point. Perhaps you might even want to change back to the original default, if that suits your tastes. But you should know that you have a choice.

Two Browsers Are Better Than One

As you go from store to store on the Internet, you'll find that some sites have been "optimized" to work with either Netscape or Microsoft browsers. Whichever browser you use, there will be some things on some sites that you won't be able to access.

In their competition with one another, these two companies each added proprietary enhancements to their software, and then encouraged Web sites to design features that work only with their proprietary enhancements. Reportedly, they now both have promised to abide by a single set of standards, and over time this problem may go away. But for now, if you have the necessary disk space available, you should install both browsers on your computer. Use your favorite one most of the time, and switch when you encounter a Web site that requires the other browser.

Both browsers are free, and each can be downloaded from their respective sites--Microsoft is at www.microsoft.com and Netscape is at www.netscape.com At either site, you'll find detailed downloading instructions. But be forewarned--the latest versions of these files are large, each taking up over 50 Megbytes of your hard drive and taking a long while to download, even with a relatively fast modem. Much of the bulk consists of features you will probably never use. If you have limited disk space you might want to get an earlier version (V3.0 and above have all the important capabilities you'll need for shopping) and select the "minimum." That way you'll only have to download five-to-six Megabytes of data.

At the time this book as written, Microsoft's site for downloading Internet Explorer was set up very simply. Just click on Download in the top bar, then in the left column click on Alphabetically, then scroll down to Internet Explorer, and pick the version that matches your operating system and your needs. At Netscape, click on Download in the top line, then Netscape Browsers. The Navigator series is the browser only. The Communicator series has numerous other features as well and is far larger.

Keep in mind that there are a few banks and other financial sites in the United States that require you to use "strong encryption" to access your account information. Unless you want to do business with one of those institutions, the security features in a standard browser are probably sufficient for everything you would want to do. The United States has restrictions that prohibit export of "strong," or "128-bit" code. That is why Netscape and Microsoft both have to offer this as an option, rather than including it in every browser; and why they make you fill out detailed legalistic forms before you can download it. If you need this option, at Microsoft, select "extra security 128-bit browser"; at Netscape, select "128 bit strong encryption."

(If you have difficulty downloading or installing your browser, or if you need some extra assistance in getting started with your browser's basic operation, check out another book in this series, Surf the Net the Lazy Way, by Shelley O'Hara. That book offers step-by-step instructions for Internet beginners.)

What To Do If Your Browser "Breaks"

Sometimes your browser will stall or crash. Don't panic. Here are a few suggestions:

• Often Web sites that want to make a sale go overboard trying to impress you with their fancy design effects. Their technical gymnastics sometimes make their pages very demanding for ordinary PCs connected to the Internet with ordinary modems. And the designers don't always do a very good job of making sure that what they have created will work with all popular browsers. If your screen freezes, or seems to take forever for a page to load, close your browser, then relaunch it and go to other sites. If all goes well at the other sites, then the problem was theirs, not yours.

• If, on the other hand, other pages load sluggishly or your browser crashes again soon, the cause is probably that the "cache"--the memory and/or disk space allotted to saving pages that you look at--is full, and the automatic function that should periodically clear that didn't work. (Browsers save page content in order to give you faster results. When you return to the same page over and over again, you see that page very quickly because you are seeing what is stored in your computer, rather than fetching the same thing time and again over the Internet.) To try to fix your problem, relaunch your browser and make a minor adjustment. In Microsoft, click View, then Options, then Advanced, then Settings. If you have lots of disk space to spare, adjust the "Disk Space to Use" upward. Then click Empty Folder. In Netscape, click Edit, then Preferences. In the left column, click on the + sign beside Advanced. Then click Cache (that means a temporary storage area). Click Clear Memory Cache and Clear Disk Cache; and if you have memory or disk space to spare, adjust those numbers upward.

• Sometimes you'll click on a link, then find that you can't use your Back button to return to the page you were at before. This may happen when using a Netscape browser to access pages optimized for Microsoft. It may also happen because a clever Webmaster has done something deliberate in the page design to make it likely you'll stay longer at his site and view more ads. To break free, in Microsoft you can view your list of recently visited Web sites by clicking on File or History; in Netscape, select Go. Then click on the one that you want to go back to.

•   By the way, if you'd prefer that other folks who use this same machine not know every place you have been, periodically clear your History file. In Internet Explorer V5, click on Go, then Open History folder. (If you have Explorer V4, click History on the toolbar or select View from the Explorer bar, and then select History.) In Netscape Communicator, click on Communicate, then Tools, then History. (If your particular browser version is laid out differently, check Help.) Once there, highlight the items you want to eliminate from the list; then click Edit, and Delete.

• Sometimes, a Web site will cause your computer to launch a second copy of your browser, and when you try to go Back to the page you were at before, an advertising page will launch and possibly another and another. This effect is typical of temporary sites designed to promote adult entertainment sites. Their advertisers pay based on the numbers of people who see the ads. Hence, the creators of the site have good motivation to use every trick at their disposal to put more ads in front of you. You will know that this has happened when you see multiple copies of the icon for your browser at the bottom of your screen. To get out of this mess, close each and every instance of your browser; then launch your browser again fresh. If you keep clicking on Back, in extreme instances, your browser may launch enough times to eat up all your computer's resources and cause it to crash. If that happens, just turn the machine off and then on again, and avoid that site in the future.

• Most pages will print with just the print command from your browser. But some sites use fancy features that make printing difficult or impossible. If a page doesn't print on the first try, click on a link for another page at that same site, then hit your back button, and try to print again. That will work sometimes, but not always. Netscape offers a nifty Print Preview option that lets you see what will be printed before you put it on paper. This additional option also helps if you want to pick out selected areas of a page for a partial printout.
• Sometimes a fancy animated graphic will hang your browser up interminably. If you suspect that is the case, and you have a recent Netscape browser, click on View and then Stop Animations. The rest of the page should load immediately.

When you launch your Web browser, you immediately connect to an Internet site that can serve as a launch point for all of your Internet travels--either the one that came pre-set with your software or the one you selected yourself, as described above. From that point, all you need to do is click on highlighted words (called hyperlinks or links) and a new Web page will appear on your computer screen in a matter of seconds. The new page you see may be at the site you were on before, or it might be at another company's site on the other side of the world. You can return to your starting point at any time by clicking on Home in your browser's navigation bar.

When you click on a link, whether it is just a highlighted word or a flashing graphic banner ad, the browser software automatically inserts the associated Web address or URL. When you place your cursor over the link, the URL appears on the bottom of your screen. The address you are currently at appears in a space on your navigation tool bar at the top of the page. These addresses are typically in the form http://www.someplace.com Sometimes an address can include many subdirectories (separated by a slash /), and perhaps an immense string of characters at the end. If there's a page with a long address, don't try to write it down or remember it. Rather, you should make it a favorite/bookmark, or use your History log (mentioned above) to go back to it later.

If the address is short enough that you can remember--perhaps one that a friend told you about or you saw in a TV commercial -- ou can type it in where the current address appears; then hit Enter, and you are off to the new location (presuming you didn't make a typo). (With recent browsers, you don't need to type http://)

Let's take a quick look at how these addresses are constructed.

• Many, but not all, Web addresses begin with the letters www, which stands for World Wide Web. The Web is the technology that allows for this global point-and-click inter-linked environment.

• If the Web site is in the United States, the three-letter extension at the end or before the first slash will indicate what kind of entity it is. And extension of ".com" means commercial; ".org" means a non-profit organization; ".gov" means government; ".edu" means education; and ".net" usually stands for an Internet service provider or related business. Two-character suffixes indicate countries outside the United States: ".ca" for Canada, ".uk" for United Kingdom, ".jp" for Japan, ".de" for Germany (Deutschland), etc.

• The element element in combination with the .com etc. is known as the "domain name." A domain name consists of a single word or series of words connected with punctuation (other than a period or slash) and combined with its extension (such as .com). (One company could have fast.com as its domain name, and another could have fast.net) Companies zealously guard their domain names like trademarks, and try hard to buy the rights to domain names that are the same as or similar to the name of the company and its major products. In the background, that name gets translated to a number code that is the true address. A site owner could set up any number of domain names that he owns to serve as "aliases" (alternative names) for the same number address.

• In front of the domain name, you might see a sub-domain--a term separated from domain name by a period and designating a distinct piece of a large site. Hence, you will see such addresses as www.yahoo.com, quote.yahoo.com, shopping.yahoo.com, etc. Subdomain addresses often do not include www.

• A word to the right of a slash that does not end with a period stands for a directory. Web sites can have any number of directories and sub-directories, just like you can on your computer.

• If the address ends with .com, etc., a country extension, index.html, or home.htm, then it stands for the "home page" or preferred starting point of a Web site--the front door that has been set up for you.

• If the address ends in .html, .htm, or .shtml, but isn't index or home, then it stands for one of many documents at a site.

• If the address ends in another three or four-letter extension (like .asp), chances are that the site is set up to automatically create pages from a database. If you remember such an address and type it in later or bookmark such a page and click later to return to it, you will probably end up at the home page of that site, not the particular Web page you wanted.

• If the address ends in an extremely long series of numbers and letters, perhaps too large to view all at once in the address window, the site probably uses special software to either give you a unique personal view of their content based on information you have given them about you, or based on a tracking system known as "cookies." We'll explain cookies later in this chapter.

Portals, Directories, and Malls

A handful of companies compete with Netscape, AOL, and Microsoft trying to be your starting point on the Web--to be a page to which you return often (though not necessarily every time you turn your machine on) and from which you can follow well-organized links to get to many other Web sites, including shopping sites. These "portal" sites generate revenue from banner advertising, and also from charging for the inclusion of links and the placement of links on their main pages. The more traffic they get, the more advertising revenue they receive. They advertise themselves both online and off-line, to induce you to click to or type in their address. They hope that what you see when you arrive will be so compelling that you will bookmark their site or make it your "Home."

Every time you click to see another page on a portal's site, one or more graphic strips known as "banners ads" will appear. These ads entice you to click on their images and words and go off to the site of an advertiser. The folks in the ad business count how many times people like you see those ads, how many times they "click through," and how many times they then buy. The ad sales companies use those statistics to determine the price of advertising.

Just remember, when shopping on the Internet, you are king. Without consumers like you, the whole online shopping movement collapses. Thousands of very creative people are striving to serve you. So don't be surprised if these "portals" make your shopping experience easy and comfortable.

Some major portals, like Yahoo www.yahoo.com, LookSmart www.looksmart.com, and Magellan www.mckinley.com, began as directories--carefully edited, categorized lists, somewhat like a yellow pages or a printout of a library catalog, but organized as a cascade of menus--click on a category and see the sub-categories, until you eventually get to the link that you want. Magellan not only lists, but also reviews and rates tens of thousands of Web sites. To become "portals," these sites have added other useful services to attract and hold you, such as email, weather, news, stock quotes, chat, maps, Internet search, white pages (search for people), and yellow pages (search for businesses).

Other popular portals--such as AltaVista www.altavista.com, Hotbot www.hotbot.com, Excite www.excite.com, Lycos www.lycos.com, and InfoSeek www.infoseek.com--began as search engines. Directories collect information about hundreds or thousands of sites by hand--either hiring people to look at sites for possible inclusion, or accepting submissions of brief descriptions from Web site owners. Search engines collect their information about the Internet by sending out robot programs, known as "Web crawlers," to find all the pages that they can and add the full content of those pages (not just brief descriptions of entire sites) to their indices. The largest of the search engines, AltaVista currently includes over 140 million Web pages. No one sorts through this information to categorize it. Rather the user enters "queries"--formatted search commands--then gets back a hyperlinked list of pages that contain the words and phrases in the query. [For a more complete discussion about the differences between directories and search engines and when to use which, see related article].

We'll talk about how to use search engines in Chapter 2. For now, what matters is that these sites have added many of the same kinds of features as Netscape, Microsoft, and Yahoo. You can use their various services and links, just as you can with those of other "portals" to help guide you on your way to the major shopping sites, without ever dealing with the search engines that are at their core.

Another set of popular portals began by offering everyone the ability to create and post their own Web pages at no cost. Geocities www.geocities.com [now owned by Yahoo], Xoom www.xoom.com [now owned by NBCi www.nbci.com], and Tripod www.tripod.com now each have millions of members and offer additional free services. They also have large directories of Web sites, including online stores.

A wide variety of others sites that began by providing popular services of various kinds now have millions of users and generate major advertising dollars. These sites keep adding portal-like features to give you more reasons to come back, and to compete for your continuing loyalty. These sites include Mapquest www.mapquest.com which provides free customized maps and travel directions, and ICQ www.icq.com [now owned by AOL] which provides "instant messaging," an alternative to email and chat for connecting with your friends and colleagues online. Expect to see similar features at major news sites--like ESPN, CNN, and USAToday--and at sites that began as telephone-number search sites (white pages and yellow pages)--like AnyWho from AT&T www.anywho.com, Switchboard www.switchboard.com, Infospace www.infospace.com, and BigYellow www.bigyellow.com.

Basically, any site that draws millions of users will probably head in the same direction, trying to get the media attention, advertising revenue, and stock-price boost that comes with recognition as an "Internet portal." The opening pages of all these sites--whether they started as directories or search engines or other services--tend to look remarkably similar. All of them will provide you with organized lists of shopping choices and other useful links.

Newspapers--such as The Boston Globe www.boston.com and The Washington Post www.washingtonpost.com--often provide such services on a local scale. Their directories list local businesses. Microsoft is also competing in this arena with a series of local "sidewalk" sites for major cities, like www.boston.sidewalk.com, which serves the Boston area.

You'll also find hundreds of online "malls." These sites focus specifically on the needs of shoppers. Some consist of just linked, categorized lists of stores. In other cases, the stores are all hosted at the same site and share some common features, such as a way for you to search through them all or to use a single shopping cart and buy from them all with a single credit card transaction. General-purpose online malls (ones that include a wide variety of products) include:

• Access Market Square www.icw.com/ams.html
• The All-Internet Shopping Directory www.all-Internet.com
• Beyond.com www.beyond.com
• Bottomdollar.com www.bottomdollar.com
• BuyItOnline www.buyitonline.com
• CyberShop www.cybershop.com
• The Globe.com Markeplace www.shoptheglobe.com
• Internet Mall www.shopnow.com
• Internet Shopper www.internetshopper.com
• Internet Shopping Network www.internet.net
• iVillage.com, the Women's Network www.ivillage.com
• NetMarket www.netmarket.com
• ShopperConnection.com www.shopperconnection.com
• Shopping.com www.shopping.com
• Shopping 2000 www.shopping2000.com
• Snap www.snap.com
• Value America www.valueamerica.com

The Buyers Index www.buyersindex.com extends the online mall concept to the physical world as well. They have a searchable directory of over 10,000 Web shopping sites and North American mail order catalogs, with over 66 million products for businesses and individuals.

Check out these sites, and see if one or more of them has an organization and range of choices that suits your tastes. In that case, "their way" is "your way," and there's no point in making things complicated for yourself. Just bookmark your favorites, or even make one your home/startup page.

Electronic Shopping Carts, Shipping, and Customs

When you arrive at an Internet store or multi-store mall, as you see items that you might want to buy, you can place them in your electronic "shopping cart," a temporary online storage space assigned to you for this visit. When you are ready to make final buying decisions, you'll typically leave the main shopping area and "click through" to a "secure" area, where you can take another look at the choices in your shopping cart, their prices, and the total, and can change the quantities. (Usually, you can eliminate an item that you do not want to by at that stage by entering a quantity of "0", which the shopping cart interprets as an order of that item of nothing.) When you've made your decision, enter your name, address, and credit card information, or, if you've been there before, enter a user name and password.

Usually, one of your choices will be the shipment method, which typically ranges from over-night delivery to regular mail. Internet shopping has led to an enormous boom in the shipping business. Yes, you can download information and software over the Internet. But most of what you buy needs to be physically moved from one place to another, which takes time and costs money--your money.

Before paying a premium for fast shipping, be sure to check the vendor's promises for how promptly they'll assemble your order. The shipping clock doesn't start ticking until the product goes out the door, and some companies may take a week or two to do that.

Also, remember that while the Internet is global, and you can theoretically buy from online stores all over the world, if you are ordering a physical object (not just computer code or information that you can download), you are going to face the usual physical world hassles. Products going across international borders are subject to customs duties and delays (even when dealing with Canada, despite NAFTA). In addition, the shipping charges are likely to be high.

In any case, be sure to print and/or save the final page, with your choices and the prices before leaving the site. That will be your reference point if you have any questions about delivery or credit card payment or the product itself once it arrives. Many retail stores also put a confirmation of your purchase into your e-mail box that you can print out to keep for your records.

Online Credit Card Use 

Do you remember the first time you got cash from an ATM machine? The first time you gave your credit card information to an 800-number service? The first time you used a credit card at all?

We all went through those scary experiences--not knowing whether this new-fangled technology would short-change us.

Look over your credit card agreements, and you'll see that the terms and the limits on liability are no different online than they are in the physical world. Also, the guarantees are just as good. If a credit card company guarantees your purchases, that applies online as well. And just as in the physical world, if a charge shows up on your bill that shouldn't be there, you can go to your credit card company, rather than having to go back to the vendor. The credit card company then acts as your proxy, challenging the charge and insisting that the vendor provide proof. The online vendor, just like one that you deal with over the phone or in person, has lots of motivation to deliver the goods promised and to make sure you are satisfied because:

• Billing queries are time-consuming and costly.
• The charge may be reversed and they'll end up with penalty fees in addition to losing the purchase.
• If they don't satisfy the demands of the credit card company and its requirements for reliability, they could lose their right to take credit card orders.

So what happens when you give your credit card information to an online store? Policies and procedures differ from one store to another, and it's always a good idea to check a store's "help" or "frequently asked questions" (FAQ) files to find out just what they do. But standard practice involves the use of "encryption" capabilities that are built into your Web browser. Think of Cold War spies sending one another coded messages. Your credit card info passes over the Internet in a form that nobody but the vendor or the credit card company or a gifted counter-spy can understand.

I mention "counter-spy" because no security is perfect. The amount of effort and money you are willing to spend to protect information or property should be consistent with the value involved. If you are guarding the Hope Diamond, or are sending the breakthrough formula for cold fusion, you will take far more extreme measures than if you are buying a music CD. Using a store's standard procedures is rather like protecting your house with ordinary door locks--quite sufficient under ordinary circumstances.

Now some major Web sites are beginning to act as a middleman between you and the credit card companies, to make it easier for online stores to gain your trust and to collect money. For example, when you go to the mall-style area known as "Excite Shopping" www.excite.com/shopping, you can buy from several different stores but only have to enter your credit card information once. Other companies are starting programs to "certify" the trustworthiness and reliability of online merchants, thereby reducing your anxiety when dealing with a store you have never heard of before and that you can't physically enter.

A variety of other efforts are under way to establish online equivalents of the Better Business Bureau. For instance, Public Eye, (www.thepubliceye.com) helped organize an "Alliance of Certified Safe Shopping Sites," and has also launched a project to raise safety standards for transactions conducted through online auctions and classifieds.

Basically, wherever there is an area of online shopping that people are reluctant to dive into because of a lack of trust, companies do whatever it takes to gain your confidence by emphasizing their trustworthiness. New businesses have been built around ways to give other companies the scrutiny and certification needed to allay customer fears.

In any case, the record for online purchases by credit card is remarkably good. In fact, buying online is probably much safer than handing your credit card over to a waiter or giving the information to an operator at an 800-number service.

By the way, if you run into a problem at any stage in your shopping experience or you believe a Web site needs improvement, tell the folks who maintain that site. Many Web sites have a built-in mechanism for sending e-mail back to them. Look for a link that says "contact us" or "help" or "customer service." When you click on the appropriate spot, a pop-up email form appears. Enter your comments, criticisms, or questions, and most likely, your message will be read and considered.

If you don't see an email address anywhere that's obvious, then try sending email to the Webmaster or support at their domain name, for instance: Webmaster@store.com or support@store.com

If that, too, doesn't work, and you really want to get in touch with this store, go to www.networksolutions.com/internic/internic.html That is an online "clearing house" of that keeps track of Internet site ownership information. Enter the domain name (the address after www and before the /). You'll see street address, contact name, email address, and phone number.

If the site doesn't have its own domain name, but rather sits in the subdirectory of another company's domain, perhaps hosted for free at a site like Tripod or Xoom, then you might have considerable difficulty trying to locate the responsible people.

What Price Privacy?

Based on your visits to Web sites and your online transactions there, companies can gather information about your buying habits and preferences. In fact, that's an important incentive for them to sell online. Many companies hope to do "datamining"--using sophisticated software tools to dig through immense quantities of information about you and millions of other shoppers. From that data, they want to learn:

• What products and services they should sell,
• How they should modify their current offerings,
• What marketing messages and techniques work best, and
• How they should modify the look-and-feel of their Web site to maximize sales.

Is that bad? Maybe, and maybe not. It all depends on your personality and sensitivities. On the one hand, these sites may provide you with a "personalized" experience, which makes your shopping easier and more effective, saving you time and bringing to your attention bargains, special offers, and coupons that you might otherwise miss. On the other hand, some of this data gathering is involuntary. They may do it without your informed consent, which may make you uncomfortable on principle, regardless of the practical benefits.

Let's consider what the online vendor can find out about you and how.

Online Cookies: Friend or Foe?

If your browser supports "cookies" (and all the more recent browsers do), then there's a file stored on your computer which can automatically relay to sites that you visit information about your recent Web surfing experiences--for instance, what page you saw just before coming to their site.

The site you are visiting will know your "domain" (the part of an email address to the right of the @ sign), but won't know your user name and hence your complete email address, unless you provide that information, for instance, by filling out a registration form. Once they have that information, they can correlate it with "cookie" information, to learn more about your experiences and preferences at their site.

