Battle of the online stores

By Russell Shaw
Gannett News Service

If you're like most people who shop online, you're more apt to buy from sites with familiar names, according to the folks at Nielsen NetRatings. Indeed, the Internet tracking firm reported in June of 2001 that online retailers with strong bricks-and-mortar operations, such as Walmart.com (www.walmart.com) or JCPenney.com (www.jcpenney.com), grew faster than their cyber-only competitors. That's no surprise because these retailers have leveraged their offline brands to build a reputation for having a wide selection of products and reliable ordering and delivery systems.

While retail titans with bricks-and-mortar roots — Walmart.com, BestBuy.com (www.bestbuy.com) and Target.com (www.target.com), to name a few — are seemingly the most comfortable choices among consumers, they're not the only ones.

In fact, some Net shopping experts say that small online retailers, which in many cases were the first to hang their shingle on the Internet superhighway, offer some advantages, such as unique and difficult-to-find merchandise, and in some cases better deals on popular products.

Talk to About.com online shopping guide Frank Fiore, and he'll tell you that the Web is "filled with little-known, professional looking online stores that offer value-added merchandise or hard to find items —even some nutty and offbeat (sites)."

On his site (onlineshopping.about.com), Fiore, author of "E-Marketing Strategies," lists and links to many of these lesser-known online emporiums. With students headed back to school this month, Fiore recommends such lesser-known sites as eCampus.com (www.ecampus.com), School-Pak (www.schoolpak.com) and SmarterKids.com (www.smarterkids.com).

School-Pak, for example, provides a larger selection of items such as calculators, scissors and erasers that students need for school. The obligatory backpack, for example, is offered in more than 40 styles. Target.com and Walmart.com, in contrast, offer less than a dozen selections each at their online sites.

Smaller online shops also can beat the prices of the big guys. SmarterKids.com sells the $31.99 Turbo Twist Vocabulator, a tubelike educational toy that uses games and a musical beat to teach hundreds of words, word roots, synonyms and antonyms. In comparison, Wal-Mart's Web site sells the Vocabulator for $37.88.

While Fiore likes specialty retailers, he's also enthusiastic about what he terms "reverse auction" sites. Unlike traditional auction sites such as eBay (www.ebay.com), where you bid on an item offered for sale, sites such as Respond.com (www.respond.com) let you browse for a product you want and specify a price you are willing to pay for it. You can bid on anything from baby furniture and indoor plants to personal watercraft. The site then takes your preferences and e-mails them to companies that may have your item in stock. If a company is interested in selling you the item, Respond.com will send you an e-mail with more information.

Similar to Respond.com, iOffer (www.ioffer.com) has items in more than 20 categories, from dolls to travel.

Several discount shopping sites offer prices that are as low, if not lower, than better-known sites. They do this by striking special deals with manufacturers, or wholesale distributors. On the book site Powells.com (www.powells.com), for example, the crime memoir "My Dark Places" by James Ellroy is on sale for $7.98. It's $10.47 on Amazon.com.

But sites that claim to offer discounts don't always have the best buys. For example, discount electronics retailer Buy.com (www.buy.com) sells the ultracompact Minolta Dimage X digital camera for $347. That's $52 less than the manufacturer's suggested price, but it's $100 more than Marine Park Camera and Video (www. mpsuperstore.com), a Brooklyn-based retailer that's been selling products via the Web since 1992.

Comparison-shopping sites can help you find the best deal from among discount retailers. NexTag (www.nextag.com) is one of the most popular and one of Fiore's favorites. It compares the prices of hundreds of products, including computers, books, music and clothing. In addition to price comparisons, sites such as NexTag list whether a product is in stock and include customer satisfaction reviews and ratings of most retailers. Other popular comparison-shopping engines include MySimon (www.mysimon.com), Biz-Rate (www.bizrate.com) DealTime (www.dealtime.com) and Price-Scan (www.pricescan.com).

Helen Popkin patrols the online store beat for ConsumerReports.org (www.consumerreports.org). Wearing her hats as a consumer advocate and an enthusiastic shopper, Popkin has discovered that shopping around can add up to significant savings.

For example, online and brick-and-mortar retailer Sephora (www.sephora.com), which specializes in fragrances, makeup, and bath and body supplies, charges $20 for a 16.9-ounce bottle of Aromapharmacy Mind & Body Cleanser. That's $1.95 less than on Aromapharmacy's own online store (www.aromapharmacy.com).

Bargain-hunting tips

While some discount sites might have familiar names, others will be unknowns. That's why Fiore and Popkin offer these recommendations.

• Order from a site with a real mailing address — not a P.O. Box or suite number. Look for a "Contact Us" link on the home page and click it. The resulting page should have the mailing address.
• Insist on a site with a toll-free number. If you need to contact the site to dispute your order, you will save money on long-distance phone charges.
• Get complete customer service contact information — not just an e-mail address. If you have questions about your order, or need to return items you have purchased, the more points of contact you have, the better. This information should also be on the "Contact Us" page.
• Pay by credit card — never check or cash. If an online store delivers unsatisfactory merchandise, you can contact your credit-card company to dispute your bill. Obtaining a cash refund requires you to jump through that many more hoops. Plus, if you paid by cash or check, and the company goes out of business, you may be out of luck.
• Check for a money-back satisfaction guarantee. This isn't necessary because only a minority of companies offer it, but doing business with a company that will back up its products with such a guarantee should be a confidence-builder.
• Shop from sites with clear shipping and return arrangements, as well as privacy policies that clearly let you prevent them from selling your information to third parties. Look for a "Privacy Statement," or a similarly worded link on the bottom of the home page. Click and read it. If the site sells your customer information to other sites, but lets you opt out of the process, this information should be included on the privacy page.

If everything seems to be in order, "shop around, and compare different prices," Popkin said.