Your browser will come with the default setting of accepting cookies. You can change that. In recent versions of the Netscape browser, click on Edit, then Preferences, then Advanced. You can choose to disable cookies, which will prevent you from entering many of the shopping sites that you want to visit. Or you can have your browser warn you whenever a Web page wants to get to your cookie file. But the warnings become a major nuisance. Each page might have as many as half a dozen cookies associated with it, meaning you'd have to click separately to accept each of them before you could view the page.

As an alternative, you could sign up at The Anonymizer www.anonymizer.com for identity-free surfing even with your cookies turned on. But when you want to make a purchase, you'll still have to positively identify yourself.

Basically, the effort you put into fighting cookies might be better spent in other ways.

Besides, since vendors want to get as much information as they can about the people who buy their products and services, you can expect that new, more sophisticated techniques will soon be developed to help them gather it. For instance, when Intel announced their Pentium III chip in January 1999, one of the main features touted was that it would automatically signal to online stores even more--and more accurate--information about you and your Web travels than cookies do. The uproar from the consumer public was so enormous that within two days, Intel turned around and promised that it would ship Pentium III with the identity code turned off and would give users the option of turning it on.

If you think about this issue from a pragmatic point of view, rather than as a matter of principle, you'll probably end up volunteering far more information than automated techniques could gather.

Think of online registration forms like you do the mail-in warranty cards that come with any electronics products you purchase. On such a card, you might tell the manufacturer your age, location, salary range, line of business, and job title, as well as when and where you bought the product. In return, it is easier for you to receive service or replacements, if something goes wrong. The manufacturer will also send you information about bug fixes and other improvements to the product, news of related products, and quick notification in case of a product recall.

Depending on the application, Web sites require varying levels of assurance that you are who you say you are. For instance, banks and airlines with frequent flier accounts will require a password for access and probably have cookies to keep track of your path through account information. That way they can confidently present you with the information you want, without your having to re-enter your password with each new request for data. Magazine and newspaper sites that provide information for a fee on a subscription basis typically use your cookie file to automatically recognize you and let you in without your having to remember and enter your user name and password. Grocery stores might, on the basis of your cookie file, give you easy access to lists of your previous purchases, to help guide you in compiling this week's order. And an online mall might let you enter your personal and credit card information just once to make purchases at half a dozen member stores, based once again on your cookie file. In other words, registration plus cookies, and perhaps also the use of passwords can make your shopping experience far simpler and more rewarding.

This surrender of private information in exchange for some retail-related benefit is similar to supermarket bonus cards. The store offers you discounts on certain items if you use your card, and the card lets the store keep careful track of everything you buy at their store. Some people refuse to use such cards. But many are willing to give up some degree of privacy in exchange for a benefit. Expect online vendors to come up with a wide range of incentives to encourage you to provide more and more information about your buying preferences.

In fact, some sites use special software ("collaborative filtering") that lets you tell more and more about your preferences. For instance, you might rate the books or music or movies that you are familiar with, and that information will be correlated with the tastes of tens of thousands or even millions of others. Then instead of depending on the opinions of professional reviewers, you can get lists of suggestions based on the ratings of people whose tastes are similar to yours--not just people with the same age, race, income, or education, but people who like what you like.

The Curse of "Spam" and the Blessing of "Opt-in Email"

You may not mind a vendor collecting information about you when that information is used for your direct benefit. But what if the vendor sells your email address to others? Then we venture into territory that is still largely unexplored, where laws and rights have not been sufficiently tested and defined. The practical effect is that if you indiscriminently provide your email address to many commercial sites, it's likely that your address will soon be on many distribution lists and your inbox will be swamped with unsolicited email known as "spam." These messages will offer you instant wealth, fabulous sex, and perhaps even eternal life.

Ironically, true "spam" is the opposite of one-to-one marketing. In this case, vendors often don't know anything more about you than your email address. Their intent is to take advantage of the fact that there is no charge for sending email over the Internet. With the right list and the right software, they can quickly send their message to tens of millions of people at a time, at near zero cost. That means a very low rate of return can still be profitable. In the early days of the Internet, such behavior was immediately punished vigilante style, by bombarding the email account of the sender with numerous nasty replies. Now the spammers have grown more sophisticated, so the return email address may be phony, and the call to action is to check a Web site. Hence, some states have adopted anti-spamming laws to reduce the level of this nuisance mail and its drain on overall Internet resources. But the Internet is a global phenomenon and matters of jurisdiction can be very fuzzy, with spamming services operating from little island countries where laws let them do what they please. Don't expect this problem to be resolved any time soon. Just learn to live with it.

Not all ads by email are bad. In fact, the latest online marketing craze is "opt-in email." You would welcome certain kinds of commercial announcements that tell you about offers you are interested in. You might ask to receive particular kinds of messages from particular sites. For instance, you might want an email from Amazon.com www.amazon.com telling you that one of your favorite authors just came out with a new book or that an out-of-print book you had been looking for is now available. Or you might want to sign up at Continental Airlines www.flycontinental.com for their "Cool Travel" email alerts about last minute bargain airfares. Responsible companies promise to use your email address information only for the purpose for which you intended, and do not sell or give your address to other companies without your explicit permission.

Then, too, you might want to sign up at Bonus Mail www.bonusmail.com or My Points www.mypoints.com, both of which are run by the same company, Intellipost. These services, which already have over two million members, reward you for receiving and reacting to email ads. When you sign up, you volunteer information about yourself and your interests. You receive their email in a Web-based format, with images and links. You get rewards for clicking in response to the message. These rewards might be frequent flier miles on your favorite airline or points toward products or services of interest to you. In addition, the messages are often about special shopping offers and limited-time bargains of the very kind you are interested in. Reportedly, the members' number one complaint is, "Send me more email. I'm not getting enough."

Sidebars For This Chapter

As an alternative to bookmarking a page, you can use the print function in your browser to print a page for future reference. The printout should automatically include the Web address, known as the URL or "Universal Resource Locator," to help you find your way back to that site again. Most browsers allow you to set the option to include the URL in the header or footer information on the printed page. (Defaults regarding this option vary among browsers.)

Make the investment to learn advanced features of both the Internet and your browser now, right when you begin working with them. In the long run, mastering advanced features will make your online shopping experience easier and more effective.

Keep in mind that if you dial a local number to get to your Internet access provider, and you have a separate phone line for your modem, then you could opt for low-cost phone service for that second line, one that doesn't include long distance.

Before your first online shopping trip, go to ClickRewards at www.clickrewards.com/yahoo/. After you have registered, when you shop at participating online stores, you'll earn ClickMiles, good for airline miles and other rewards.

Relax. When you begin shopping online, you aren't making an irreversible decision. It simply broadens your choices. Need a change of pace? Turn off the computer and drive to the mall today.

With today's fast and powerful computer systems, you can launch two or more copies of the same browser or even run two or more different browsers simultaneously. They all share the same phone or cable line out to the Internet. This capability comes in handy for comparison shopping, letting you see two or more competing stores side by side in small windows, or in rapid alternation.

If you have call waiting on the same phone line you use for your modem, then every time someone dials your number, your Internet connection will get cut off. That can be very annoying when you are putting the finishing touches on an order. To disable call waiting, precede the number you dial for your Internet provider with 1170 or *70.

See a great picture at a Web site? Take a break from shopping and save it. Position your cursor on the image, click the right button on your mouse, then "Save Image As." Give it a new name if you like, but use the same three-character file-type extension (e.g., .gif), so your computer will recognize the format and be able to display it. Like videotaping a TV show, you can only do this for your personal use. You don't own the "intellectual property." To use that picture in a publication or to post it on your own Web site, you would need permission from the owner.

Look before you click. The text and look of an ad may be catchy, but the site may be one you've been to before and would prefer never to return to. When you place your cursor over a hyperlink, the full address of the page that you would connect to appears, typically at the bottom of your screen. The domain name (e.g., amazon.com) is often the same as the company name.

Often companies that started on the Web--like Amazon.com--deliberately select a company name that also serves as their Web domain name. That makes it easy to remember their Web address.

Start a list of the gifts you give to relatives and friends. Keep it as a document on your Word processor and add to it as you buy gifts from the list or think of new items to add. Maintaining this list will make shopping a lot easier next Christmas, birthday, or anniversary.

You can use an online store to help you decide what you want, then drive to a physical store, or dial an 800 number, or even mail a check to complete the purchase.

To save a snippet of text from a Web page--perhaps a product description or a price list you'd like to save for reference--click the left button on your mouse, hold it down (drag it) as you move the cursor over the text you want, highlighting it. Then click "Edit" in the navigation bar, and then "Copy." Open a document in your word processing software and paste the text where you want it..

Don't make decisions based on discounts alone. Be sure to add shipping charges when making price comparisons. For low-priced items, the shipping might be greater than the discount, and (if price is all that matters to you) you might be better off buying locally.

Plan ahead and order early. Then you won't have to pay extra charges for quick delivery.

Some online stores, like Amazon.com, ask at checkout if the purchase is a gift, and offer to gift wrap it, enclose a personal message, and send the item straight to the recipient.

Many online stores save details from your first order and expedite your future purchases at the "checkout counter," recognizing you by your registration (with username and password). This saves you the trouble of retyping things like name and address and even credit card number, if those are the same.

When an Internet store gets so big that it carries virtually every item in its chosen realm, you can benefit from using its searchable catalog as a research too, even when you don't intend to buy. For instance, a search at Amazon.com covers not only every book in print, but also more than a million titles that are only available secondhand.

When you visit Amazon.com after you've made your first purchase there, you'll be greeted with a personalized message, addressing you by name and offering you a selected list of book recommendations, based on your past purchases and the preferences you and others with tastes similar to yours have indicated. Technology based on "cookies" and "collaborative filtering" makes this seeming magic possible.

To avoid having spam fill your mailbox, open an email account at one of the free services like Hotmail (www.hotmail.com) or Yahoo (www.yahoo.com). Use that second email address whenever you fill out forms at online stores. Then the spam email will tend to go to that dead-end account, keeping your main email account relatively uncluttered.

If blatant spam says, "Reply to this address if you don't want to receive messages like this in the future," don't. Often this is just a trick to have you confirm your email address.

Window shop online. Go through all the steps of finding and selecting something you really want but can't afford yet. Bookmark the page, or add it to your "favorites". Then relax, knowing that when you're ready, you can consummate the purchase with the greatest of ease.

Chapter Two: Use Search Engines, Price-Compare Sites, and Auctions

Since the online world is new and strange, you are most likely to turn to the names that you trust. Confidence in dealing with other stores will come from isolated experiences--chance encounters, recommendations, and from interacting with other online shoppers.

Eventually, your curiosity will grow, and you'll crave more exotic shopping experiences. You will sense that you have just barely touched the surface and wonder: What's really out there? How do you find truly unique items? How do you find the amazing bargains? Where is the revolutionary experience?

In this chapter, we'll introduce you to some basic tools that can help you take advantage of the unexpected opportunities lurking in the chaotic immensity of the Internet--search engines, comparison shopping sites, and the places where ordinary people like us can both buy and sell from one another without stores--classified ads, newsgroups, and auctions.

Directories and Search Engines

At the large Web sites that call themselves "portals," you will probably have a choice of searching or browsing through the content of their site and/or of the Web at large. You search when you know exactly or fairly close to what you want. You enter the appropriate word or words in the syntax required by that search engine and ideally you go to a hyperlinked list of pages that probably contain the information you want. If you don't find what you want on the first try, that's either because the information isn't available, or because you need to improve your "query"--that is make your search terms more precise and make sure you are using proper syntax. Syntax is the structure for the query that this particular search engine requires, for instance the use of punctuation. (There are no standards. They all do it their own way.)

When you are uncertain--maybe you know the category, but are looking for suggestions or ideas, you should browse or surf through directory listings. In this case you look at organized lists of choices, perhaps with descriptions attached and probably with hyperlinks to more detailed choices. This is like walking into a book or music store, going to you favorite section, and scanning the shelves to see what's new and what might catch your interest.

Most people favor one style more than the other--it's a matter of personality. Beginners strongly favor directories, because they feel familiar--like yellow pages listings. Sometimes you think in categories and sometimes in specifics. If I want to find a college in Southern California, I'll go through a directory, checking under colleges, then US, then California, then Southern California, scan the list and pick the ones I want to check out. If I want to find driver software for my BJ200 Canon printer so I can run it with the new operating system I just installed on my computer, I'll use a search engine and go straight to the Web page I want. Everybody will probably use both these modes of operation at one time or another.

With a directory, you depend on the judgement and hard work of others to sort out what information is important and how pieces of information relate to one another. Using such a service exclusively would be like having someone else arrange your house, categorize your email into folders, arrange your books, organize your CD collection or your videotapes. Most people prefer to define "order" based on how their own mind works and makes associations, rather than on the tastes of someone else. At first someone else's order might seem convenient, but as you become more familiar with the Internet and what's really possible, these structures begin to get in your way.

With a search engine, if you go through the trouble of learning the commands, you can pluck whatever you want from the massive disorder of the Internet whenever you want, and quickly. And you aren't limited by the decisions of others. The search engines send out robots on expeditions of exploration and discovery, so you don't have to. But they don't make judgements of relevance or worth--that's your role; and that way the one item that is most important to you doesn't get filtered out before you learn that it exists.

The Portal Game

There are fewer search engines and directories than you probably thought. The major players keep buying up related and competing services, and they also use one another's services.

Excite, a search engine which was bought by the Internet cable service @Home, owns Webcrawler (search engine) and Magellan (directory) and Classifieds2000 (massive classified ad site). Lycos (search engine) owns HotBot (search engine) and Tripod (massive Web-hosting site).

AOL Netfind uses Excite in the US and Lycos in Europe. Netscape Search uses Excite. LookSmart (directory) uses AltaVista (search engine) for the search part of its service, and AltaVista and HotBot use LookSmart for the directory part of their service. Magellan (directory) uses Webcrawler (search engine). Search.com uses InfoSeek (search engine). InfoSeek partnered with Disney to create the GO Network www.go.com, which includes ESPN.com, Disney.com, ABCnews.com, ABC.com, and Mr. ShowBiz. Inktomi (search engine) powers HotBot, NBC's Snap, Yahoo, and iAtlas. And Microsoft's MSN just announced that it is switching from Inktomi to AltaVista for search. By the time you read this paragraph, these relationships and many others will most certainly have changed yet again.

Despite appearances, you really only have a choice of about nine major search engines (AltaVista, Inktomi, Northern Light, Excite, InfoSeek, Lycos, Webcrawler and newcomers Google and AlltheWeb).

How big are these search engines? WebCrawler covers about 2 million Web page documents, which by physical standards sounds immense, but by Internet standards is tiny. AltaVista weighs in a 140 million, while Inktomi has 110 million, Northern Light 80 million, Excite 55 million, InfoSeek 30 million, and Lycos 30 million. [NB -- These numbers have gone up considerably since 1999]

Choosing A Search Site

When you want quick and simple results, without having to learn anything about search engine syntax or commands, try Excite www.excite.com, Lycos www.lycos.com or InfoSeek www.infoseek.com. Just enter a word or two or three, and you'll get your results directory-style--with a handful of "recommended" sites at the top of the list, followed by results from a directory, then followed by general Web index results. The emphasis is on easy of use rather than precision or power.

By the way, don't be fooled at Lycos. Their search form is at the top of the page and looks likes it's part of a banner ad. You could easily miss it and think that all they had was their directory choices.

Excite adds an interesting twist known as "intelligent search". In addition to looking for occurrences of the exact words in your query, it also matches synonyms, and not just from a thesaurus, also based on what it has learned about related concepts from the documents in its index. Excite gives the example that a search for "elderly people financial concerns" would find both sites mentioning the economic status of retired people and the financial concerns of senior citizens. To use this feature, click on "Results for Other Possible Interpretations" under the query box. (NB--The need to "understand" the meaning of the content limits this approach to English language Web pages.)

Newcomer Google www.google.com ranks the results based on the number of links to a particular site. It uses that as a measure of "popularity," even though it is probably more a measure of how long the site has been active. It takes time for people to recognize how good a site is and to create links to it; and then it takes many months before those sites get indexed again by Google. As with Excite, Infoseek, and Lycos, here you are basically limited to typing in a few words. Google does, however, have one very helpful unique feature. Your results list shows the piece of text where your query words appear, so you can see the context and judge if that's what you really want.

AltaVista, Inktomi, and Northern Light www.northernlight.com give you far greater power over the results you get.

In the HotBot www.hotbot.com version of Inktomi, you can click on "More Search Options" and use pre-set forms to indicate your choices. (HotBot was created by the publishers of Wired Magazine, and retains the magazine's flashy graphic look-and-feel.)

To control your query at Northern Light, click on "Power Pearch." There you'll find pre-set forms similar to those at HotBot, however, you can search not only through Web pages, but also through over 5000 full text documents in their "Special Collection." These documents aren't available on the Web, because the people/companies who created them want to be paid for them. The cost for an article is usually in the range of $2.

You'll find Northern Light particularly valuable when you are looking for current news. News sites typically keep their stories in databases, which search engine robots can't normally access. And news changes far faster than the typical search engine updates its index. This special service at Northern Light allows you to search through 33 online news sources with a single query, rather than having to go to their separate sites.

At AltaVista, you have three different ways to search. Simple Search is what you see first. There, just like at Excite or InfoSeek, you can type a few words and get good results quickly. And once you get your results, you can choose to "refine" your search, providing you with automatically generated categories associated with your category words, and even a graphical view of your choices, to help step you through constructing a more complex query that includes some terms and excludes others. If you click on Advanced Search, you arrive at a realm where you can use a series of commands to very precisely define what you want.

For example, go to AltaVista. Click on Advanced. In the top (ranking) box, describe with a series of words what you want to buy. In the bottom (query) box, type the words "for sale" (including quotation marks). Then click Search, and you'll see a hyperlinked list of Web pages that match what you're looking for.

You can refine your search by entering dates -- to get only the most recent information. When two or more words must appear in a certain order, enclose them in quotations marks so they will be treated as a phrase.

The commands that you use in the bottom (query) box are:

• AND -- means that the term before and the term after must both be on a Web page for it to be a match (e.g., house AND Boston)
• OR -- means that if either the term before or the term after are on the Web page, then it's a match (e.g., outdoor OR indoor)
• AND NOT -- means that the next term cannot be on a page for it to be a match (e.g., Washington AND NOT DC)
• NEAR -- means that the term before and the term after must both appear on a page within 10 words of one another, in any order (e.g., Richard NEAR Seltzer would match with Richard Seltzer or Seltzer, Richard or Richard W. Seltzer).

AltaVista also allows you to search not just the Web, but the Internet wildlands known as "newsgroups." To get to that area, click on "Usenet" under "Specialty Searches." ("Usenet" is a term left over from the old pre-Web pioneering days of the Internet.) We'll give some examples of what you can do with Advanced Search later in the chapter when we talk about newsgroups.

Automatic Directories

For its initial demo, iAtlas is partnering with Inktomi. You can do a search at the iAtlas site and filter your results by industry or by city. It can also enable searches by zip code and site popularity, iAtlas says. Their approach should make it possible to create directories (for instance of a city) automatically, rather than by hand. By the time you read this book, dozens of popular Web sites will probably have adopted this approach, broadening the range of how you can find what you want when you want it.

Comparison Shopping

In your first online shopping excursions, you will probably focus on a few stores that you know through real-world equivalents, that you have heard about through advertising or from friends, and that you found easily and quickly by way of a major portal site.

As you become aware that there are a wide range of choices, and you'll gain greater confidence in the reliability of stores you might never have heard of before, you will want to compare prices--especially for brand-name, mass-manufactured merchandise, that should be identical in quality regardless of the retailer. The major portal sites are either adding software or linking to other sites that make price comparison extremely easy. There is no need to go to a dozen or more separate stores and take notes on the prices offered for the goods you want. Rather, you can go to a single comparison site that covers that class of goods, enter a specific query--the kind of product, the brand, the specific model or size, even major options--and learn which stores carry it and what they charge for it.

If you know exactly what you want -- a brand-named, mass-manufactured item -- and all that matters to you is price, then try one of the following sites. The look and feel of these sites are likely to be very similar since many use the same software, which typically sends out a robot program or Web crawler (like a search engine gathering information for its index). The difference lies in what kind of stores, how many stores, and which stores they include in their results, all of which change very rapidly.

• AltaVista Shopping Guide shopping.altavista.com
• BottomDollar www.bottomdollar.com
• Excite Product Finder www.jango.com
• Hotbot Shopping Bot shop.hotbot.com
• Junglee Shopping Guide by Compaq compaq.junglee.com
• Yahoo! Shopping shopguide.yahoo.com
• Web-Market www.webmarket.com
• Yahoo! Travel travel.yahoo.com

Note also that sites offering price comparison searches typically provide a hyperlinked "buy" buttons next to every item in the results list they display. But, in most cases, clicking that button does not add your choice to a common mall-like shopping cart. Rather it takes you to the actual vendor's page, the one who is offering that quoted price, and you have to make all your purchases separately. In all probability, common shopping carts should be introduced soon.

Site Comparisons

For quality comparisons, seek sites that focus on a single category of product (like all the sites that sell books), and sites that provide easy access to information (usually more than just price) from many vendors. Some of these might use multi-stage search technology that lets you specify all the key parameters necessary to configure a complex product like a computer. The site then would provide you with a list of vendors who can deliver such a product in your price range. We'll introduce you to some sites like that in our shopping tours, which span Chapters 4 through 10.

You can also check the online version of Consumer Reports www.consumerreports.com. Casual visitors get general consumer advice. For a paid subscription fee (currently $2.95 per month or $24 per year), you get access to product and service comparisons, ratings, and recommendations.

Consider also:

• CompareItAll www.compareitall.com, which has a wealth of shopping-related information.
• Compare.net www.compare.net, which offers "complete and unbiased product information" on a wide range of consumer products. (But, unlike Consumer Reports, this site accepts advertising from the companies whose products it compares.)
• Consumers Digest www.consumersdigest.com, the online version of the print publication, with product reviews and articles covering household goods, electronics, travel, food, and cars.
• eSmarts www.esmarts.com, which reviews and rates shopping Web sites, (reviewing the stores, rather than the products). eSmarts does not sell anything directly and reportedly does it receive any commissions on sales.
• Microsoft's Sidewalk sites, like boston.sidewalk.com, which reportedly are going through a transformation which will make them consumer-report type sites, with a local twist.

Making Online Shopping Automatic

To get a sense of what the current generation of bots can do, check BotSpot www.botspot.com. In particular, test drive the applications highlighted in their "Best of the Bots" section, as well as the shopbots list at www.botspot.com/search/s-shop.htm.

Today, the most common bots just investigate multiple search engines for you. If you have only a vague idea of what you want and would only enter a word or two as a query, that might be a useful alternative. If you find yourself in this situation, try InferenceFind www.infind.com, and you may be able to locate the item you need.

This method of searching, however, takes away your ability to take advantage of the unique and powerful search commands at such sites as AltaVista, HotBot, and Northern Light. If you have a clear idea of what you are looking for, you are better off mastering the capabilities of a single search engine, rather than using a bot to submit a poorly constructed query to dozens of separate search engines, with a single command.

In the future, bots might serve as your own personal shoppers. Securely supplied with your passwords and credit card information, a properly engineered bot could perform a wide variety of tasks for you, including not only finding goods and information at the prices you want, but actually making the purchases for you. Imagine telling a bot to keep an eye on the price of certain stocks, and giving it the authority to buy and sell for you as soon as those stocks hit certain price points. Or, imagine using a bot to continuously scan through auction and classified ad sites for hard-to-find items you desperately want, and then to buy or bid for it, at a price within your guidelines.

Recently, the increased use of a new standard known as "XML" has simplified the work performed by bots and shopping-oriented search engines. Many commercial sites will include special coding in their Web documents to identify that they have products for sale and the types of products, and at what prices. That coding will make it much easier for a bot to fetch and compare information of this kind.

In other words, these Web documents will "describe themselves" in a way that makes it possible for the entire Web to operate like a single unified database. When this standard is in widespread use, you should be able to ask detailed, structured questions, and search the catalogs of hundreds of thousands or even millions of stores with a single click.

Bargain Hunting in Classifieds and Newsgroups

For the online equivalent of yard sales, you might want to venture into newsgroups. In Chapter 3, we'll talk about how to use newsgroups and other forms of online discussion to get help and advice from other shoppers. If your main intent is to buy through newsgroups, your best starting point is AltaVista. From the area called "Specialty Searches," click on Usenet. AltaVista will then display a query box. Enter the phrase

+newsgroups:forsale +whateveryouwant

and replace "whateveryouwant" with the type of item for which you are looking. If you are entering a phrase rather than a single word, put the phrase in quotation marks and put a + sign in front of the first quotation mark. When you get your list of results, to read an entry, just click on its name. If you want to get in touch with the person who posted the information and is selling the item, click on the associated email address. Keep in mind that while you will see many tempting offers in newsgroups, be cautious. No one but the seller is providing you with any assurances about your would-be purchase. Responding to these ads is like responding to notes posted on a bulletin board at your local grocery store, except the seller probably doesn't live in your neighborhood or even your city -- he or she might even be in another country.

If you want to post your own ad in a newsgroup and have never used newsgroups before, your best place to start is at Deja.com www.deja.com. Be sure to read the general information at Deja that explains what newsgroups are, how they work,and the proper way to use them. Follow the instructions there for finding the right newsgroup(s) to post your item in, and how to do the posting from the Deja site.

Online Auctions: When Buying Means "Winning"

Similar to face-to-face auctions, you are bidding against other people who want the same goods, and who, like you, are looking for a great bargain or trying to get hold of something that is very hard to find. But unlike a live auction, you don't have to be on hand at a certain time, and you don't have to wait while the auctioneer sells all the other goods on which you have no interest in bidding. With an online auction, you click from item to item and bid on any item[md]or items[md]you like, however often you like. Each item being auctioned has a certain timeframe that it will be offered for sale. As each offered item's auction deadline approaches, the online action intensifies. The name of the game is to just barely outbid the next highest bidder, as near to the deadline as possible. Then you "win," and have the honor of paying for and receiving the merchandise. At the auction's close, you[md]the buyer[md]deal directly with the item's seller to arrange payment, shipping the purchased item, and any remaining details.

At some auction sites, you buy directly from the manufacturer or from a store rather than an individuals, and the merchandise for sale is new or refurbished. These sites, designed to quickly turn overstocked inventory into cash, often go out of their way to heighten the excitement and draw buyers back. Some hold "flash auctions" -- auctions which begin and end in a very short time period, rather than lasting for days or weeks, which is common at sites where individuals sell to one another. For instance, at First Auction (www.firstauction.com) you will find numerous auctions that last just 30 minutes, and where the first bid -- even on merchandise worth hundreds of dollars -- is always just $1. Such a set up can easily create a bidding frenzy.

Like a competitive contest, participating in online auctions can become very exciting. Especially at a "flash auction," you might get caught up in the competitive thrill of the moment. If you are not cautious, you could wind up buying things you don't want or need. As with gambling, you could become addicted. But if you can manage to maintain some self control, you can find bargains and hard-to-find collectibles--along with enjoying the exhilarating experience. One additional sideline benefit is that you'll meet lots of people online who have similar interests to yours. Here is a listing of a few sites to get you started in the thrilling world of online auction activity:

• eBay www.eBay.com: This site is one of the largest auction sites, boasting that it currently has nearly twp million items for sale in over a fifteen hundred categories. This site receives over 140 million hits per week [That number has gone up considerably since 1999] . With so much to offer, eBay is a great place to check out as your first online auction site. But before you begin bidding, first read their tutorial and frequently asked questions to learn the rules of how eBay conducts its business and charges fees for participation.

• Amazon.com www.amazon.com The Internet book-selling giant entered the auction business in April 1999, with many of the features and much of the look-and-feel of ebay.

• The Internet Auction List www.internetauctionlist.com: This site is actually a list of over 1400 different auction sites, and lets you search for specific types of auctions in a variety of ways, including by geography. Depending on what you want to buy or sell, you may prefer an auction site in your state, or at least in the same country, to reduce shipping and customs costs, delays, and hassles.

• BidFind www.bidfind.com: This site is a searchable index of items for sale in on-going auctions at numerous sites (including eBay).

• OnSale www.onsale.com: This site holds auctions for manufacturers and resellers that are trying to reduce excess inventory. So while you'll see lots of used and collectible merchandise at eBay, here you can look for bargain prices on new goods in the categories of computer products, sports and fitness, home and office, and travel.

Sidebars for This Chapter

Want to go to a physical store to see, touch, and maybe buy something you found online? Go to the Web site Mapquest www.mapquest.com, to request map and driving instructions for free to a local store that is associated with the online store.

For mail-in rebates on products from electronics to toys, check The Rebate Company www.rebateco.com. Many of their products are completely free after the rebate.

Are you finding good stuff on the Web, saving the documents, then having difficulty weeding through what you've saved? Then go to AltaVista www.altavista.com, and download AltaVista Discovery software for free. This software indexes all the content on your hard drive, and lets you find everything you want instantly, with the same look-and-feel as the AltaVista Search site.

If a page is temporarily unavailable due to system or network problems, or if the page no longer exists on the Web, Google will provide it for you. The service saves all the pages that it indexes, and can serve them up on request.

Hungry for more? If you want to learn more about recent developments in search engines and directories, check Search Engine Watch www.searchenginewatch.com and subscribe to its monthly email reports.

When considering similar product offerings at different sites, open two or more copies of your browser and reduce the browser's size so you can view two separate copies of the browser with individual product descriptions and pictures at the same time. Or, you can run two individual browsers and quickly bounce back and forth between the two or more browsers.

Put the "eGenie" to work for you. Connect to egenie.opensesame.com. As you explore this site's categories of entertainment, including TV, movies, books, and music, the eGenie "bot" will "learn" your tastes, based simply on your choices. eGenie will then automatically generate a list of Web sites and web location recommendations tailored for you.

Test drive the bots at www.wisewire.com/trialwires2.html In particular, see the "Sample Tech Toy Wires," including computer hardware, audio systems, and cellular phones. You'll see hyperlinked lists of Web pages linking you to those items. The linked sites listed by the bots are rated by visitors to those Web sites.

Clear out your attic and basement of old books and knickknacks, things that you once collected and now no longer care about. Go to eBay and put them up for sale. You'll get cash you can use on your next shopping trip, and you'll free up space to accommodate the new stuff you pick up.

Chapter Three: Advanced Techniques:Becoming a Creative Online Shopper

Congratulations. You are now ready to join the community of Internet online shoppers. Once you become part of this special group of people, then you'll begin to realize the true benefits of the Internet. By sharing openly, you gain access to the wisdom, experience, insights, and fellowship of tens of thousands of other online shoppers who have interests similar to yours.

Just tens of thousands of people? Not millions? Only a small percentage of those who shop online actively participate in the online community. Most online shoppers just pass through their shopping experience, buying one thing here and another there. But I hope that you'll aspire to more than that, wanting to achieve the truly active effortlessness that comes when you make online shopping an integral part of your life and identity. You'll live it, you'll breathe it, you'll love it. What the heck, it's fun.

What do we mean by the online shopping community? The Internet offers a variety of ways by which you can and should interact with other shoppers, and not just with shopping carts and credit-card transaction processing programs. Here is a brief summary:

• Chat is "real time" dialogue that occurs on the Internet between several people who are online simultaneously in the same chat area. In that chat area, you will be able to see what other participants type and they see what you type--live--as it's happening in real time.

• Forums are like bulletin boards. You post a message. Somebody comes by later and posts a response. Somebody else responds to that response. Over the course of days, weeks, months, years, threads of discussion grow.

• With email distribution lists, you "subscribe" to receive and send email messages in a given subject area. These email distribution lists are sent by and to other online participants who also subscribe.

• With newsgroups (also known as "Usenet newsgroups"), you can post and read messages in a given subject area without having "subscribed," simply by going to the right place within the newsgroup to read.

Be A "Full Player"

Once you know how this online community stuff works, you should also consider becoming a full player:

• With your own Web pages, you can publish recipes, tips, or experiences: ideas and advice of all kinds, as well as lists of collectibles for which you are looking. Invite the entire world to take a look at your Web pages.

• For about $100 per month, rather than depending on auctions and classifieds, you could use the lessons you've learned as an online shopper to open your own online store to sell your mother's jewelry or your wife's herbal tea.
  

A Word of Caution

As you meet new people in newsgroups, forums, and chat sessions, you can benefit from their advice and suggestions, and you can help others as well. Just remember that people are people even in cyberspace: with all their good and bad traits. You should proceed with caution, listening more often than talking, until you've had enough online experience to develop cyber-street- smarts.

You have learned to proceed cautiously when approached by a street hawker or a door-to-door salesperson or when you get an unsolicited phone call from a stranger. You need to get used to the Internet equivalent of these encounters, to sense when you should hold back and when you should be open and sharing.

Immediacy

In most cases, you first will arrive at a registration page, where you apply for a password, or you can just sign in, then click to enter and immediately join in the discussion. Sometimes your browser software will suffice for you to participate in the chat room's activity. Other times, you will be given instructions on how to download special chat software. Unfortunately, there are dozens of different chat programs, and different sites use different ones. Don't sweat it. Follow the instructions you find at each chat room. Just dive in--read and react. It won't take long for you to get the drift of how it works, and when you come to the same chat room for the second time, it will be even easier to join in.

In most cases, you type your messages in a form, and in a viewing area you see what you and others have been saying. You'll also see hyperlink buttons to click on to submit what you've typed or to change the look-and-feel of the page for your convenience. If you are confused, check the chat room's Help files. Better yet, speak up. Type what you are thinking. Ask your questions and let the folks like you who are connected help you. Once you start participating in the chat, just go with the flow of activities. You'll be surprised how soon this seemingly stilted and awkward communication mechanism becomes second nature to you. You'll almost start "hearing" it. (Imagine telegraph operators in the days when Edison was young, who heard words when the uninitiated just heard clicks.)

This medium is great when you need suggestions for a gift, or advice on what is the best of this or that, or tips on the best place to get what you need. When you have a question and need an immediate answer, or just need to vent to and relate with people in the same kind of circumstances, give chat rooms a try.

Forums let you carry on discussions across barriers of time as well as space. Your crazy schedule and time zone differences needn't get in the way of your discussing recipes or disk drives with an online friend in Thailand. Because you aren't faced with the urgency of everyone being connected to the Internet at once (like you are with chat rooms), you can pause and reflect and even edit your question or answer or comment before posting it to the forum. Days, weeks, maybe even months later, you'll be able to go back and see what you said, and what was said in response, as well as whether the conversation went any further from there. You might even tell your friends about this discussion and ask them to take a look and add their thoughts.

Where do you find forums? You'll see links to some of them at portals and malls and major shopping sites.

Email Via Distribution Lists: When You Know the Subject--Not the People

Many of these email distribution lists use automated software, so you sign on and off with a standard message to a particular address. The smaller distribution lists have posting addresses, and everything sent there by a subscriber gets automatically forwarded to the entire subscriber list. The larger distribution lists have one or more moderators who filter the mail and perhaps put the best postings together into "digest" messages.

A public email distribution list's audience is typically a few hundred people and sometimes as large as a few thousand. The larger the subscriber group, the more likely the list will have moderator; otherwise, you could get so many emails from the group that they became a nuisance rather than a help.

How do you find these public email distribution lists? Go to "Liszt, the mailing list directory" www.liszt.com. (That's not a typo; this site spells its name like the name of the Hungarian composer). The searchable directory includes over 90,000 public email lists that you can join. This Web site also provides a recommended subset, organized by category.

Search Liszt for "antiques," and you'll find four matches. Click on the category "business," then "shopping," and you'll find:

• Giftgiving: help for the gift-giving challenged (e.g., helping men find gift ideas for women.)
• The Internet Cheapskate Newsletter: information on free and cheap Internet services.
• McDonaldSv: surplus items for office, home, work, at low prices.
• RummageFun: for selling anything and everything, like a big yard or rummage sale.
• Shopping: weekly updates of online shopping opportunities.

Newsgroups: Reach Out to an Even Broader Community

Liszt also has a newsgroup directory. But the most comprehensive source of information about newsgroups is Deja.com. On peak days, this Web site processes over a million postings from hundreds of thousands of people to over 50,000 different newsgroups. [This number keeps growing.]

Click on "New Users" at the bottom of Deja's first page for information on how to get the most out of their free service. This Web site makes it easy for you to find and read the items you want and also to post items to any of these groups. Some examples of advice or information you can post requested responses for are as varied as looking for a rare collectible or seeking advice on what DVD system to buy.

Web Pages: Make Your Own and Let People Find You

I've created my own Web site, myself; and over the last three and a half years, I've built my site to include over 900 documents, some of which are entire books. In any typical week, about 4000 people visit my site, most of whom found their way to my site by using search engines. Often, they are looking for advice about doing business on the Internet or using the AltaVista search engine; or they have read a book or author that I've read or mentioned. Some also come looking for my online shopping directory, which has links to all the sites mentioned in this book www.seltzerbooks.com/shopping.html

But, why would you want to create and maintain your own Web site? Here are some great reasons:

• Post lists of what you want to buy so sellers can find you.
• Share with others hyperlinked lists of sites that you want to recommend (perhaps with your personal reviews).
• Post useful content related to areas of particular interest to you, so others with similar interests will find your pages and then contact you.
• Take advantage of affiliates and associates programs offered by stores where you buy frequently, so you can get discounts on what you buy yourself and also get referral fees (cash or merchandise credit) when people click from one of your pages to that store and then buy something.

For ideas on what to include in your Web site and why, how to design your pages, and how to publicize your site for free over the Internet, check my book, The Social Web, which is available for free at www.seltzerbooks.com/#social. For now, book is only available in electronic form. You can read it at my Web site, and save and print it, just like you would any other Web page. You can also buy it on diskette from Amazon.com.

Opening Your Own Online Store

While you can expect other companies to make similar offers, Yahoo! Store is leading the way in making it easy for ordinary people to open and run small online stores. Yahoo! Store already has over 280,000 products listed [number growing rapidly], and this mall-style collection of stores gets millions of page views per month. Shoppers can do a single search across all the stores. A single "shopping basket" keeps track of your choices, as you move from store to store within the site. And Yahoo! Store enables secure credit card transactions. As one of their store keepers, you need no special software--just your browser. The folks at Yahoo! claim you can build a store and start taking orders in "minutes."

But please don't underestimate the time and effort required to successfully run a store, even online. If you want try running an online store because you love what it is you'll sell, go for it. If you want to get rich quick, go to Las Vegas instead. Your odds of striking it rich will probably be better there. Before deciding, be sure to read the excellent article "The 10 Secrets of Selling Online" by Paul Graham.

Sidebars For This Chapter

If you can't find a store's email address (unfortunately a common occurrence these days), try the following method. If the Web address is www.greatstore.com, then send email to "webmaster@greatstore.com" or "support@greatstore.com". If that doesn't work and the message bounces back as "undeliverable," then look them up at one of the online yellow pages sites, such as AnyWho Switchboard  or Big Yellow.

If you really get into the mode of relating to other people in chat, go to Xoom and start your own free chat room. Tell your online friends about it, and gather there at pre-set times to talk about whatever interests you.

If you love the forum style of discussion, consider creating your own forum for free at Delphi (www.delphi.com).

Ever want to talk to a friend while in the middle of an online shopping excursion? Go to Mirabilis and read how their ICQ "instant messaging" software works. Download and install it. Then get your friends to do the same.

Concerned about the volume of email you might get from distribution lists? Sign up for free email accounts. You can use a different account to subscribe to each list. You can then pick up messages from a particular distribution list by going to the email account that you used when you signed up for that particular list.

Okay. You've become a shopping guru. Why not use the money you've saved to throw a party for the friends you've met online? If you live in far-flung locations, arrange to "rendezvous" at a vacation spot. To work out your travel plans, maybe hold a weekly chat or carry on your discussion in a forum. To get the best travel deals, check the sites discussed in Chapter 8. And when you get back, post pictures and notes at your own Web site.

Chapter Four:Books, Music, Videos 

Books, for example, have been traditionally sold through physical stores that have limited shelf space. Publishers battle for this shelf space,and only the best selling books are stocked. Thousands of other books don't make it and even the ones that do soon get pushed aside by new titles. The losers are shipped back to the publishers as "returns," with the store receiving for full credit for the unsold books. The returned books eventually show up as "remainders," and are liquidated at enormous discounts.

Compare this traditional book sale model with today's online book store--a "virtual" store with no such physical constraints. The Internet version of the book store can include millions of different items, storing the information in a database so that you can find what you want quickly, searching by author, subject, or title.

Choice: How Many Million is Enough?

So with an Internet-based book store, where do all the books come from? Typically, the basic listings come from Books in Print, a publication of R.R. Bowker (www.bowker.com) which attempts to catalog all books published in the U.S. Their Internet edition includes more than 900,000 titles published since 1979. A would-be superstore sets up a searchable database starting with that information and makes business partnerships with one or more distributors.

Some online superstores, like Barnes and Noble (www.barnesandnoble.com) are connected with pre-existing physical stores or chains of stores. Others like Amazon.com are new to this business and will probably never go to the expense of building brick-and-mortar stores. The typical superstore will have some best-selling books in stock for very quick turnaround. They'll forward other orders to their distributors for shipment in a few days. And others they'll special order from the publisher for delivery in a few weeks. If you need a book quickly, you might want to shop around the various superstores to see which one guarantees fastest delivery for that particular title.

The highly publicized success of Amazon.com has attracted lots of competitors. Here's a list of the best known online book retailers today, but expect plenty more to join the fray.

• A1Books (www.a1books.com)
• alt.bookstore (www.altbookstore.com)
• Amazon.com (www.amazon.com)
• Barnes and Noble (www.barnesandnoble.com)
• Book Stacks Unlimited (www.books.com)
• Books-a-Million (www.booksamillion.com)
• Books Now (www.booksnow.com)
• Borders (www.borders.com)
• Buy.com (www.buy.com)
• Indigo (www.indigo.ca) -- located in Canada
• King Books (www.kingbooks.com)
• Powells (www.powells.com)
• Shopping.com (www.shopping.com/ibuy/books)
• Wordsworth (www.wordsworth.com)

How do some of these stores offer numbers of titles far greater than those found in Books in Print? Some, like Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble, bolster the number of items they have for sale by including out-of-print books (for which they have finder services.) Amazon also has a program, Advantage, for small presses. This program accepts books on consignment. Those efforts make available to the general public literary and other rare works that otherwise would be almost impossible to find and difficult to purchase.

Specialty Book Stores -- Surviving the Attack of Godzilla

I have to admit that I'm an Amazon addict. I spend an average of $100 to $200 a month there, and a lot more at Christmas when I buy gifts. But I also regularly buy books at Daedalus and Schoenhofs.

Daedalus (www.daedalus-books.com) regularly sends me a printed catalog, which has thoughtful, well-written mini-reviews of books I would otherwise probably never have heard of and that I very often find delightful. For the most part, these are low-priced remainders--hardcovers now going into paperback or gems that for one reason or other didn't make it in the book stores.

I shop at Schoenhof's (www.schoenhofs.com) for their enormous selection of foreign language books--French, German, and Russian. But while I'll check their Web site, I'm probably more likely to phone them, because their knowledgeable sales staff can let me know about alternative editions and related titles.

Whatever your tastes, there are probably niche stores on the Internet that can make it easy for you to decide what to buy, learn about new books in your field, or find a particular book when you don't know the title or the author.

Here's a sampling of the Internet's niche book stores. You will find many others by links from related Web pages and also by using the major search engines and directories (discussed in Chapter 1).

• African American Literature Bookclub (www.aalbc.com) offers specialty books with the African-American focus.
• Bibliofind (www.bibliofind.com) lists over nine million old, used and rare books offered for sale by thousands of booksellers around the world
• Cherry Valley Books (www.cherryvalleybooks.com) tends to specialize in children's, young adult, and parenting titles.
• Cody's Books (www.codysbooks.com) is the online service of a well-known bookstore in Berkeley, CA.
• FatBrain.com (www.fatbrain.com): FatBrain lists all those computer books you need to master software and hardware.
• Future Fantasy Bookstore (www.futfan.com) is an online science fiction book store.
• Quantum Books (www.quantumbooks.com) is a technical and scientific book store, with its physical store's location near MIT.
• Politics and Prose Bookstore and Coffeehouse (www.politics-prose.com) in Washington, DC, only includes books personally selected by the owners.
• Schoenhoffs (www.schoenhofs.com) specializes in foreign language (French, German, Russian) texts.
• Sky Publishing's online store (store.skypub.com) features astronomy books, as well as other star-gazing paraphanalia.
• Tattered Cover Internet Store (www.tatteredcover.com) is an online service of several physical stores in Colorado.
• Victor Kamkin (www.kamkin.com) specializes in Russian language books and magazines.

The Rise of Pseudo-Stores Online

I operate a pseudo-store, myself, at my Web site at www.seltzerbooks.com/. There I have a list of every book I've read for the last 41 years (so I'm a bit obsessive), plus lists of my favorites, and reviews. Because those pages of mine are indexed at the major search engines (and especially at AltaVista), I get lots of email from other readers who have enjoyed the same books as I did. That email is my best source of recommendations for what to read next. It's also a lot of fun getting in touch with people of similar interests and sharing ideas with them. Since I'm an Amazon.com associate, I get a 5 to 15 percent referral fee on what visitors to my site buy at Amazon when they click to there from one of my links. You can do the same. It's relatively simple, and here are the steps:

1. Post one or more Web pages at a free Web-hosting site like NBCi [formerly Xoom] (www.nbci.com/), Tripod (www.tripod.com, or Geocities (www.geocities.com), as described in Chapter Five.

2. Sign up for an affiliate/associate program at one of the book superstores. Signing up typically costs nothing and takes about a day for verification that you do have a Web site and that you don't seem to be doing anything illegal there.

3. Make a list of books that you love and would like to recommend, preferably around a common theme, so your "store" will have an identifiable niche.

4. Following the instructions from the superstore, make hyperlinks from your pages to the pages at the superstore where those particular books are offered for sale.

5. Add additional content, such as reviews, to let visitors know more about the books you have chosen and to encourage them to click on the hyperlinks.

6. Anyone who clicks gets connected to the superstore, where they get more information and where they can place orders online.

7. The superstore collects the money and fills the order, periodically sending you reports about activity from your site. The site also sends you a check with a finder's fee that typically amounts to 5 to 15 percent of what the customers paid for the books they bought.

If you are considering creating a pseudo-store, don't get inflated expectations. You aren't likely to get rich this way. But if you love books and like to share your enthusiasm, this is a way to pick up a little "found money."

The difficult part is getting enough traffic to your little Web site to generate sales of this kind. For tips in doing that, you can check my book, The Social Web, which you can read online at www.seltzerbooks.com/#social.

What Price?

Yes, an online store may try to lure you in with ads about special prices on particular books, but so do physical stores, which heavily discount the best sellers and hope you'll buy more books once you're in the store. But shopping online you'll be hit with shipping charges, which decline the more you buy. If you only want that one item, the shipping will bring the real cost up close to list, or certainly no better than you could do at the physical store around the corner. You only get the benefit of the advertised cost savings on the one title by buying several or even half a dozen other books at the same time; however, those additional titles probably don't have the same high discount.

If you do insist on buying one book here and another there, while the nominal cost for each item might be less, the total cost, including shipping, will be much higher than if you bought them all at the same superstore.

By the way, you can't use a search engine like AltaVista and Hotbot to find out which online stores have the book or music or video you want. That's because the stores keep their catalog information in databases, and public search engines today cannot access databases. You can, however, use a comparison site like PriceScan (www.pricescan.com), or Acses (www.acses.com) to check the availability and price of particular title across a dozen or so online stores.

Logically, you might expect to get the best deal by eliminating the middleman and going straight to the publisher's site. In fact, you could use the search capability at an online superstore to find out who the publisher is and then go to the publisher's site to make the purchase. But the industry doesn't work that way.

Major publishers typically give bookstores and distributors a discount in the range of 40 to 55 percent, depending on the size of their orders. But, believe it or not, they are not set up to handle individual orders themselves and can't do so economically even though they'd get the full undiscounted price.

For instance, at Macmillan's site (www.mcp.com), you can search and browse their complete catalog (more than 2000 new titles published each year), and see a description, the table of contents, and a sample chapter of each. But you can't buy the book online there. Rather they expect you to make the purchase at retail book stores. Smaller publishers, whose books are carried by a limited number of stores, will probably include a list of those stores at their site. Only the very tiniest publishers, who sell primarily by direct mail and whose titles may not appear in stores at all, are likely to sell directly over the Internet.

That means that a superstore like Amazon.com is not in competition with the publishers, but rather works in partnership with them. In fact, Amazon.com welcomes all the information and excerpts and pictures that the publishers are willing to provide. Hence, the Amazon.com site becomes the simplest way for a publisher to sell single copies, without all the logistical headaches and cost of trying to deal directly with hundreds of thousands or even millions of individual customers.

If you know of a publisher that specializes in books in your field, you may want to check the publisher's Website for its latest catalog and browse to see what's new. Then you can go to an online superstore to make your purchase.

It's All a Matter of Taste

To help us make these decisions, we traditionally rely on best-seller lists, awards, reviews, and the opinions of friends. We also sample the goods--flipping through books in a physical store, or hearing music on the radio or TV or seeing previews of videos. Online superstores typically give you easy access to best-seller lists, award lists, reviews by professionals, and also reviews by people like yourself. (For instance, at Amazon.com you can post your own reviews of the books you've read.) And, thanks to their partnerships with publishers, they sometimes provide detailed descriptions, tables of contents, and even sample chapters.

If you are a glutton for reviews, check AcqWeb's Directory of Book Reviews on the Web at www.library.vanderbilt.edu/law/acqs/bookrev.html. This site will link you to all the major traditional sources of reviews, including Library Journal, Booklist, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Salon Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, and The Atlantic Monthly. It also includes links to publications that review scholarly and interdisciplinary books, children's books, and computing and Internet books.

You also could and should spend some time checking the book-related newsgroups, including the monstrously large and very active rec.arts.books, and its off-shoots (rec.arts.books.childrens, rec.arts.books.hist-fiction, rec.arts.books.marketplace, and rec.arts.books.tolkien). And science fiction lovers should consider rec.arts.sf.fandom, rec.arts.sf.marketplace, rec.arts.sf.misc, rec.arts.sf.science, rec.arts.sf.starwars, rec.arts.sf.superman, and rec.arts.sf.written. If you don't have access to a news server by way of your Internet service provider, you can search through and read and post to all of these at Dejanews (www.dejanews.com).

In any case, avid readers should definitely check Evelyn C. Leeper's home page at www.geocities.com/Athens/4824/. Evelyn has been a regular and prolific contributor to book-related newsgroups for many years. At her personal Web site, she has posted her numerous insightful reviews, along with the "frequently asked questions" (FAQ) documents from rec.arts.books. and rec.arts.sf.written, which may well answer some of your own questions. You will also find there a very complete list of physical bookstores worldwide, generated and updated by the collaborative efforts of newsgroup participants over many years.

But for buying books and music and videos, the online shopping experience is truly unique, and not just a matter of easy access to enormous quantities of information. The superstores can actually help me to better understand my own tastes and then to find the works that match. That's basically why I do nearly all my shopping for this class of goods online today, and why the unplanned, impulse purchases I make there are very often winners.

The simplest form of online personal recommendations matches you with others who have purchased an item in which you are interested. For instance, at Amazon.com, when I read the details about a particular book or music CD, I immediately see a list of the top three items that purchasers of this item also bought.

A class of software known as "collaborative filtering" takes this a giant step forward. Based on your previous purchases and on any information you provide regarding your tastes (for instance, rating titles that you are familiar with), the system learns your preferences. At the same time it is learning the preferences of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of other consumers of books, music, and/or videos. It builds a profile of your preferences and matches you with others who have similar tastes. Then your list of personal recommendations (which you can access at the store's Web site or get periodically by email) includes those items that your cyber-soul-mates have given high ratings to and that you have not yet rated. The more people provide details on their preferences, the more effective the system is in predicting everyone's likes and dislikes; so when you take the time to give your input, you not only help yourself, but also the community of others like you. You learn what others like you enjoy, rather than what professional reviewers prefer. And the recommendations are truly tailored to you as an individual, rather than to some fictitious notion of you based on statistical averages.

This approach is very different from the demographic data, used to target advertising and programming to mass audiences. Demographics are static categories of people based on factors such as age, sex, race, education, and income. Advertisers try to find correlations between those factors and what people watch and what they buy. But individuality gets lost in averages. The "average man" is a statistical fiction. Such data helps advertisers define their target audience, determine what they are likely to watch, and craft messages that are likely to appeal to many of them. But they are useless for helping you determine what book or record or video is most likely to please you.

By the way, these online preference services provide a strong incentive to return over and over again to the same superstore. For instance, once you've taken the time at Amazon.com to rate dozens or even hundreds of books or music CDs or videos, you can count on getting useful recommendations there. And as you buy more there and rate more there, the recommendations keep improving.

TheInternet: Reinvigorating the Book Industry

Basically, online book shopping changes not just how you buy, but the whole economics of the publishing industry. You have far greater choice today, and even greater choice in the future, as publishers choose to keep their books in print longer, because now they have an outlet that isn't limited by shelf space. They also could publish more books because they no longer depend on large print runs and traditional distribution methods. They might, for instance, take advantage of print-on-demand technology that allows them to print a few copies or even a single copy economically, as orders come in. At the same time, very small and do-it-yourself publishers--that have no hope of making it into physical stores--can sell their books through the same online superstores that the major publishers do, giving you even greater choice.

Electronic Books: Books That Sell Without Ever Being "In Print"

• No manufacturing and warehousing cost and no waste from returns; hence lower prices.
• Immediate online delivery, with no shipping costs or delays.

Also, a few innovative publishers, like Macmillan (www.mcp.com/personal/) also make the complete text of selected books available to be viewed for free over the Web. Meanwhile hundreds of volunteers are making the full text of thousands of public domain classics available for free in electronic form--for the good of all--through projects like Gutenberg (www.promo.net/pg).

With computer displays the way they are today, very few people would be inclined to read an entire book online, and printing out an entire book on your personal printer is far more expensive than buying a book. So publishers who put the full text of books up on the Web are basically giving you an unlimited set of samples to consider--just like you could at a physical book store. Reportedly, the publishers who offer full texts of books free for viewing at their Web sites typically see a 20 to 30 percent increase in print sales for those same books.

The exception is the blind, who, thanks to computer-based text-to-voice converters, can and do read electronic books that are made available in plain text form (without fancy formatting and graphics).

We are just now beginning to see in the public marketplace inexpensive computer-like devices devoted to displaying electronic books. As such gadgets catch on, and as the displays for ordinary PCs improve, the market for books sold, delivered, and read in electronic form should soar, changing the standard practices of publishers and the buying and reading habits of people like you.

Music: A Sound Investment

• alt.bookstore (www.altbookstore.com)
• Amazon.com (www.amazon.com)
• Barnes and Noble (www.barnesandnoble.com)
• Best Buy (www.bestbuy.com)
• BlockBuster Video (www.blockbuster.com)
• Borders (www.borders.com)
• Buy.com (www.buy.com)
• CDNow (www.cdnow.com)
• CD Universe (www.cduniverse.com)
• Columbia House (www.columbiahouse.com)
• Compact Disc Connection (www.cdconnection.com)
• The Intelligent Tunes Music Network (www.tunes.com)
• K-Tel (www.ktel.com) (With this site, you can build your own custom music CD.)
• Music Boulevard (www.musicboulevard.com)
• Music Favorites (Kmart) (www.musicfavorites.com)
• MyLaunch (www.mylaunch.com) (This music community uses special software to help match people of similar taste and to provide recommendations based on what people similar to you like.)
• Spree (www.spree.com)
• TotalE (www.totale.com)
• Tower Records (www.towerrecords.com)
• Wherehouse (www.wherehouse.com)

Also, thanks to affiliate/associate programs, expect to see lots of little pseudo-stores that sell music. These pseudo-sites will also provide information and recommendations about particular kinds of music and then provide links to superstores for particular titles, in return for referral fees or credit on future purchases. As in the case of books, if you are a serious music lover as well as buyer, you may want to consider becoming an affiliate/associate yourself and setting up your own Web pages, as described in an earlier section of this chapter. (Hundreds of thousands of people like yourself have done so already.)

When shopping for music, the online search capabilities at the superstores are particularly useful here. Categories of music tend to be very subjective and idiosyncratic (is that pop or folk or rock?) While one physical store might shelve a particular CD in one category, another might put it in a different category. And if you are trying to buy music as a gift--shopping for kinds of music with which you are not personally familiar--the physical store can be very intimidating, and it can take you a long time to find what you want unless you are able to find a helpful salesperson with a moment to spare.

Those same search capabilites make it easy for you to find and learn about independent labels and artists, whose music is now for sale online, but who couldn't get shelf space for their CDs and cassette tapes in physical stores.

For you to be able to hear music samples to help you make your online music-shopping decisions, your PC needs an audio card and related software, and you also need to fetch the appropriate plug-in software for your browser. (Most music sites use plug-ins from RealNetworks, which you can download from their Web site at www.real.com.) For the best sound, you may want to get quality speakers. Then you'll be able to get the most out of the music sampling capabilities at online stores.

As with books, the trend is first to provide excerpts/samples online, and later to sell the product in electronic form, so you can download it directly to your PC, rather than waiting for delivery of a physical CD or tape. You'll find the beginnings of electronic delivery today at a handful of sites, such as Music Boulevard.

At Music Boulevard, click on "Download Music" to see the selections. A single song might cost about a dollar and take about half an hour to download. But first you'll have to download and install a free e-mod music player, which will take you another five minutes.

If you are going to buy music in electronic form, you will want a portable way of saving it. Otherwise your hard drive will get filled quickly, and you will be frustrated when you want to play the music on a device other than your PC. You might consider adding one of the new CD drives that lets you write as well as read CDs.

For music, radio stations provide samples all day; you pick a station that suits your tastes, hear some tunes that you like, and buy them. But the stations only play a small percentage of what's available. What about the rest? In the past, those options were dead: An artist or group either "made" it or didn't. Now those unknowns can sell their CDs and tapes through online music superstores. But how do you find out that the "unknown" exists? (Yes, you can search for an "unknown" by name, but you already have to know their name to search for them.)

Emerging artists now have the opportunity to take matters into their own hands and offer samples of their music or complete works online at their own Web sites. We discussed in Chapter 3 how ordinary people like us can create our own Web pages at sites like Geocities, NBCi (formerly Xoom), and Tripod, that offer free space and the tools you need for ordinary pages consisting of text and graphics. If you love music or have your own music group and are ambitious,you can take this approach a step further and build a site with audio content, as well as text and graphics, at very little cost.

Audio files are much larger than text files: a single song might take up ten times as much space as an entire book (5 Mbytes vs. 500 Kbytes). So you wouldn't want to do much, if any, audio if you were limited to just 5 or 10 Mbytes of space (which is typical with free Web-hosting accounts). But, Hispeed (http://www.hispeed.com/) currently offers unlimited Web space for as little as $19.95 per month. Hispeed is also set up to handle "streaming audio"(for a couple extra dollars a month) --where the listener hears the sounds as they arrive, rather than having to download an entire files and then play it back. With free software from RealNetworks (www.real.com), you can turn your sound files into the format needed for "streaming audio" and post them on your site at Hispeed.

If you are really ambitious, you could create many such personal files--voice as well as music--and run your offerings regularly, operating your own Internet-based radio station at very low cost and without needing FCC approval. (Keep in mind that $15/month is the base price. The more you do, the more it costs; but you'll be amazed at what is possible on a shoestring.)

To see how online radio stations work, check the RealGuide at RealNetworks (www.real.com/realguide/index.html). Some of the sites linked to from there feature music from artists who have not yet hit the mainstream. You might also want to check Musicnet's HotPicks (www.musicnet.com/hotpicks/index.html), which offers over 2000 music clips.

You can also learn about new music artists through newsgroups which you can search for at Dejanews (www.dejanews.com), and through email discussion lists, which you can search for at Liszt (www.liszt.com).

Video: Seeing Is Believing

For now, though, the Internet, is limited pretty much to buying or renting a video or DVD, and this process online is very much like buying a book. Nearly all the online superstores that sell both books and music (listed in this chapter), also sell movies, and provide the same kinds of capabilities to help you make your video choices. You will also find some sites that just specialize in movies, like Blockbuster Video (www.blockbuster.com) and Reel (www.reel.com).

Reel has an enormous selection of new and used videotapes to buy, DVD movies to buy, and videotapes to rent. With over 35,000 movies for rent, the Reel Web site is where you get hard-to-find films (foreign, cult, rare, classic, offbeat) and independent movies, as well as all of the mainstream ones. Blockbuster, a relative newcomer to the Internet, is rapidly catching up.

Keep in mind that "finding" is not necessarily the same as "receiving." Online vendors typically work through distributors, and some are better than others are providing realistic estimates of how long it will be before the item ships. The fact that a video appears in an online catalog is no guarantee that you'll receive the goods in reasonable time. Over time--and forced by competition--service should improve.

If you are addicted to movies, Reel has an affiliate program (similar to those discussed above for books and music), which will let you "build your own video store."

If you need more info to make your choices, check the Internet Movie Database (www.us.imdb.com), which is owned by Amazon.com. This database is purportedly "the ultimate movie reference source and covers everything you could possibly want to know about movies." Continuously updated, it also has hyperlinks to thousands of related external Web pages. It currently covers over 170,000 titles.

If you are interested in recent releases, check at the search sites like AltaVista--these days nearly every major new motion picture has it's own Web site, packed with graphics and multi-media effects, and info for fans.

If you are really into movies, and might even consider writing one yourself, be sure to visit these Web site locations:

• Drew's Scripts-O-Rama (www.script-o-rama.com) which boasts links to over 600 complete scripts, including scripts of major feature films like Star Wars (in some cases, with several different drafts), as well as scripts by independents (like me) that have not yet been produced.
• The Screen Writer's Utopia (www.screenwritersutopia.com) has information geared for the needs of screen writers, including space for hopefuls to share tips and insights.
• Scripts Now (www.scriptsnow.com) is a site that showcases new scripts and writers looking for producers.
• American Zoetrope (screenplays.fcoppola.com) (run Francis Ford Coppola's production company) accepts submissions of feature-length screenplays over the Internet. "For each screenplay that you submit we ask that you read and review four screenplays submitted by other screenwriters. The screenplays you submit will in turn be read and reviewed by others. American Zoetrope staff, who are always looking for good new screenplays to produce, will read the best-received screenplays."

• rec.arts.movies.current-films (This newsgroup now has over 8000 articles posted at this location.)
• rec.arts.movies.international
• rec.arts.movies.erotica
• rec.arts.movies.lists
• rec.arts.movies.misc (misc = miscellaneous)
• rec.arts.movies.movie-going
• rec.arts.movies.past-films
• rec.arts.movies.people
• rec.arts.movies.production
• rec.arts.movies.reviews
• rec.arts.movies.tech

Finally, for a personal view of movies that are worth watching, check the Web site of Mark R. Leeper (husband of Evelyn Leeper, mentioned earlier in this chapter) at www.geocities.com/Hollywood/6960. He has been a long-time active participant in movie-related newsgroups, and he posts at his site helpful and informative reviews of the many movies that he sees. To see my own fledgling effort along the same lines, check All about movies.

Sidebars for This Chapter:

• Looking for a specialty store--for instance, a Jewish bookstore or a jazz music store--just go to AltaVista (www.altavista.com) and enter exactly those words as your query. You might get back millions of matches, but the ones at the top of the list will be pages that include every word of your query and are just what you are looking for.
• Looking for a poetry reading or book signing in the Washington, DC area? Go to the Washington Post (www.washingtonpost.com), and click on Books. In other cities, check the site of your local newspaper.
• Looking for a book about Ethiopia or another African country? Check the catalog at Africa World Press/Red Sea Press at www.africanworld.com.
• That's enough shopping for today. Take a break and read a book, instead of buying another one. Or, better still, go chat with an author at Barnes and Noble (www.barnesandnoble.com) in their "Authors Online" area.
• Want suggestions on what books to buy/read next?
  
• Are you a fan of Ken Follett's thrillers? Maybe you'd like to write a book like that yourself. If so, check his "masterclass" on writing at his personal Web site at www.ken-follett.com, or send him email to let him know your thoughts about his work (click on "contact ken").
• Go to Amazon.com (www.amazon.com). Click on "Recommendation Center," then on "BookMatcher." Rate dozens or even hundreds of titles. The more effort you invest now, the better the recommendations you'll get in the future.
• Want to keep up on what's happening in the area of electronic books? Subscribe (for free) to eBook-List (send email to eBook-List@mabooks.com, with "subscribe" in the subject line) and to Book People (send email to spok+bookpeople-request@cs.cmu.edu). Also, check my free newsletter Internet-on-a-Disk at www.seltzerbooks.com/ioad.html, where I include notes about Internet trends, interesting Web sites, and books available online.
• Interested in free electronic copies of works by authors like Jack London, Charles Dickens, and Balzac? Check the Internet Public Library (www.ipl.org) for searchable listings and links to thousands of free books online.
• Looking for second-hand cassette tapes and music CDs? Check Second Spin (www.secondspin.com).
• Also, keep in mind that if you have a CD-ROM drive, you can listen to you music CDs on your PC (while shopping). So, adding good speakers to your PC configuration might be well worth the money.
• Create a celebrity Web page devoted to your favorite music group, or actor/actress, or author. Go to pagebuilder.lycos.com/celebrity/gallery/ to see samples of what other people have created so far. Sign up for your own free celebrity page space and get started creating own page. When you're done, go to AltaVista (www.altavista.com), click on "Add a Page", and enter the address of your new page. In a day or two, the text from your page should be in the search engine index, so strangers will be able to find your creation.
• If you recently bought a DVD player for your PC, you may be able to test out a new hybrid way of getting full-screen full-motion video, known as "Web DVD." The sample disk that came with the system may provide you with the username and password you need to get into www.drive-on.com, a Warner Brothers site that interacts with the content on that sample DVD to deliver unique entertainment experiences.
• Would you like a personal guide to help you find Internet riches? Check The Mining Company. They have hundreds of volunteers who scan the Web for material in their specialty, provide links, and write articles for people like you. The section dealing with books, music and movies is at home.miningco.com/arts
• Looking for a really great buy in books? Want to sell your books for instant cash? Half Price Books (www.halfpricebooks.com) is the site for this rapidly growing chain of book stores. They don't yet sell online, but they list contact information for individual stores so you can check out a book's availability or for information on selling or exchanging you used books. This retailer also sponsors a number of Half-Pint Libraries, children's reading areas set up in community centers and hospitals.

Chapter Five: Computers and Software

When Egghead, the prominent software retailer, closed its physical stores and decided to operate solely on the Internet, I was shocked and disappointed. I had shopped regularly at the local Egghead store and depended on explanations and advice from their sales people whenever I needed either hardware or software.

Also, I greatly valued the fact that when I bought new add-ons or upgrades for my PC, I could pay to have them installed on the spot.

When I didn't have a store like that any more in my neighborhood, I had to go online, which meant I could no longer rely on someone else's expertise and judgment. I was forced to learn more about computers than I ever wanted or expected to learn. As it turns out, that's probably a good thing, both for my budget and myself.

Basically, when it comes to computers, you should learn before you shop, especially before you shop online. The products are complex assemblies of standard commodity parts made by multiple manufacturers. The more you understand about your choices and their implications, the better you'll be able to take advantage of the opportunities available on the Internet.

Today, the computer industry is a commodity, standards-driven marketplace. Computer "manufacturers" are really just assemblers. They buy processors from one source, software, disks, memory etc. from other sources, and assemble them into systems. The competition is fierce and the profit margins are slim. In terms of the basic specs--speed, memory, and storage--what we now define as a "complete system" for home use would have made a wealthy technical guru tremble with envy ten years ago. This dream system now sells for about what it would cost to buy a wooden table for your kitchen. Does this make sense?

And this dream system has barely enough capacity to perform what we now perceive as basic tasks because the latest versions of the software we depend on, and even the games we play, require the latest and greatest of hardware to run properly. Does this make sense?

Did you ever hear of "built-in obsolescence"? We are seeing the computer-equivalent in action.

Fifteen years ago, it seemed inconceivable that an ordinary individual would ever want or need a 100 MHz machine with 1 gigabyte of disk storage space. Yes, we could forecast that such machines would be available and at reasonable cost, because of predictable improvements in technology. As a rule of thumb (known as "Moore's Law"), the speed of commercially available processors doubles about every 18 months. Typically, the new model sells for about what the old one did, and the value of the old one drops in half. While, at some point, technology must meet barriers that will slow the pace of change, the computer industry has been adapting at this incredibly rapid rate for more than two decades now, with great regularity. And the software industry has been keeping in lock step with these hardware developments by making each new version of the common applications that people depend upon more and more complex and bulky, requiring the full capacity of the latest and greatest hardware. I don't believe this software inflation results from a conscious conspiracy. Rather we're seeing the consequences of human nature--software expands to fill the capacity available for it.

That means that even if you don't want to do any more with your system in the future than you do right now, to stay compatible with other people with whom you have to share files, sooner or later you will have to upgrade your software. And the new versions of software will make your equipment seem painfully slow in two years, and obsolete in four.

In other words, in defiance of all logic, even though your computer could probably function well for another 10-15 years, and could do everything you really need to do with it, you will find yourself compelled to make major upgrades or buy a complete new system every two to three years.

Considering the enormous resources available today, I'm amazed at what we were able to do back in 1983-84. Back then, my Atari 800 with no hard drive and 48 Kbytes of memory seemed lightning fast and capable of miracles. Today, my year-old 266 MHz laptop with 2 gigabytes of storage and 96 Mbytes of memory (2,000 times more than that old Atari) feels sluggish and limited.

Basically, "Moore's Law" plus software inflation mean that the computer system you buy today, no matter how well chosen, will not last. You'll be back shopping for add-ons and upgrades and new systems again and again. In other words, you should invest some time learning about these gadgets and the commodity upgrades you can buy for them so you can make full use of the shopping resources on the Internet, and save again and again.

Read What's Published, or Perish

You don't need to learn to program. You don't need to learn the skills of a technician. But you should familiarize yourself with each of the major commodity pieces that can go into a system and which you can later add or upgrade. You should understand the terminology and the measures of speed and capacity and how they relate to your needs. And you need to keep up to date on major new options as they become available.

Impossible task? Hardly. There are thousands of people making a living providing information like that for people like you, in the form of articles, magazines, books, and courses. This information is available in traditional form and/or over the Internet. Here's a sampling of the resources available to you:

• CNET: The Computer Network www.cnet.com provides articles intended to help you make decisions about buying computer products. The Hardware section (www.computers.com) helps you determine what is available in various product categories, at what price, and where you can find what. The Computer Network lets you filter your searches by price, processor, RAM, hard disk, screen size, etc. Its Shopper.com (www.shopper.com) provides a similar service. If you want to purchase, you are connecte to the vendor. Their software download section is quite large.

• The Ziff-Davis Network (www.zdnet.com, as shown in Figure xxx.3, offers a complete line of magazines that includes:
• Family PC www.zdnet.com/familypc provides advice on buying hardware and software for use in the home. It is written for a general, rather than a techie audience.
• PC Magazine www.pcmag.com tests equipment and software and publishes the results as PC Labs Reviews. Their download section includes free software, shareware (which you can download for free, but are expected to pay for if you decide to use it) software reviews, and articles.
• PC Computing www.zdnet.com/pccomp provides "best of the best" picks in all major product categories, plus "tips and tricks," product reviews, and software downloads.
• PC Week www.zdnet.com/pcweek emphasizes the latest product and business news, rather than in-depth or how-to articles.
• MacWEEK www.macweek.com and Macworld macworld.zdnet.com offer news and reviews of Apple products, plus downloads of software.

• In addition, Ziff-Davis University www.zdu.com offers online courses in many computer-related topics. Currently, for a subscription fee of $7.95 per month you can take as many of these courses as you like. The experience includes reading texts assigned by the instructor (you have to buy the books), and interacting with the instructor and other students in forums and sometimes in chats as well, for the duration of the class (typically about 5 weeks). Topics include: Building Your Own PC, Maintaining Your Own PC, Troubleshooting Your Own PC, and Upgrading Your Own PC.

• IDG (www.idg.com) publishes the "Dummies" series of books www.idg.com/books, as well as such periodicals as PC World Magazine www.pcworld.com and ComputerWorld (www.computerworld.com). PC World provides helpful articles, product reviews and software downloads, and its picks of the top 400 products in each of the major PC categories. ComputerWorld provides news on computer products, companies, and trends.

• McGraw-Hill publishes Maven--Business Week's Computer Buying Guide www.maven.businessweek.com, which includes product reviews and comparative ratings. Their "picking a system" explains the key factors and helps you "uncrack" the code of "computerese." The same company also owns Osborne Books www.osborne.com and McGraw-Hill Online www.mhonlinelearning.com, which offers online technical, computer-related courses, typically for about $300-400 each.

• Macmillan www.mcp.com, publisher of the Lazy Way series, also offers a wide range of other books intended to help you better understand computers and related technology. In particular, their Que imprint www.mcp.com/publishers/que includes such titles as "How Computers Work" and "Upgrading and Repairing PCs," as well as the Complete Idiot's Guides www.mcp.com/publishers/que/series/complete_idiots_guides. These guides are "designed for anyone not familiar with a topic or technology. Rather than covering every way to accomplish each task, these books focus on doing things 'the simplest, most straightforward way.'"

• O'Reilly Associates focuses mainly on highly technical books, aimed at programmers, Webmasters, and Web page designers. But their "In a Nutshell..." series of computer software tutorials nutshell.oreilly.com addresses the needs of a more general audience.

• The online version of Wired Magazine www.hotwired.com discusses high tech entertainment and communication products in an entertaining and futuristic vein. Wired puts technological trends into a social and economic context. They seem to find a new revolution to announce almost every month. It's fun. And here is the place where you might first see mentioned a product or class of products that you will eventually want to shop for. They also offer a few free online tutorials on such subjects as Web design, animation, and Java.

• Computerist www.p3p.com calls itself "a magazine for the technologically confused." Far smaller than the productions of the major computer publishers, it does offer news, independent reviews, information and opinion on computing and technology, all written in ordinary, non-technical language.

What's in Store for You?

Also, with your inevitable need for upgrades, you should think of your computing capability not as a fixed asset, but rather as a regularly recurring expense for a consumable. You will periodically refill your system box, rather like refilling the oil tank for your furnace. Hence you should seriously consider creative financing arrangements, such as leasing, and/or guaranteed future trade-in agreements.

When considering leasing, the length of the lease is critical. If, for your use, the system is likely to become obsolete in two years, you don't want to be saddled with it (and its payments) for three or four years.

When considering a pre-arranged trade-in/upgrade agreement (such as that now being offered by Gateway), remember that while you will be able to get back some of the value of the system you buy today, you are at the same time locking yourself into a particular vendor. In this volatile industry, by the time you need to upgrade, there may well be better choices elsewhere -- including free PCs.

Also, look for and invest in extended warranties and service contracts. Sooner or later you will need help, either to pick the right product or to install it or fix problems later on. So make sure that as part of your purchase, you are going to have access to experts who can help you either online or by phone. If it is by phone, the company should provide a toll-free number and assurances that you won't be stuck on hold for endless hours, if you are lucky enough for your call to ever get through.

You also should look for online stores that offer not just the ability to search for the best price and performance on all the different pieces that can go into a computer or an upgrade, but also tools designed to help you "configure" your system. In other words, you want to make sure that pieces made by different manufacturers or by the same manufacturer at different times will really work well together, and make sense. (What's the point of a part that's ten times faster than the rest of the system can handle?) Only if you have that kind of information can you really take advantage of commodity prices and price comparison tools and even auctions. And you want this online decision-support program to be organized and worded in ways that make sense for your level of knowledge--not just for the eight-year-old computer guru who lives next-door.

The creative financing, warranty, service contracts, and online configuration tools can come from either the manufacturer/assembler or an independent store (which may also assemble a system to your custom requirements). The cross-company search capabilities at various online superstores might help you determine which make and model you want. Then you might go to the manufacturer's site to use the configuration tool there, as a check against the store's recommendation and price; and you might also want to see if the manufacturer is offering better deals on financing and service.

Price Comparison

At Pricescan www.pricescan.com you can search for the hardware, software, and computer supplies you need across dozens of online stores. You enter the features, parameters, and price range you want. The results list includes the model number, the vendor name, and a selection of dealers, along with their prices.

With the online service Price Watch www.pricewatch.com, you can click on a category of computer product to get all the prices, or enter a customized search. You can also search for the best price on a particular product from a particular manufacturer.

Covering hardware, software, and components (such as generic memory, StreetPrices www.StreetPrices.com "sniffs out the best consumer prices on the Web." They update their index hourly.

Killerapp www.killerapp.com calls itself "a shopping channel for computers." It helps you pick the right product at the best price and most convenient location. You can select a product area, then enter your keywords to drill down to exactly what you want. You can see lists of the hundred most popular products in a wide variety of categories. You can get detailed contact information on hundreds of computer dealers nationwide. Killerapp also lets you create your own personalized page for tracking prices of products that you are interested in buying.

Online Computer Superstores

• Computer Shopper www.computershopper.com is the online equivalent of the monstrously large print publication you see on magazine racks in grocery stores. Published by Ziff-Davis, the magazine is stuffed with page after page of ads and price lists--which are probably far more in demand that the editorial content. This publication is the one to which you should turn when you've already done your homework, know exactly what you want, and want to find the best price for it. Computer Shopper's online version is a shopping site--a computer superstore, with links to related classified ads and auctions. The online site, however, does not sell any items itself, nor does the magazine. Computer Shopper simply links you to the vendor who is selling the desired product, and makes no endorsement regarding the reliability of those who place advertising in the magazine, as well as on its Web site.

• WebShopper www.Webshopper.com is IDG's computer shopping site. They offer categories such as "Quick Picks," "Deals," "Rebates," and "Top Seller Lists," as well as links to product reviews published in IDG's many magazines. This site provides a way to search or browse through all the major computer product categories.

• Cyberian Outpost www.outpost.com provides the usual product lists of hardware, software, and accessories, so that you can both search and browse this site's inventory. This site also offers advertised specials and software downloads. Cyberian Outpost also has a "Manufacturer Stores" section, with selected products from a couple dozen vendors. If you want an item delivered "overnight," this online store claims that if you place your order before midnight Eastern Time, you can receive the goods the next day via an overnight shipping service.

• CompUSA www.compusa.com is keeping its physical stores going, with fix-it and installation services, as well as training. Check its leasing program. The Web site lists the physical store locations and helps promote advertised specials that only apply at the physical stores. But a wide range of products are available for purchase directly online, including complete systems made to order for you, based on your responses to its online configuration capability. It will be interesting to see how this business evolves--whether or not CompUSA's online site and its physical retail locations can complement one another, and how. (Was Egghead brilliant or foolish to jettison its physical stores?)

• In addition to selling the same hardware, software, and accessories online that it used to sell through physical stores, Egghead www.egghead.com runs two related online businesses. SurplusDirect www.surplusdirect.com is an "online liquidation center," a place for manufacturers to get rid of excess inventory, not just for computers and software, but also for jewelry, luggage, home and garden products, and other merchandise categories. And Egghead Auctions www.surplusauction.com uses an online auction mode to sell computer hardware and software, both new and used/reconditioned, and also sells a variety of consumer products.

• Circuit City www.circuitcity.com currently uses its Web site just to provide information about the products it sells, and to point visitors to its physical stores. You can't buy online yet, but it's hard to imagine that it won't move in that direction soon.

• Micro Center www.microcenter.com calls itself "the computer department store." Its Web site points visitors to its chain of physical stores, in 10 states across the United States. Like Circuit City, Micro Center does not yet sell directly online.

• In addition to being an online technology superstore, Necx www.necx.com also has an Outlet Center, mainly to sell "end of life, open boxed, and demonstration models..." Necx also maintains a centralized exchange for buyers and sellers of electronic components and computer products, listing over 200 million items from over 20,000 sources.

• Computer Discount Warehouse www.cdw.com focuses on sales to businesses rather than individuals, as this site's slogan, "computing solutions built for business" indicates. That means that in addition to hardware and software, it also has a "solutions" section; and you will not find any articles or help geared for "newbies." But many of the products for sale here are the same as the ones you see at other computer superstores; if you have done your homework (or need the products for work at home), this online site may be a good place to look for a bargain.

• Buy.com www.buy.com runs half a dozen online superstores, one of which www.buycomp.com focuses on computer hardware, and another of which (www.buysoft.com) sells software. Price comparisons by way of Pricescan often show products from here near the top of the list.

• Selling only software, Beyond.com www.beyond.com is set up to handle the needs of computer novices, as well as general shopper. In the "customer service" section, you'll find a step-by-step guide on how to shop with Beyond.com, with details on how to track your order, and information about hundreds of software publishers. The site also offers a recommendation guide and a gift center. While many software sites are set up just for techies, Beyond.com looks and feels like a superstore.

• Chumbo.com www.chumbo.com also sells software, in superstore style. It has a section that describes new games that have not yet been released but are likely to be in short supply when they do come out. Chumbo.com lets your pre-order for shipment on release day.

• Despite its name, Buysoftware.com www.buysoftware.com sells computers, accessories, peripherals, and training, in addition to software.

• PC Connection www.pcconnection.com is a long-time mail order catalog company, now using the Internet to sell the same technology products. The site has separate areas for clearance sales and auctions. PC Connection promises to deliver everything overnight, even when orders are placed as late as 2:45 a.m. Eastern Time. In addition to offering a 30-day money back guarantee on many of its products, this online store also offers technical support and operates a factory-authorized repair center.

• Value America www.valueamerica.com has the look and feel of a major department store, with one area of the store dedicated to selling computers. The site encourages visitors to "become members" at no cost. Members get discounts and earn "ValueDollars," that can be spent on future purchases. ValueDollars represent at least 1% of an item's price, and they can be used for up to 50% of a future order. Also, if you are a member, Value America keeps receipts of your purchases on file as documentation for warranties and rebates. This site can keep track of a shopper's important personal dates-like anniversaries and birthdays and send the shopper automatic reminders of those dates.

• iDOT.com www.idot.com calls itself "PCs for Smarties." The site has sections set up as "community stores" for "gamers," college students, and small business owners. The iDOT site also highlights low-cost machines in its "UnderGrand Store." You can sign up to get this site's free email newsletter, and also to get early notification of upcoming product specials. Once you've picked a base computer model, you can "Go Configure" to put together a complete system. You can also use iDOT's configuration tool to select the right upgrade for your existing system.

• Insight www.insight.com bills itself as "your discount source for computers, hardware and software." It offers over 80,000 brand-name products at discount prices. Expect a no frills approach, with special discounts available for business, education, and government customers.

• BuyersZone www.buyerszone.com is set up to serve the office needs of businesses. This site acts as an intermediary between buyers and vendors. BuyersZone has numerous categories, including computers, and provides online tools for you to "learn what you need to know before you go buying," compare products, and get quotes from vendors linked to this site.

• J&R www.jandr.com sells computers and software, as well as consumer electronics gear, music, and movies. Here you are buying systems "off the shelf," as is, rather than configuring them. But if what they have happens to be what you want, the price might be good, and you could buy it with a minimum of hassle.

• If you want commercially published game software for your PC, check out Game Lord www.babbages.com, for this site's reviews and demonstrations.

The Makers and Shakers

For instance, just before Christmas 1998, a new company soared out of nowhere to grab a significant chunk of the PC market. emachines (www.e4me.com), as shown in Figure xxx.18, currently sells new, fully equipped, powerful 300Mhz computer systems (including the monitor, 24X CD-ROM, 56K modem, 3+G hard drive, and 32 MB RAM) for less than $500--less than half the cost other competitors were selling comparable systems for at that time.

You might be reluctant to deal with a newcomer, because of questions regarding reliability and support -- will they be around if and when it breaks? But if the system is built from standard commodity pieces, any computer fix-it shop should be able deal with it, and third-party service contracts (such as those offered by some computer stores) should be able cover it. If you have any doubts about a particular company or system, ask for advice from the people you would normally turn to for fix-it help.

With prices dropping at that rate, don't be surprised if some of the old established computer system manufacturers with easily recognized names soon disappear. (I worked for Digital Equipment for 19 years. Ten years ago, Digital was second largest computer company in the world. Today, Digital doesn't even exist anymore, have been swallowed up by Compaq.)

However, you should still check not just the online stores, but also the computer manufacturer Web sites, where you may find better special deals on select products. Also, the larger, Internet-savvy computer makers, like Dell and Gateway, are likely to have a wide range of products available directly through their Web sites. You may want to use their configuration tools, have them put together your dream system, and take advantage of their creative financing options.

If you visit an online superstore and find an attractive system made by a company you know little about, you should definitely go to the manufacturer's Web site to do some additional checking before making your purchase. What else does this manufacturer offer? How does the company represent itself? How does it try to differentiate itself from competitors? Also, be sure to check how easily you will be able to get follow-up information and service, should you decide to buy a computer from this manufacturer.

Dell (www.dell.com) seems to be the current online computer sales leader, both in terms of volume of business and its Web site's ease of use. This PC manufacturer has a lease program that's available for individuals as well as businesses, with a calculator to figure out if leasing a PC is the right option for you. Dell has "employee purchase" agreements with corporations, schools, and federal agencies; so you might be able to get a special price on your personal purchase if you work at the right place. Dell also sells refurbished and guaranteed products at substantial discounts. You can buy online, or call a toll-free number. Dell's advertisements appearing in magazines typically include an "E-Value" code that you can enter at Dell's Web site to take advantage of advertised offers.

Dell provides clear explanations of delivery time and shipping options so that you have a good understanding of what to expect when you purchase a PC. After you place an order for a computer with Dell, its online order status system lets you check continually to see what's happening with the custom computer they are assembling for you until the time you receive your PC.

If you click Dell's "contact" option, you'll see an extensive list of choices organized by the types of questions you might have, each of which has an email address and phone number.

When you enter Dell's site, the choices you first see are arranged by how you might want to use their products. If you click on the "home" option, then Dell displays a Web page that lists notebook computers, desktop PC systems, software, and accessories. Go another level deep into these nested options, and you will be able to pick a "recommended" configuration, or choose to build a PC customized to your needs. With Dell's configuration tool, you can select your basic PC style, and then add all the options you might want: processor speed, hard disk storage space, modem, amount of RAM, etc. With each selection, you will be able to see how each choice changes the computer's overall price. If the components you choose might not work well together, the configurator displays a symbol to alert you to that possibility. Then, if you are an expert, you can research the details and make your own decision; or, if you are an ordinary shopper, you can select other components to remedy the problem. Once you put your choice in the "shopping cart," you also can click on "request sales help," and someone will--if you like--step you through your final purchasing steps to make sure what you are ordering matches what you want and need. No wonder Dell reportedly sells over $10 million worth of products per day over the Web.

Gateway (www.gateway.com), as shown in Figure xxx.21, offers an option to trade in your PC after two years, and provides financing so you can pay monthly rather than all at once. This computer manufacturer has had a successful mail and phone-order business before the dawn of the Web. Recently, they opened a nationwide chain of stores at which you can see, touch, and test the products you are interested in buying. (Gateway opened its physical stores at the same time that Egghead closed its stores.) Gateway also now makes good use of the Internet to provide technical support for its customers. Before the Web, if you called Gateway for technical support, you would most likely have to stay "on hold" for over two hours, waiting to talk to a support person. (Oftentimes, you might not be lucky enough to get through to Gateway at all). Now you can get answers to many of your questions with quick searches through the Web site's Q&A section.

Because of competitive pressure, expect other computer makers, like those in the following listing, to imitate and improve the kinds of features and service that Dell and Gateway offer today.

• Compaq directplus.compaq.com
• CyberMax www.cybermax.com
• Fujitsu www.fujitsu-pc.com
• Hewlett-Packard www.hp.com
• IBM www.ibm.com
• Micron Electronics www.micronpc.com
• microworkz www.microworkz.com
• Sony VAIO Direct www.sony.com/vaiodirect-800
• Toshiba www.toshiba.com
• WinBook www.winbook.com/webcommerce/index.htm
• UMAX www.umax.com

Think Small

PalmPilots have no keyboard. You input information using a touch screen that understands a shorthand code. You "scribble" what you want to remember, with a pen-like device. The palm-sized computer later displays the information in a neat and readable font. It can even come with a modem, for connection to the Internet.

These machines don't replace desktop or notebook machines. They are so small that you carry one in your pocket and pull it out when you need it to check phone numbers, appointments, and reminders. Some people even use these little PCs to keep track of golf scores, while on the course. These palm-sized PCs are yet another class of product that eventually you'll probably "need." For details on palm-sized PCs, visit the Web site www.palm.com.

The popularity of palm-sized computers has fostered an entire range of specialized software and related gadgetry. If you are looking for palm-PC-related products, you will usually find these items listed separately at computer superstores. PalmPilot Gear HQ www.palmpilotgear.com currently sells over 2000 different software packages for PalmPilot machines. You can buy an expense report desk accessory, an aviator pocket reference, programs to keep track of your bank accounts, arcade-style games there is an immense variety of applications.

Going Soft

You can also get what's known as "shareware," which is software you try out first and then pay for later, if you like the product. With shareware, your trial version won't time out, but it may come with limited functionality--just enough to whet your appetite and make you want to buy the full-blown version. Or the version you download for free works very well indeed, but to get support and future upgrades, you'll need to pay to register your copy. One fine example of this type of product is the award-winning WinZip file archiving utility (www.winzip.com), written and distributed by Nico Mak Computing, Inc.

Other software, called "freeware," is completely free. The authors of freeware write the software for the fun of it, for the general good of computer users, and for the chance to demonstrate their software writing skills. Often, the developers insist on having their names attached, and restrict the software to noncommercial use, then retain the intellectual property rights, while letting people freely copy the software. With terms like that, if the freeware turns out to have potential, then the author retains the right to turn it into a commercial product. Still other developers place their freeware in the public domain, and welcome others to develop improvements and create variations of the original freeware, with all the freeware developers working together as part of an online community.

You'll find try-it-before-you-buy-it software, shareware, and freeware at the same download sites.

Keep in mind that whenever you download software, you are at risk of bringing a virus into your computer, which could cause a nuisance, erase files, or completely disable your computer. Imagine your computer is about to have sex with another machine, and exercise appropriate precautionary measures. You are most likely, but never guaranteed to be safe downloading software from trusted sites. You should also have anti-virus software on your PC that automatically checks any new programs before you run them. Ideally, you would want anti-virus software which automatically updates itself over the Internet as new viruses are discovered, , like Norton AntiVirus from Symantec.

If you are new to downloading software, you should read the introductory article "Free (and Nearly Free) Stuff and Where to Get It," by Gail Shaffer. You can find this article at PC Magazine's Web site (www.zdnet.com/pcmag/pctech/download/best/index.html).

If you are interested in finding out what shareware and freeware is available in any particular category, use Softcrawler (www.softcrawler.com). (When you enter this URL, the site displays a page for you to first select your language selection.) This site searches simultaneously across eight major download sites. You just enter what type of software you are looking for and get a list of what's available from these sites:

• CNET's Shareware.com (www.shareware.com)
• CNET's Gamecenter.com www.gamecenter.com
• CNET's Download.com www.download.com
• Ziff-Davis' Software Library www.zdnet.com/swlib
• FreeWare32.com www.FreeWare32.com
• Albert's Ambry www.alberts.com
• FileMine www.filemine.com
• FilePile www.filepile.com

For the Advanced Computer Buyer: Newsgroups, Classifieds, and Auctions

The pricing of computers is based on rapid advances in technology, which lead to predictable improvements in computer speed. As a rule of thumb, a machine that's 18 months old should be worth only half what it originally sold for, because you could buy one twice as fast for the same price today. One that's three years old should be about a quarter its original value. And many people with perfectly good equipment feel compelled to sell their old machines and buy new ones to run the latest and greatest new software. So if the computing tasks you want to accomplish do not require the latest and greatest computer hardware, and if you know enough about computer hardware to be confident about making purchasing decisions and evaluating used hardware, you could come up with some serious computer hardware bargains.

As you try to navigate your way through this difficult and complicated territory, turn to newsgroups and email discussion lists for advice and tips, as well as announcements of items offered for sale.

As discussed in Chapter 2, there are literally thousands of computer-related newsgroups, each focused on a different area of interest. Go to Deja.com www.deja.com, and search for items directly related to your computer and software shopping questions. Then get involved in that newsgroup's discussions yourself--asking for help when you need it, and providing help to others when you can. Similarly, check and become involved in email discussions-a list of which you'll find at Liszt www.liszt.com. Also, check the major classified sites, like Classified2000 www.classified2000.com.

For used and refurbished equipment, consider the Advantage Computer Exchange www.computerpricing.com. This site features both PC and Mac price indexes, which reflect nationally tracked used computer sales, indicating low (the average buyer's bid), high (the average seller's ask), and close (the average sales price) for every item. Computer Exchange also provides links to PC and Macintosh user groups. (User groups are geographically centered organizations of computer users with common on-going computer interests. These groups can be drawn together by a common hardware platform-PC or Macintosh-or by a particular software interest, for example, an operating system like Windows or UNIX, or a particular software application, like FrontPage, QuarkXpress, or Office. These user groups usually conduct physical meetings on a regular basis.)

Also consider the refurbished offerings of major computer companies like Dell and Compaq. Last summer, I bought a notebook computer for my daughter at Compaq Works www.compaqworks.com at an excellent price, with an extended warranty and service agreement. Some configurations and special deals are in short supply, and Compaq Works updates its offerings throughout the day. I found it best to check the listings online, then call Compaq Work's 800 number and talk to a knowledgeable sales person who understood what each hardware package actually included. The sales person may also know of other choices which have not yet appeared in the Web site listings, and may alert you to a better deal than the one about which you were inquiring.

The Boston Computer Exchange www.bocoex.com works primarily with companies that want to buy and sell excess inventory and idle assets. Continually checking with this Web site can result in a bargain or two.

Some computer auctions sites sell only new and refurbished equipment, and deal directly with you, the buyer. Each computer is offered for bid online for a certain length of time. When the specified bidding time has expired, the person with the highest bid is notified by email and pays the company running the Web site by credit card. The auction site then ships the hardware.

In Spring 1994, the Internet Shopping Network www.internet.net was the first store to sell computer products directly to the public over the Web. After just a few months, Barry Diller, of Home Shopping Network fame, purchased the company. Today the Web site points visitors who are looking for a computer superstore to the Cyberian Outpost. But the Internet Shopping Network still sells computers and related gear auction-style at First Auction www.firstauction.com. This auction site offers "flash auctions" throughout the day-auctions in which the bidding starts at just $1, and the total bidding time is less than 30 minutes. After the 30-minute bid time expires, the highest bidder gets the product offered through auction, and the merchandise is new, not used. First Auction also has less frantic 48-hour auctions, with a wider selection of goods for sale. If you are lucky, you might pick up a complete, well-equipped, new computer system for $200-300.

Other auction sites of this kind include:

• Egghead Auctions www.surplusauction.com
• Onsale.com www.onsale.com
• Ubid.com www.ubid.com

Sidebars For This Chapter

You can also learn about the latest and greatest computer products at trade shows. If you might be interested in checking out a local one or taking a vacation computer-shopping trip, check Trade Show Central (www.tscentral.com). Nearly all the major shows are listed there.

Some Internet businesses are giving away PCs to customers who make long-term commitments to them, for example, if you sign a long-term agreement with an ISP. Keep an eye out. Opportunities of this kind are likely to multiply.

Need computer supplies, like a printer cartridge? Try the Web sites of office supply stores like Staples www.staples.com or OfficeMax www.officemax.com, or go straight to the site of the manufacturer.

A wide variety of simple, inexpensive gadgets designed just to get you connected to the World Wide Web are just now becoming available. If accessing the Web is all you want to do, check out WebTV (which uses your television set instead of a monitor), and also take a look at televisions that have Web access built into them.

Microsoft provides valuable enhancements to its current products for free download from its Web site www.microsoft.com, but when they release a new version of the base product, they delete the software patches. However, if you know the name of the patch or its file name, you can go to AltaVista www.altavista.com, enter that name in the query box and find dozens of sites that still offer it for free.

If and when you install a new operating system (such as Windows 95 or 98), you'll find that you need new driver software for your existing printer to work properly. Go to AltaVista www.altavista.com, and enter in the query box the model name of the printer and the word driver (e.g., +bj200 +driver*). You are likely to find the software you need at one of the pages near the top of your results list.

Free-PC has joined forces with Compaq to offer free computers to "people who agree to share personal data about themselves and be exposed to Internet advertising." Consumers must agree to use the free computers at least 10 hours a month and allow the machine to download advertising that is displayed in a strip on the right side of its screen. For details, check www.free-pc.com.

Puzzled by an error message on your PC? Go to AltaVista www.altavista.com and enter the error number/name in the query box. One of the Web pages near the top of your results list will probably explain what it means and what to do about it.

Did you enjoy playing the old arcade games like PacMan and Missile Command? Would you like to play them on your PC? Go to MonroeWorld www.monroeworld.com or Dave Central Shareware Archive www.davecentral.com and download either Retrocade or Mame (free emulator software) and the game programs that go with it.

For information about computer-related flea markets that are held in the physical world, perhaps near where you live, check KGP Productions www.pcshow.com.

You could save yourself some money by asking around the office or your neighborhood to see if you can find a friend, neighbor or relative who just upgraded to the latest and greatest computer and wants to unload his old one. Stick with someone you trust who can also help you as you get started.

Chapter Six: Travel

In addition to wanting to catch your attention when you are thinking about travel, these companies have a lot in common. They sell time-contingent services, rather than products. The seats on planes, the rooms in hotels, the cars at the rental lots, even seats at a theater are all limited. You need to reserve the space in advance to be sure you'll have it when you need it. And if a given space is not taken for a given time slot, the vendor will get nothing for it.

A time slot is an asset before the time arrives. The value rises with the scarcity. Then once the time has passed, the asset simply disappears.

Hence the travel industry is subject to wild time-contingent shifts in supply and demand. The vendors would love to be able to change prices rapidly to take advantage of fierce competition for the last few seats, or to sell off remaining inventory with special offers before it becomes worthless.

"Travel" is a business model--the business of matching limited, time-dependent resources with customers, (as opposed to businesses where the availability is unlimited, such as pay-per-view TV). The short-term car rental business has more in common with the airline business than with a car sales/lease business. The time-share condo business and the vacation home rental business have more in common with the hotel business than the buying and selling real estate.

What matters is not the physical product, but how customers relate to the product in a time-limited way. The vendor sells the time slot, not the physical product. The vendor sells an intangible--"ownership of time," or "the experience of your life," whichever way you perceive it.

The Internet's ability to match remote buyers and sellers can help the vendors maximize their profits, while at the same time enable shoppers to find lower prices than they might ever before have imagined.

In the past, a major constraint on the ability of the market to operate efficiently was the difficulty involved in getting the right information and then making the necessary transactions. Especially with airlines, the information was so complex that only a limited set of trained specialists (travel agents) had access to the schedules and pricing of all vendors, along with the authority to make reservations and issue tickets. Now ordinary travel shoppers like you can access all that information in simple, easy-to-understand form, and can make reservations and buy tickets over the Web.

As more and more people realize that they have this direct power, travel agents need to redefine their role and provide services that today's travelers will be would to pay them for providing.

At the same time airlines and other travel service companies are scrambling to create alliances, including special package offers, and interlocking reward programs. These programs are aimed at repeat customers, and tied in with efforts to balance demand (like seasonal pricing) to avoid empty seats and rooms. Travel agencies may take the packaging to another level, including deals with resorts and entertainment events--for the Super Bowl or Disney World, or guided tours, or a scuba diving, golfing, or skiing vacations.

With travel, rewards programs not only encourage customers to come back to the same vendor to accumulate points, they also create opportunities to create different classes of service. Your repeat patronage can earn you gold or platinum membership which qualifies you for special privileges and also insulates you from the common hassles and inconveniences of travel. With the right membership, you'll get first shot at the best seats or rooms, you'll get to board your airplane first, and you'll even earn more points each time you return than the ordinary customer does. In the past, long lines, poor service at airports, and crowded coach compartments on planes might have prompted you to fly another airline the next time. Today, when airline conditions seem awful in general, the annoyances serve as an incentive to concentrate your travel on a single airline, or go out of your way to earn credits from their allies, and thereby earn the right to better service in the future.

As you enter into the world of online travel shopping, remember that every "deal" is also a temptation. Yes, if you planned to travel, shopping online can help you get the best prices, perhaps allow you to get the reservations you want at the time that you want, and arrive at your destination so armed with information that you needn't waste time on logistical nuisances. But by opening yourself up to all this information about opportunities you otherwise would never have heard of, you may well end up traveling more often and spending more (albeit more effectively) than ever before.

Do-It-All Travel Sites

• Microsoft's Expedia Travel expedia.msn.com
• Travelocity www.travelocity.com
• Yahoo! Travel travel.yahoo.com
• Travelbase Internet Travel Planning www.travelbase.com
• The Trip.com www.thetrip.com
• Preview Travel www.previewtravel.com
• Travel.com www.travel.com
• Atevo www.atevo.com
• Flifo www.flifo.com
• TravelScape www.travelscape.com
• Travel Quest www.travelquest.com
• Internet Travel Network www.itn.net
• Biztravel.com www.biztravel.com
• 1travel.com www.1travel.com
• Travelzoo www.travelzoo.com

When you enter Microsoft's Expedia Travel expedia.msn.com, you are presented with three main choices: book a flight, reserve a room, or rent a car. To get full access to all of the site's features, you need to fill out a registration form, and get a user name and password. Then you can search for flights by lowest published airfare or by preferred travel times and airline. If you sign up for "fare tracker," this site will send you email messages about best price offers for specific trips that you are planning. Expedia's hotel lookup feature provides detailed information on over 38,000 hotels. The map area provides driving directions, as well as local maps. Expedia Magazine has travel-related articles. "Communicate" is an area where you can discuss matters of common interest with other travelers in forums (bulletin-board style), or live chat. The car rental section includes nine companies: Advantage, Alamo, Avis, Budget, Dollar, Hertz, National, Sears, and Thrifty.

In Expedia's "vacation shopping" area, you can check out vacation packages, cruises, resorts, sports and adventure, and special deals. But these sections could use more content. There are only five resorts and eight cruise lines. And the section labeled "trains, buses, and charters" actually has no buses, just Amtrak and AirCharterNet.

For information about local events and attractions, Expedia points you to Microsoft's Sidewalk City Guides expedia.msn.com/daily/sidewalk. These sites cover Boston, Denver, New York, San Francisco, Sydney, Chicago, Houston, San Diego, Seattle, Twin Cities, and Washington.

Travelocity www.travelocity.com claims its site provides "access to more travel providers than any other Internet site." This site includes the flights of over 700 airlines (400 bookable online), 50 car rental companies, and 40,000 hotels. Travelocity processes your airline reservations through SABRE, the same system used by 40,000 travel agents. When you buy a ticket, you have three delivery choices: electronic ticket (you just have to show your ID at the airport), postal mail, or travel agent.

Keep in mind that each of these major travel sites will have its own "special deals" section, with some overlap. So if deals are what you are looking for, you should keep checking rather than latching on to the first one you see.

Travelocity also has a destination guide with details about all countries and major cities. This site's bed and breakfast section profiles 19,000 individual Bed and Breakfasts and inns in North America, and another 1700 in the rest of the world. The listings call out "ski resorts" separately and provide details on dozens of them. Additionally, this site provides maps, weather, a currency converter, frequent traveler information, and seat maps for a dozen airlines.

Yahoo Travel travel.yahoo.com provides the same basic services (plane, rental car, and hotel search and bookings), but it looks like an excellent place to window shop--to poke around for ideas when you know that you want to travel, but aren't sure where you want to go. Here you can search by "lifestyle," which includes: business, family, lesbian/gay/bisexual, Jewish, naturalist/nudist, singles, seniors, special needs, women, and vegetarian. You can also research your trip by destination, including by country or activity of interest (arts and education, cruises and adventure tours, resorts, and sports and outdoors). You'll find tremendous variety here--from safaris to whale watching to paranormal phenomena. Here, too, you can join scheduled chats on travel topics or open-ended chat sessions, or participate in message boards (forums) organized by activities and interests, destinations, and lifestyles.

Travelbase Internet Travel Planning www.travelbase.com lets you search or browse through its database of 30,000 hotels, 1500 of which have Web sites. You can click on a state and then on a city or area; then select either only hotels with Web sites or every local hotel. Some of the hotels allow you to book online. This is a good place to check if you want to see the Web site of a hotel but don't know if it has one or what the Web address is. You need to sign up and get an ID and password to use Travelbase's airline and car rental system. This Web site also has a toll-free phone number to call for help.

In addition to the usual do-it-all travel-site capabilities, The Trip.com www.thetrip.com has some very interesting "guides and tools." For instance, with its "flight tracker," you can pick a particular flight that is now in the air and see its plotted course on a small-scale map, then view its current position over a large-scale map, and also see its present speed, heading, and altitude, together with the takeoff time and scheduled landing time. You can also request email notification when a particular flight lands.

Trip.com's "airport guides" offer airport maps, regional maps, and terminal views for all major airports. You can sign up for "trip.com," a free weekly email newsletter with tips, trends, and deals, or for "Deals-2-U," which is email notification of special low fares on routes in which you are interested.

A downloadable "world clock" makes it easy for you to display on your PC the current time at any cities of ongoing interest to you. For travel-related information and articles, you can check its online magazine, "The Complete Traveler," or Trip.com's "news and community" section.

Preview Travel www.previewtravel.com claims to have over 6 million registered users, which is probably due in large part to its extensive destination guides. This travel site makes available online, for free, lots of content from Fodor's Travel Publications. For each major destination, you can read about: attractions and activities, accommodations, restaurants, when to go, arriving and departing, getting around, practical information, and special interests. In addition, you can take a look at a photo gallery, a video clip gallery, and related vacation packages for each destination. Preview Travel also lets you create your own custom mini-guide, with selected portions of its online content packaged neatly for you to print out and take with you on the trip. (By the way, you can also go directly to Fodor's at www.fodors.com).

If you aren't sure where you want to go, you can use Preview Travel's "vacation finder" to help make up your mind. You can check a wide range of vacation and cruise packages by region.

Getting ready to go, you can check Preview Travel's packing list suggestions, for each of about a dozen categories of trips. If you want to buy any clothing or luggage online or toll-free by phone, you can do so from the site's TravelSmith store (travelsmith.previewtravel.com). Preview Travel's "business" travel section provides you with a different arrangement of the same underlying tools and options.

Are you getting a little overwhelmed with the wealth of possibilities? It's not over yet. Take a look at Travel.com www.travel.com. There you'll find the usual 500 airlines, 33,000 hotels, 50 rental car companies, 3,000 bed and breakfasts, and miscellaneous cruises and vacations. But here, too, you'll find links to other travel-related Web sites, carefully arranged in 3,500 categories. You'll also find links to non-Microsoft guides to New York City, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Chicago, and St. Louis. From this site, too, you can access the "discounted hotel inventory" provided by Hotel Reservation Network. And, of course, you can access maps, get email notification of drops in airfares, and read an online travel magazine.

Atevo www.atevo.com offers "content, community, and commerce," including the usual suspects (airlines, hotels, and destination information). This site's National Parks section, organized by state, provides a wealth of detail on U.S. parks. Atevo also makes it easy to interact with fellow travelers, offering you free personal Web space to set up as "Your Travel Page," in addition to the opportunity to participate in travel-related message boards (forums).

Flifo www.flifo.com has an international flavor. This site gives you a choice of having your tickets delivered in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, or Australia. With this site, too, you can book flights, hotel rooms, and rental cars; but Flifo offers very little else--none of the usual destination information and related links. Flifo, however, does offer discounted rates on flights abroad.

TravelScape www.travelscape.com is a subsidiary of Las Vegas Reservation Systems, and has special relationships with hotels in that city, in addition to offering the typical do-it-all travel-site services.

Travel Quest www.travelquest.com has all the usual services, plus a Rail Services section with links to Amtrak, to the train that links England and France through the Chunnel, and to specialty train services. Don't be intimidated by the registration form on the home page. If you are still window- shopping, just click on one of the choices in the left column, and you'll bypass the registration area.

The Internet Travel Network www.itn.com boasts over 4 million registered users. Along with vacation packages and deals, they offer travel guides to over 4,000 destinations, known as "Rough Guides." From there, you can choose "Rough Takes," which consists of biweekly updates on travel events and trends. Why does the Internet Travel Network get so many users when there are so many other sites providing similar services and information? By offering a variety of reservations systems, designed for both large companies and small companies--making it easy for employees to book travel and get the best corporate discounts. It also offers reservation services to other companies that operate networks of travel agencies. In addition, the network partners with non-travel companies that want to offer travel-booking services from their Web sites. If you run a Web site, just plug in their reservation services and you're in the travel business. Visitors to your site can book their flights and hotel rooms without leaving your site. Apparently, Uniglobe, CNN, and Ticketmaster all use this service.

The biztravel.com site www.biztravel.com acts as a do-it-all site for the frequent business traveler. This site helps you maximize your frequent flier miles and your credits in frequent "stayer" programs by guiding your choices in booking flights, hotels, and rental cars. It also helps you keep track of all your credits in those reward programs in one place. The Cityinfo section serves as a guide to hotels, restaurants, airports, weather, etc. in major U.S. and international cities. If you need to plan meetings, conferences, and shows, "Event Source" lets you search through a database of 9000 meeting hotels and sites worldwide.

Biztravel.com's "Pager Alert" service lets you receive flight status, gate info, and weather conditions at your destination by email delivered via any pager service that provides an email interface. You can sign up to receive automatic upgrades from coach if and when you are eligible. You can also use its services to track flights in route, plan a group event, find a trade show, charter a flight, and read world travel warnings. It also has a page of great travel-related links with useful descriptions. To access these travel-related links, click on the Other Valuable Sites option from the Biztravel home page.

More? Yes, don't stop now. The variety and richness of these sites is amazing. 1travel.com www.1travel.com provides a large collection of classified ads posted by travel agencies and travel providers. You'll be delighted at choices you never knew you had. Want to stay in a log home? Want a tour to the Seychelles Islands or to the Czech Republic? How about an Alaskan cruise or language study trip or a casino vacation? This site offers discounted fares on international reservations departing from 21 countries, from a database of over 3 million fares. They also offer special service if you are planning a multi-city (five or more, multi-country (three or more) trip.

How would a newcomer ever hope to get a foothold in a market so remarkably well served as this one? When Travelzoo.com www.travelzoo.com launched its "do-it-all" travel site in April 1998, the Travelzoo management offered visitors part ownership in the company, just for visiting. As the company's senior management explains, "Travelzoo.com soared in popularity this summer (of 1998) by adopting a unique, never-before-seen ownership concept. Netsurfers were invited to become co-owners of the Travelzoo.com site. And within three months, 700,000 people had signed up. And with that, the company's ownership goal was reached. As co-owners, these 700,000 netsurfers have an incentive to visit the site again and again, and to encourage others to do the same. This has led to a major boom in visitor traffic to Travelzoo.com. And as the number of hits increases, so do the advertising dollars the site can command." www.travelzoo.com/Story.htm

Online Travel Agencies

TravelHUB hosts a worldwide directory of travel agencies, categorized by specialty. The specialties include: airfare only, adventure, business, cruise, eco tours, family, alternative lifestyle, handicap, seniors, singles, sports, student, specialty travel, and by geographic location. (If you want to travel in New Zealand, you might want to have a local agency plan the details for you.) They provide the address and phone number of each agency, plus a link to the agency Web site, and a button to click to bring up a form to request their services.

TravelHUB also brings together in one place the travel specials of over 500 travel agencies, and lets you sign up to receive daily travel-special alerts by email.

In addition, TravelHUB purports to have the "largest online database of international discounted airfares (consolidator fares)." According to TravelHUB, "consolidator fares" are airline tickets purchased by airline wholesalers and resold to travel agencies at discounts of up to 70% off regular rates. Some of these fares are for charter flights, but most are with regular airlines. They recommend that you first check the latest deals on scheduled fares, then come here to see if you can do better with a consolidator rate. They also warn that cancellation fees for consolidator fares are high--up to 50% of the fare price; so make sure your plans are definite before buying tickets this way.

Uniglobe Travel www.uniglobe.com runs a retail travel franchise with 1100 locations. The Web site allows customers to book their own flights, pick vacation packages, etc., with the local agencies getting credit for the sale. Visitors can search for affiliated agencies in their area. Uniglobe also runs a proprietary intranet Web site, which links these agencies, so that they can work together to assemble unique travel packages.

Some of the larger agency Web sites, like Global Online Travel www.got.com provide the same kinds of services as the do-it-all sites, letting you book your own flights, hotel rooms, and rental cars. But they focus on their special deals, vacations, and cruises; and they also provide phone numbers for you to talk directly with travel professionals, if you'd like. (Global is backed by Signature Travel Services, a chain of travel agencies). The do-it-all sites list specials and packages, too; but with nowhere near the variety of choice that the agencies offer, and without the option of direct contact that the agencies are equipped to provide.

Traveler's Net www.travelersnet.com provides do-it-all site type resources, acts as an agency, and gives you a rebate on agency fees that they receive from travel providers. As explained at the site, "When you do the planning and furnish us with the information necessary to book your trip, we share the commission that is paid to us by travel suppliers." They have detailed tables showing you how much you get back on the purchase of airline tickets and vacation packages, based on the price. The sums are not princely--but this is "found money" -- money back after you paid the best price you can find. Their lists of travel links www.travelersnet.com/links are also quite rich, and well worth exploring.

Many agencies seem to focus on vacation travel, putting together a unique variety of packages in which they have worked out all the details and negotiated discount prices with all the vendors.

Bon Vivant www.bvt-usa.com is a travel agency headquartered in Pennsylvania. It specializes in vacation packages, and has a wide variety of offerings. For instance, under "exotic," you can choose among Africa, Galapagos Islands, and Antarctica. Under Africa, Bon Vivant has 16 safaris to choose from. And under Antarctica, you choose from among four different itineraries. Bon Vivant provides preferred discount rates at 12,000 hotels and inns.

Internet-Travel Services www.internet-travel.com is an online travel agency that specializes in "dream vacations" and "hassle-free business trips." When you click on "air travel," you connect with Priceline for airline tickets and hotel rooms. Major areas of this site focus on: the Bahamas, Bermuda, the Caribbean, cruises, Florida, Hawaii, Mexico, and singles.

The Travel Network agency www.travelnetworkinc.com operates out of Florida and has a franchise business in 15 countries. Their site includes: cruises, honeymoons, packages and tours, and specials.

For escorted tours at discount rates, check Pennsylvania Travel www.patravel.com. On its opening page, it is explained how the discounts work--basically, you get back part of what would have been the booking commission.

For a two- to four-week European vacation based in "your own private apartment or house," check Untours www.untours.com. According to the site, "Before your trip, our well-trained staff helps you select the right country, area, apartment, and length of stay, (and) reserves and purchases the most convenient and economical air and ground transportation... Upon arrival our carefully-selected European staff meets you at the airport upon arrival (standard group arrivals only), escorts you or gives you detailed self-escort directions, to your apartment, invites you to a group orientation session to help you decide what to do during your stay and how to do it, host a special group event..., and is available by telephone throughout your stay if you need additional assistance.

Is the Price Right?

Priceline www.priceline.com takes a unique approach to pricing. You post a request for air travel with them, indicating where you want to go and when and how much you are willing to pay. You guarantee your offer with a major credit card. Then Priceline seeks a seller willing to fill that request. With Priceline "there is no auction, no bidding and no back and forth. Simply name your price and let Priceline find a seller." Recent advertising blitzes by well-known personalities like William Shatner and Rush Limbaugh have made Priceline a well-known online travel service. Priceline has also recently added hotel rooms to its online offerings.

Check the Airlines

Here are the addresses of the major U.S.-based airlines. You'll note that unlike most stores, where the address is basically the company name, these companies tend to have unexpected URLs that you probably couldn't guess.

• American Airlines www.aa.com
• Northwest Airlines www.nwa.com
• Continental Airlines www.flycontinental.com
• Delta Airlines www.delta-air.com
• Southwest Airlines www.iflyswa.com
• Trans World Airlines www.twa.com
• United Airlines www.ual.com
• US Airways www.usairways.com

Playing the Incentive Game

If you are a collector of frequent flier miles, then you can and should consider a few new reward programs linked to your online behavior. On the Internet, you can get credits, which can be exchanged for frequent flier miles, by signing up at ClickRewards www.clickrewards.com and shopping at associated online stores. You can also sign up at Bonus Mail www.bonusmail.com or My Points www.mypoints.com and earn rewards (exchangeable for frequent flier miles) for receiving and reacting to email ads.

Sites that Strive to Do One Thing and Do It Well

• The Family Travel Network www.familytravelnetwork.com provides voluminous advice and suggestions for travelling with kids
• The same company that produces Golf Travel Online gto.com and Ski Travel Online skito.com, also plans to launch a travel site that focuses on "destinations" www.destinations.com.
• New Choices www.newchoices.com focuses on people age 50 to retirement.
• Green Travel network www.greentravel.com provides adventure and "eco" travel packages.

Any Room at the Inn?

Also, there are a few hotel specialty sites that offer unique services. For instance,

Hotel Wiz www.hotelwiz.com lists 43,000 properties worldwide and offers up to 40% discounts on 15,000 of them. It has an easy-to-use search engine, and allow online booking. It also provides hotel reviews.

Hotel Express International www.hotel-discount.com/anglais/index3.htm operates as a hotel discount club, offering 50% off on accommodations in 3,500 hotels in 72 countries. Membership currently costs $200/year.

All Hotels www.all-hotels.com boasts links to tens of thousands of hotels worldwide--virtually all the hotels on the Web.

Don't Forget Your Traditional Sources

The large local branches of AAA Travel Services have their own Web sites, and some of them (like California at www.aaa-calif.com/travel/services.html) offer a wealth of information on line, such as local traffic reports. Call your local branch to find out if they are online, or do a search at AltaVista (www.altavista.com for AAA Travel Services and the name of your state, e.g.

• +"AAA Travel Services" +California
• Or you can go to www.aaa.comand enter the destination zip code to locate web pages for the closest AAA office.
• Youth Hostels International www.iyhf.org can hook you up with hostels in any country.
• Club Med www.clubmed.com provides info on all its resorts from a central site.
• DisneyWorld (www.disneyworld.com and Disneyland www.disneyland.com both offer special travel packages.

The Last Word

Sidebars For This Chapter

All travelled out? Want to enjoy a few cartoons about the hassles of travel and maybe email them to your friends? Go to 1travel.com www.1travel.com/postcard/card.htm.

Would you rather go by bus? Surprisingly, bus companies get short shrift or no shrift at all at travel-related Web sites. If you want to check this low-cost alternative, you can get a list of bus company Web sites at Yahoo dir.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Companies/Transportation/Buses/Bus_Lines

Want to see some background on the travel company you are about to do business with? Then check the "scorecard" on 22 top travel sites at Gomez www.gomez.com.

Do you like ghost movies? If so, maybe you'd like a night at a ghost-infested hotel. travel.yahoo.com/Destinations/Activity/Cruises_and_Adventure_Tours/Paranormal_Phenomenon/

Want a list of all the essential numbers to help you do currency conversion in your destination country? Go to Cheat Sheet* for Travelers www.oanda.com/converter/travel

Need to phone home? Rent cellular and satellite phones, worldwide, at Action Cellular Rent-a-Phone www.globalphone.net.

Do you want the toll-free phone numbers of airlines, hotels, cruise lines, rental car companies, and tour operators? Go to the list of travel-related links at Traveler's Net www.travelersnet.com/links.

Might you be interested in a train ride through South Africa with a steam locomotive? Check a site run by individuals who want to preserve the tradition of train travel in South Africa www.ru.ac.za/departments/iwr/staff/daf/tt/timetabl.html.

Want to plan some special nights out at restaurants during your vacation or business trip? Check DineNet Menus Online www.menusonline.com for a national restaurant directory, with full menus.

Are you planning on traveling with kids? A few words of advice might turn a potential nightmare into a wonderful experience. Check the articles and tips at About.com travelwithkids.about.com. And from there, check their recommendations for "Top Family Vacations."

Are you over 50 and interested in exchanging your home with another family for a vacation? Then check Senior Vacation and Home Exchange www.seniorshomeexchange.com. They currently have over 600 listings in 30 countries.

Would you like to see wildlife in its natural habitat? How about an excursion to Mongolia? Check World Wildlife Fund Travel www.wwfus.org/travel.

Do you want to save postage on postcards? Go to Travel Preview (www.travelpreview.com) and send digital postcards for free from their site. The recipient gets email saying to check a specific URL where they'll find the photo you chose, together with your personal message. To be wickedly lazy, send the postcards before you leave on your trip--take care of your social obligations quickly and easily, and then you can forget everyone but yourself while you're gone.

Chapter Seven: Food

If you are the sort of person who doesn't put much value on time savings, uses lots of coupons, and goes to two or three different real-world grocery stores a week in order to chase the lowest prices, don't bother with the online supermarkets. Do it your way.

If there are gourmet treats that you crave for yourself or would like to buy as a gift, and that aren't available locally, check the online specialty food shops. Once again, you aren't likely to find bargains. A discount of 20 percent off doesn't mean much for relatively low-priced items if you then have to add shipping charges. But you might be able to quickly and conveniently purchase merchandise that otherwise would be very hard to find, except by catalog or while traveling.

Getting Started: Indulge Yourself With A Gourmet Treat

For the cheese lover, consider International Gourmet's World of Cheese www.igourmet.com. There you can sign up for the Cheese of the Month and get "a different, exciting world-class gourmet cheese at the beginning of every new month!" You can also order individual items, check cheese-related recipes, and chat with other cheese lovers.

For fresh or smoked seafood shipped overnight from Florida, check Shore to Door Seafood www.shoretodoor.com. That's where you can find Atlantic salmon, swordfish, yellowfin tuna, etc. Shore to Door also offers almost every type of fresh seafood you could ever crave, from stone crab claws in season, to Gulf-fresh shrimp, to live Maine lobster. All items are shipped fresh to your door for a truly gourmet treat. What's your preference?

If you are more interested in health than taste, and if you are particularly concerned about the use of pesticides and other chemicals, you should take a look at the vegetables and fruits available from Diamond Organic www.diamondorganics.com. There you can take a guided tour of the family farm, and meet the family as well as view the produce. To get started, you can order a variety of samplers for about $50, including overnight Federal Express delivery.

Do you crave the perfect cut of beef? Then consider specialty grocers Dean & Deluca www.dean-deluca.com. At this Web site, you can find a 12-lb., bone-in rib roast for $150 or six 10-oz. filet mignon steaks for $80. You'll have to add on shipping, of course--$10 for standard 7--10 day delivery of that filet mignon and $30 for UPS next-day delivery. Dean & Deluca also offers caviar, smoked fish, cakes, pastries, fruits, and many other items. If you are a connoisseur of fine apples, perhaps you'd like their apple sampler (10-lb., 12 apples) for $45, plus shipping.

Are you just dying for goat cheese in oil or white truffles? Then try the "Delicacies" area at Balducci's www.balducci.com. You can also get canned anchovies in their "Specialties" area and a wide variety of homemade pastas and sauces in their "Pasta" section.

In addition to pastas, Balducci's also offers completely prepared entrees, like rack of lamb or chateaubriand, ready to put into your oven and complete with the necessary instructions to finish cooking the entrée items. Buying ready-to-cook gourmet items changes the whole process for busy people who like to entertain.

For more exotic recipes, like potato-and-goat-cheese galette, check Cooking.com www.cooking.com. This site provides complete cooking instructions, including steps and related details, as well as nutritional analysis. Unfortunately, you'll have to shop for the ingredients elsewhere. While the site does sell some specialty foods, including pastas, herbs, salsas, and dips, these ingredients are not correlated with the recipes. Cooking.com's main line of products appears to be cookware, tableware, and cookbooks.

Frieda's www.friedas.com offers Asian and Latin produce, along with exotic fruits and nuts from around the world.

GreatFood.com www.greatfood.com lets you browse by category, brand, review, or meal occasion (such as "back packing, barbecue, beach party[el], cocktail party). This site also has a gift finder where your choices are arranged by price range, in case you'd like to send some Beluga caviar to your aunt in Poughkeepsie.

For herbal tea, including a Tea of the Month offer, visit Snowbound Herbals www.sbherbals.com. This site's related products include herbal oils, salves, and massage oils. Here you'll also find lots of articles related to herbs and teas and how they can benefit your health.

If you want to buy wine or beer online, keep in mind that all deliveries will require an adult signature. As they say at Virtual Vineyards www.virtualvin.com, "Someone of legal age must be at the shipping address during the day to sign for and accept the packages. Packages cannot be left without the signature of an adult." This procedure is intended to prevent minors from buying alcoholic beverages online, and is necessary to comply with state laws. Other online wine dealers include K&L Wine Merchants www.klwines.com and SendWine www.sendwine.com which are set up primarily to handle gift purchases and corporate or multiple orders.

To find an online store that offers the specialty that meets your individual taste, try going to Yahoo! www.yahoo.com; in the query box on the opening page, type the name of the item you want. For instance, enter "Amish food" and then click on the first link, and you'll get three choices--one in Pennsylvania Dutch country and the other two in Illinois. Or enter "lobster" and click on the first link, and you'll get a list of dozens of suppliers. As an alternative route, you can go through the cascade of menus at Yahoo!, clicking first on Business and Economy, then Companies, then Food, and continue down whatever path strikes your fancy. To browse for gourmet, special food, wine, and beer stores at Looksmart www.looksmart.com, click on Shopping, then Food & Wine.

Buying Your Weekly Groceries

An hour or two? What else could you be doing with that time? And how often do you end up making quick trips to the store to pick up items you forgot the last time or things you ran out of unexpectedly? For me, it's about two or three times a week. Of course, those short trips don't take as long as the main one. But that does add up to a total of over three hours a week, every week (even when I'm on vacation!), just grocery shopping. And every time I walk into a supermarket, I end up coming out with more than what I intended to buy. I'm a sucker for well-packaged, well-placed, and well-priced impulse items.

What's the alternative? Shopping online, of course. Some Internet-based grocery services are nationwide and use shipping companies for delivery. But most are local or work in partnership with local supermarkets. Today, your choices will depend largely on where you happen to live.

The Grocery Shopping Network www.groceryshopping.net/storelocator.htm, which recently merged with eGrocery, provides a service that helps existing grocery stores with physical sites to also do business online. With their store locator, you can browse through a list of hundreds of stores, scattered across most states in the U.S.

Once these services reach volume, they are likely to thrive and spread rapidly. This business is tough. The vendors are ramping up for what should become a very lucrative market ($85 billion by 2007, according to articles at the Grocery Shopping Network). But at the moment, they all seem to be losing money. They need to attract enough customers to reach the volume that will make them profitable. In the meantime, if you are fortunate enough to have a local service, try using it immediately. These new companies are doing everything they can to attract and keep customers like you.

The online-only businesses buy food at wholesale prices, just like the local grocery stores do, but operate with far less overhead than physical stores, which have to invest in and maintain attractive store space and have higher payrolls, with cashiers and others involved in face-to-face customer interaction. Hence, online grocery service could become extremely profitable. But to reach volume, they need to induce ordinary people like you to change long ingrained grocery-buying habits. That's difficult, despite the promised convenience and time savings.

So expect the online supermarkets to keep coming up with new services and tempting special offers and discounts. Now is a great time to be an online consumer.

Today's Top Choices

• NetGrocer www.netgrocer.com delivers throughout the U.S. (except Alaska and Hawaii) by way of overnight delivery. Delivery takes two to four business days and costs $2.99 for orders under $50 and $4.99 for all orders over $50. However, this service doesn't provide fresh produce and meat--just packaged and canned goods.

• Peapod www.peapod.com works in partnership with supermarket chains--Jewell Osco in Chicago, Stop and Shop in Boston, Tom Thumb in Dallas, Safeway in San Francisco and San Jose, Randalls in Austin and Houston, and Kroger in Columbus. At its Web site, you enter your zip code to get specific information about terms in your area. Professional shoppers shop at a supermarket for you. The price you pay is what you would pay if you went to the store yourself (including in-store specials and redemption of coupons). Peapod offers next-day delivery ("in most cases") seven days a week, and you can choose a two-hour delivery slot that's convenient for you. There's a $7.50 delivery charge for orders under $60, no charge above that. To place your orders, you can use your Web browser, or with Windows software you can download the catalog from the Peapod site. This site acts more like a local grocery shopping service than a regular on-line store. Also, rememeber that this service is available only in certain major metropolitan areas, but as the popularity of on-line grocery shopping increases, look for this site's service to be expanded and similar services to become available in yet uncovered areas.

• Serving the Boston area, Hannaford's HomeRuns www.homeruns.com purportedly charges prices comparable to supermarkets, offers next-day delivery to homes in its service area, and has a double-your-money-back guarantee on its products. The minimum order is $30 with a delivery charge of $10. There are no delivery fees for orders over $60. HomeRuns sends out a printed catalog to customers twice a year (the latest is 97 pages long, with over 5,000 items). You can order over the Internet or by fax or phone. The service charge is $5 to process phone and fax orders, but processing is free on the Web.

• Another Boston-area service, Groceries To Go www.gtg.com, takes orders over the Internet and by fax. It experimented with home delivery (in partnership with a local milk company) and probably will again. But, for now, it delivers to the parking lots of large corporations at the end of the work day and has a central pickup facility. There is a $25 minimum order. Groceries To Go's online recipes ("Shop by Meal") are sorted by cuisine (e.g., Italian, Chinese, Mexican, etc.) and by preparation time.

• Also serving the Greater Boston area, ShopLink www.shoplink.com not only does groceries, they also handle dry cleaning, video rentals, prepared foods, bottle and can redemption, shoe repair, and UPS shipping. ShopLink is trying to be your overall convenience service. Other online grocery services are on an ad hoc basis--come and shop when you want, and all you need is your browser. When you sign up for ShopLink, you get specialized software on a CD-ROM, and you pay them on a monthly basis. There are two service levels: $25/month for weekly delivery, and $39/month for weekly delivery plus one special delivery per month.

Tomorrow's Choices

You can also check the major directories--LookSmart www.looksmart.com, and Yahoo! www.yahoo.com--and browse through their lists of food stores in hopes of finding one or more in your area.

The Service That's Right For You

Delivery

• Delivery location (to your home or a pickup spot). If you live in an apartment or in a neighborhood where you don't feel comfortable leaving anything of value on the back doorstep, you might prefer to pick up your groceries at the parking lot at work or at a drop-off point that's on your way home.
• Delivery frequency (how many times a week). You need some items, like milk and bread, more than once a week. And you can't always foresee what you'll want a week in advance. It could be very helpful to get deliveries two or three times a week.
• Delivery time (when during the day you can expect to receive the orders). You might prefer to get your deliveries in the morning before you leave for work, like the milkman and bread man in bygone days. Or you might prefer that the deliveries come shortly before you arrive home from work, so there would be less time for them to sit unattended as a temptation to curious neighborhood kids, or less time before you can put them in the refrigerator. Perhaps you might want to find a service that delivers in the evenings and on weekends.
• Lead time (how long in advance do you have to submit your order). With some stores you can submit your order the day before you want it. With others you have to give two days or more notice. In most cases, the shorter the lag time, the better.

You've been buying groceries in supermarkets all your life and probably take for granted all the time-consuming steps involved. Now that you're shopping a totally new way, you'll be going through new steps that will feel awkward until you've repeated them often enough for them to become routine. That's when you will begin to see the real time savings.

You'll find that the different services, under the pressure of competition, tend to provide similar shopping experiences. Nearly all will provide you with a choice of ways to find the items you want. For instance, you should be able to search by generic names of foods and by brand name. You should also be able to browse through categorized lists of items. Choose a method that matches your way of thinking and remembering, and build your new routine around that. Given your style, you may find it particularly important to be able to:

• Type want you want in plain English and see what they have that matches that. Perhaps you'll be supplied with information about serving size and price per serving, or with the pricing quickly translated to terms that are easy to compare (like price per pound) so you can make quick choices concerning brand and size.
• Access your previous orders and build a new order by editing that rather than starting from scratch.
• Select a recipe, indicate the number of servings, and see a list of what you would need to buy, in a form that's easy to add your order.
• Sort your choices by their fat content or other dietary factors.

Do they offer fresh produce, or only canned and packaged foods? Much of the convenience of online shopping comes from getting everything or just about everything from a single service. Watch out if there's a category of food that the online services don't carry and that you need all the time. These are some good questions to ask:

• Do they offer fresh meat? Unless you are a vegetarian, that will be important.
• What happens to fresh meat and vegetables if I'm not home when they deliver? Perhaps you remember when the milkman deposited milk in an insulated box on your porch, usually before you got up in the morning, and you'd pop it in the refrigerator before you went to work. Today's grocery services will probably deliver perishables in throw-away insulated containers, packed with refrigerants, or they'll provide you with a large durable plastic cooler for you to keep on the porch. You'll have to decide if the temporary storage provided is appropriate for the kinds of foods you plan to buy and the length of time they are likely to sit before you bring them in. (If worried about theft, choose a service that lets you pick up your groceries or that can guarantee delivery at a time when you are home.)
• What about the quality of the selection? "I have no problem ordering canned and packaged goods--they are all the same," you say. "But I'm not about to trust a stranger to pick my meat or even my tomatoes." In fact, that's the first question I asked when my wife wanted to try one of these services. I simply couldn't imagine that a stranger could select fruit that was ripe but not too ripe, and good but low-cost cuts of meat. So as a test, I ordered peaches and top-round steak. The peaches arrived unbruised, firm and juicy. The steak had little fat, was marked with a "buy by" date like at the supermarket, and tasted fine. Now I'm a believer.

Make Up Your Mind

You might want to store-hop and comparison shop for specialty and gourmet items, but for your standard milk, bread, soda, snacks, meat, and vegetables--the foods that are on your shopping list week after week--stay put, unless the store has done something that undermines your loyalty. You have made an investment of time to figure out how their Web site works and learned to find and order the things that you want. Don't throw that away by trying out one service after another. Rather, learn to use one very well, and take advantage of all the convenience features.

Grocery shopping isn't a matter of buying one or even half a dozen items and lingering to make sure that each is "just right." Rather, you need dozens, perhaps even a hundred items every week. You are not a professional shopper. You have a life to live. You want to get this over with, quickly and efficiently. And because you will incur service and delivery charges if your order is below a minimum (typically around $60), there's not much to gain from item-by-item price comparisons from one store to another. In fact, being too choosy about prices will end up costing you not only time but money, since you'll have to pay for multiple deliveries.

Coping With Online Catalogs

Actually, the experience is not that different from your first time through a new supermarket "superstore." You are faced with aisle after aisle after aisle, and nothing seems to be organized the way it was at the store you used to go to.

In both cases, there's a learning curve. It's far easier the second time. And eventually the organization of the store becomes part of the map of your mind, and you know without even thinking about it just where to find what.

Actually, an online store is likely be very systematic, following a strict hierarchy of categories. In contrast, a0 physical store is laid out for efficiency of the operation (such as placing refrigeration units next to the wall), and to tempt you with impulse items up front near the check-out counter.

But there is no getting around the fact that newcomers will find it tedious to fight their way through the online grocery catalogs. This is a major barrier, and the vendors are scrambling to find solutions.

For instance, NetGrocer let's you type in your shopping list, however is natural to you, and tries to automatically match what you've typed with what it has in its catalog.

HomeRuns prints its complete catalog and periodically sends it to customers by snail-mail. They do that in part because their business isn't only on the Web--you can also phone (800 number) or fax. But the printed version of the catalog can come in handy for online shoppers as well. The organization is the same as on the Web, and you can flip through and get a feel for the whole thing, rather than stepping through one Web page at a time. You can check off the items you want while on the train or subway to and from work, while waiting for an appointment, or during a boring meeting. Then, once you've made your choices, transferring the information to the Web is a breeze.

Return to the Corner Store or Local Supermarket When That Makes Sense

If you suddenly run out of a couple items, like milk and bread, or you unexpectedly learn you'll be having guests for dinner, forget the Internet. Just pick up what you need at a local store.

The Internet makes sense for groceries:

• when you need to buy a lot of stuff, or
• when there are items you need repeatedly at regular intervals so you could set up a standing order.

Exception--if and when there's a convenient pick-up point (e.g., your company's parking lot) and your Internet grocer lets you pick up the same day you place your order. Eventually, that kind of service may be commonplace; it may take service like that to move large numbers of grocery shoppers to the Internet. But today, that kind of service is very rare.

Using the Internet to Avoid Shopping

Go to AltaVista Search and click on Advanced Search. Then in the top box, enter the word "recipe" (without the quotes). In the bottom box, just type in a list of an ingredients. Don't worry about punctuation--just enter the words. Click on Search. In a second or two you should see a list of Web pages that mention the word "recipe" and that also have those ingredients, with the pages that have all those ingredients at the top of the list. Click on the ones that look interesting. With a little luck, that could be your next meal--without your having to go to the store.

Sidebars for This Chapter

Some online stores offer enormous selection--more brands and sizes than you are likely to find in a typical supermarket. Just once, take the time to consider options you've never tried before, and add the good ones to your regular list.

Find and buy all the cookbooks you could ever imagine at Amazon.com, or at an online store that specializes in your favorite kind of food and style of cooking.

Consider the value of time saved--especially in mid-winter when the weather is horrendous and the traffic impossible, or in the fall and spring, when your kids are heavy into school activities and you just don't have time to go to the store. Or when you are just plain too tired.

Having easy access online to lists of what you've bought each week, you can see what you've spent and what you've spent it on, helping you to better plan and manage your money over extended periods of time.

It's time to count your blessings. Shopping online, you won't bump into your mother-in-law or that neighbor down the street who talks forever when you run into her. You also won't face the inevitable delays at the check-out line--trainee clerks who aren't sure what to do, price checks, and people who insist on writing checks in the cash-only line.

At most online supermarket sites, you can see the total of your order as you go along by taking a look at your "shopping cart." That is the page that summarizes the choices you have made. At that page, you can easily delete or substitute products to stay within budget and see the adjustment to your total each time, rather than guessing as you typically have to do at your neighborhood store.

It's going to take awhile to learn what's where, and how to click your way through to a completed order. So make your first trial runs when you have time to spare--for instance, when you call for service and are put on hold, when you have to wait for a repair person to arrive, or while waiting for your 6-year-old to complete his video game and get ready for bed. Later, when you need to order groceries in a hurry, you'll be prepared.

You probably already have a to-do list on your computer. Now keep a grocery list, adding to it whenever you run of something that you use regularly. That will make it a snap to compose your online order.

Even if you don't shop on the Internet, you can still use the Web to save money on your groceries with online coupons. At NetDeals www.netdeals.com/grocery.html, enter your zip code to find out which local supermarkets participate. Then choose the coupons you want and print them.

If you really like to use coupons, CoolSavings www.coolsavings.com offers coupons for retail locations other than grocery stores. Some of their deals are offered by K-mart, Kids "R" Us, and H&R Block.

If you are a community-oriented person, you may want to try a variety of high quality, mostly frozen foods sold by Market Day www.marketday.com This shopping service is really a fund-raising organization for private schools and other types of related organizations. Once a month, Market Day supplies a convenient four-page brochure from which you can make your selections. Market Day then delivers the ordered items by truck monthly to the school or organization using the food sales service as a fund-raiser. All foods offered are of restaurant quality, although some are packaged in larger-than-usual quantities. If you are not sure of a school or organization in your area that is part of the Market Day program, contact the Web site, and they will be able to locate the nearest member of their fund-raising network.

If you do have same-day delivery to a convenient pick-up point, you can, from the office, prepare for the guests your spouse just invited to dinner. Just choose a recipe and let the online service calculate what you need and assemble the order for you.

Once you've placed your first online grocery order, hop in the car and head to the supermarket. Bring a lounge chair and relax on the grass near the parking lot. It's time to gloat while everyone around you is scrambling to do their "real world" shopping.

Chapter Eight: Shopping for Banks, Loans, Insurance, and Investments

The Internet offers hundreds of quality Web sites that deal with every aspect of your personal finances. If you are a fully functioning member of society (not in prison and not under age), you are almost certain to find information and advice on the Internet that can save you or gain you money--significant sums of money, not only for today, but for tomorrow and the next day, too.

When you are talking about money, having the right information or lacking it can make a huge difference in the amount you can save, gain, or lose. What you don't know about finance issues can cost you big time, both in the realm of personal finances and in the realm of investing.

Unless you are an expert investor, you most certainly can find new ways over the Internet to save or gain money that you've never before considered. Once you have tasted the fruit of knowledge regarding money, you must taste again and again and again. Your days of blissful ignorance will be over. You will not be able to rest until you have checked all likely sources of advice and information before making an important financial decision. You will read article after article, even when they are on the same subject, because one article may have an unexpected detail that makes all the difference in your unique case.

It's no wonder that Web sites featuring financial information are multiplying like gerbils. One individual Internet user with an important pending financial decision might easily look at dozens, even hundreds, of screens a day. And people who use the Internet and get hooked on investing for gain will be tempted by the wildly fluctuating market, the ease of online trading, and the low online transaction fees to buy and sell, and buy and sell, over and over again. With the wildly increasing interest in online money activities, every online financial company is crazily fighting to gain every possible customer's attention and win that customer's loyalty.

As we take our online shopping tour of Web sites that relate to money, we'll first consider sites that focus on personal finances and teach you how to manage your money well. Then we'll look at those sites that focus on what you can do if you have money to spare and are anxious to get a piece of the fast-paced online investing action.

Do the Most With the Money You Have

• Quicken.com (www.quicken.com: This site, produced by the makers of Quicken software, focuses on "Making the Most of Your Money." It has sections on investments, home and mortgage, insurance, taxes, banking and credit, small business, retirement, life events, saving and spending, and financial forums (for discussion of common concerns with other visitors).
• MoneyCentral, Family Finance moneycentral.msn.com/family/home.asp: The family section of this Microsoft site deals mainly with "life events"--marriage,raising kids,coping with separation, caring for parents, and saving, selecting and paying for college. Other sections you can access off the main page moneycentral.msn.com include "Retirement and Wills," "Real Estate," "Smart Buying," "Investor," "Money and Banking," "Taxes," and "Insurance."
• About.com Guide to Personal Finance pfinance.about.com: This site features many informative money management articles and lots of links to related money management sites.

About.com provides volunteer "guides" for each of hundreds of different subject areas on the Internet. These guide scour the Internet for information related to their subject, and provide helpful links and articles for their visitors. Personal finance is one of the subjects they handle extremely well.

When you enter the About.com personal finance section, you'll notice that the Web site isn't as polished and flashy as the Quicken and MoneyCentral Web sites. But the articles and links you find there, as well as the site's opportunities for discussion with other online people in situations similar to yours, will probably prove more valuable to you in the long run.

When you visit the MoneyCentral Web site, check the "Banking" area (moneycentral.msn.com/banking/home.asp), and click on Manage Debt. In that unlikely place, you'll find several very helpful calculators. Of particular interest is the calculator called the Instant Budget Maker, which you will find in the "Create a Budget" section. Enter your family income and a few other facts, and you'll get back a detailed list of how much the average family like yours pays for housing, transportation, food, etc., based on federal statistics. Taking a look at what other families spend is a good, realistic way to start your budget.

If you have a pressing financial problem, first focus on that problem, of course. If, however, you are fairly worry-free, approach the Internet's personal finance information with an open mind and explore finance-related Web pages links that grab your fancy. Keep an eye out for an unexpected financial benefit, a money choice you didn't know you had, or a piece of personal finance information that you had no idea was available. Take brief notes about each of these three introductory sites: what sections look interesting, what articles you might want to read, what calculators you might want to use. But don't try to read and do everything now on your first visit; otherwise, you'll never have time to familiarize yourself with all the other financial resources available on the Web.

When you have checked those first three recommended Web sites, you should next check out the advice at the following additional sites, similarly taking notes as you go:

• Cheapskate Monthly www.cheapskatemonthly.com: At this online newsletter Web site, see the rapid debt repayment plan calculator.
• The Dollar Stretcher www.stretcher.com: Check this Web site for important weekly tips and advice.
• Kiplinger.com www.kiplinger.com: When you visit this site, try "Ask Kiplinger" for common questions and answers.
• Money.com www.money.com: This Web site is an online version of Money magazine.
• Financenter.com www.financenter.com: At this Web site, you can find information about loans, credit lines, insurance, retirement, and budgeting.

• Looksmart www.looksmart.com: At this site, click Home and Family, then select Personal Finance. There you can choose among dozens of choices in the following categories: "Best of the Web," "Banks and Credit Unions," "Car Finance," "Credit and Debt," "Estate Planning," "Insurance," "Mortgages," "Retirement Planning," "Software," "Taxes," and "Tools and Calculators."
• Lycos www.lycos.com/money: At the Lycos site, check out the "Life Events" section in particular, which includes tips on paying for college, taxes, buying a car, death, divorce, financial aid, kids, making a will, marriage, when you're just starting out, and worker's comp.
• Yahoo! Finance quote.yahoo.com: At Yahoo!, you can get information about loans (credit reports, mortgage quotes, auto loan rates), insurance (quotes on auto, life, home, and renters insurance), and taxes (online tax filing, refund estimator, and tax organizer).

Banking Over the Internet

Today, nearly all traditional banks have Web sites. Some of these Web sites are simply online brochures, featuring only static marketing content. Increasingly, many bank Web sites now provide methods for customers to perform online tasks without having to visit a branch or make a phone call. With most bank Web sites, you can get account balance information, transfer money from one account to another within the same bank, and apply for loans and credit cards. You can have your salary automatically deposited in your account. And, with your permission, the bank can automatically deduct loan payments from your account. Some bank Web sites provide your account information in a form that you can directly download into your computer's personal finance software, like Quicken or Microsoft's Money.

Just keep in mind that a handful of banks insist that their customers use the highest available level of encryption security when accessing their files online. If that's the case for a bank that you want to use, you will need to download the "strong encryption" (128-bit) version of your favorite browser, as discussed in Chapter 1.

If you would like to find an online bank, the best place to start is to check out banks with branches in your area. You can search the Internet for Web sites of the local banks you know by name, often just by entering "www.name.com" in your browser's address window, where "name" is the actual name of the bank. Be sure to compare each bank's services and offers to find the best deals.

After you have checked the Internet for local banks with Web sites, you should also check the banking section at

MoneyCentral moneycentral.msn.com/banking/home.asp to compare the rates offered by various (but not all) online banks. You can also check the Security First Network Bank www.sfnb.com--the first bank to exist only on the Internet, operating without any physical branches.

Before you decide on an online bank, you should also check several banks that have gained a reputation for their use of the Internet:

• Wells Fargo www.wellsfargo.com
• Citibank www.citibank.com
• Bank of America www.bankamerica.com

Online Bill-payment Services

I was stung by this very problem last year around Christmas time. Proud to be taking advantage of the latest technology, delighted not to have to pay for postage, and believing that I now could keep tight control on my checking account, maximizing the "float" available to me, I paid dozens of bills online. The next month, I got socked with dozens of late charges from those companies I had paid with such pride and satisfaction. My online bill-paying service had lumped my payments with those of other individuals using their service to pay the same debtors, and then issued paper checks to those debtors. With the slowness of Christmas mail, the paper checks arrived after the due dates. As a result of this situation, I wound up with late charges and a messy-looking credit record that took many phone calls and letters to correct.

As more and more people pay bills online, this "delay-to-pay" method used by some online banks is certain to change, making direct electronic payment to businesses of all kinds widely available. But until that time, watch out for services that just mail checks the old-fashioned way.

Borrowing Money

• GetSmart www.getsmart.com: This site is a borrower's marketplace. For example, you can search through thousands of credit card offers to compare terms and conditions.
• MortgageAuction.com (www.mortgageauction.com): At this site, mortgage lenders can bid for your home loan business.
• E-loan e-loan.com: With E-loan, you can search for lenders and rates. This site also features articles on loan information.
• Quicken.com Home and Mortgage www.quicken.com/mortgage: This popular site offers several different loan calculators, as well as a good selection of loan-related articles.
• QuickenMortgage www.quickenmortgage.com: This site offers mortgage-shopping tools.
• MortgageQuotes www.mortgagequotes.com: At this site, you can compare mortgage rates from over 1,000 lenders nationwide.
• Credit.com www.credit.com: With Credit.com, you can search for credit cards and loans and apply for mortgages. The site also offers credit-related advice.
• Priceline.com www.priceline.com: This site offers a "name-your-own-rate" service to help you find mortgages.

• MasterCard www.mastercard.com
• Visa www.visa.com
• American Express www.americanexpress.com
• Discover Card www.discovercard.com

Here is a list of the major credit rating companies:

• Experian www.experian.com
• Trans Union www.tuc.com
• Equifax www.equifax.com
  

Income Tax Survival Kits

With the IRS's Web site, you can now print outtax forms and booklets provided directly from the Internal Revenue Service (www.irs.ustreas.gov). To be able to read and print IRS forms and booklets, you will need "Adobe Acrobat" software. If you don't have this plug-in, you can download it for free from the IRS site and follow the installation instructions.

In addition to the information provided at the IRS site, the following sites will provide you with tax advice and information. Another set of sites provide massive lists of links to sites with still more information--enough to meet every imaginable tax-related need. Some of these are maintained by companies, other just by knowledgeable individuals who scoured the Web for this kind of information for their own purposes and provide the lists of links for the benefit of all.

Additional Tax-Advice Sites

• Taxweb www.taxweb.com: This site is a consumer-oriented source for federal, state, and local tax developments.
• Tax Analysts Online www.tax.org: From this Web site, you can access worldwide tax-related news.
• MoneyCentral Taxes moneycentral.msn.com/tax/home.asp: The MoneyCentral Taxes section offers several financial calculators and tax-related articles.
• Warren Gorham & Lamont www.wgl.com/tax/tax.html) This site offers information on all kinds of taxation issues.
• H&R Block www.handrblock.com: The Web site is official site of the H&R Block tax preparation service.

• Tax Resources www.taxresources.com
• Tax and Accounting Sites Directory www.taxsites.com
• Will Yancy's Home Page www.willyancey.com/index.htm
• Tax Resources on the Web/Alan G. Kalman Home Page pages.prodigy.net/agkalman

While you are gathering tax information, you might also consider buying a PC tax preparation program and filing your taxes online. If trying this approach appeals to you, consider:

• Intuit's TurboTax www.turbotax.com
• Kiplinger's TaxCut www.taxcut.com
• SecureTax.com www.securetax.com

Buying the Insurance That Is Right For You

The Internet's insurance-related Web sites can help you learn what your options are and also will provide comparative pricing information. Some of the best insurance information Web sites are: