FAQ Topics

Why Shop Online?

Q

Can I save time shopping online?

A

You’ll save tons of time when you shop online.  You do not have to drive to the mall, park, hike inland for a mile or so, buy stuff, hike back, and drive home. You can shop whenever you want. These stores are always open. If you get an urge to book a trip at 2 A.M., you can work out all the details, and have tickets coming your way even though all real travel agents are asleep. The minute you enter an online store, you can find what you want a lot faster than you can going from department to department in a big mall store. Purchases that involve purely electronic transactions can be completed in a few seconds (or minutes, on a very busy day). For instance, several online stock-brokers promise that trades will be completed within ten seconds. If you reserve a car, flight, or hotel via the Web, you get confirmation in less than a minute.

Q

Can I save money when I shop on the Web?

A

Yes, even though you pay for shipping, you can generally save a lot online, compared to what you might have to spend in a retail store built out of steel, glass, and concrete blocks. Every online store can offer better prices than their physical cousins, because each online sale carries less overhead. Even if the company has retail outlets, an online sale does not carry the burden of expenses that must be charged to retail sales. An online store has: No rent, air-conditioning, heating, or janitorial services for a retail showroom No salesclerks out on the floor No paper catalog, no postage In fact, some online stores have no warehouses, either. Of course, like a retail operation, an online store has to pay someone to maintain a database with their current inventory.

Q

Is some stuff free?

A

Yes, but the amount and quality vary from one product category to another. If you are shopping for a CD, for instance, you can often download parts of songs and listen to them for free. (Even after you leave the site, you can listen to the snippets or tracks again, because they are sitting on your hard disk.) Ditto for clips of video. Also, you can download freeware (software and fonts you don’t have to pay for), shareware (software you can try out, but should pay for if you decide to use it on a regular basis), and demo programs. Also free, or almost so, are tons of information you used to have to pay for. For instance, in the past if you wanted to get a stock quote, you phoned your broker, who charged you an annual fee for your account, plus a commission on each trade.

Q

Can I learn enough about the product I want to buy?

A

The amount of information you get on each product varies enormously from site to site, but if you go to stores we recommend for their product descriptions, you will learn a lot, probably more than you could pick up walking around and talking with salespeople in a regular store. Instead of dealing with a clerk who hardly knows what products lie under the glass countertop, you get a product description that often includes a list of specific features and benefits, system requirements, optional add-on products, and possibly reviews by critics and other customers. Not every online store piles on the info like this, but the best ones do. And the rest of the Web acts as a giant clearinghouse for reviews, surveys, gossip, and research, so if you are new to a product arena, you can learn from the stores and these other Web sites what kind of products are available, what differentiates the good from the mediocre, and what features you might really want. Online shoppers, in general, are better informed than their mail-order cousins or mall denizens. After you buy a product, you may be able to get a little (only a little) phone support from the store, mostly about assembling or installing. But for real technical support you have to call the manufacturer.

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How Do I Find a Product in the Online Shop?

Q

Why are some brands available at a store, but not others?

A

Most likely, the store has negotiated to be an authorized reseller only for certain manufacturers. Or the store has an arrangement with a wholesaler who supplies products only from those manufacturers, at least in that product category. How come? Perhaps the store is concentrating on some other product category, and just puts up products with these brand names, as a gesture, to suggest that the store has a wider range of products than it really does. Or maybe the owner believes that these brands offer the best products for customers, considering quality, availability, or price. If you want a particular brand, you could go directly to the manufacturer’s site. But, depending on what products they sell, you may find that the manufacturer’s prices are far above those in the stores (to make their dealers look good), or the manufacturer may just refuse to sell on the Web, in order not to undermine relationships with dealers and resellers. Best to go to another store in the product category, and try there. (In our chapter about the product category, skim the list of sample products to see if you spot the brand you want.)

Q

How can I search for a product if I don't know a brand name?

A

Use a unique keyword. Keywords are very important words—that is, words that most people would associate with this particular product. These words act as keys to the database, opening it up to show you a particular product, or a set of products, all of which are associated with that idea. You can type in a keyword you think describes the product you are looking for, and the database comes back with a bunch of products that the store staff has described with that word. For instance, for a frying pan, the store folks might decide that keywords include pan, frying, cooking, fry, fries, stovetop, cast iron, the manufacturer’s name, steak, hash browns, omelets, scrambled eggs, pancakes, and griddle cakes. That way, if you type in pancakes, you get a list of products, one of which is the frying pan, because in the Keyword field on its record, the word pancakes appears. To limit the number of products you turn up, think of a keyword that applies to your kind of product but no other. For instance, pancakes will bring up frying pans, skillets, and warmers, but not steamer baskets, microwave ovens, and ice-cream makers. Not too bad, in a big database. Of course, you may think of a word that is so unusual that the store staff didn’t think of it either when they entered keywords for the product. Time to back off, and enter a more general term, such as pan.

Q

How can the store offer these discounts?

A

Depending on the industry, the wholesale price of a brand-new item is 20% to 55% off the retail price, so virtual stores can easily offer you 15% to 50% off retail, and still make a slight profit on each sale. But you may wonder: How can they manage to offer discounts that go way below those offered by physical stores? Stores that live entirely online, with no retail showrooms, no paper catalogs, and (in some cases) no warehouses can offer major discounts because their overhead is less than anyone else’s. The lightest virtual stores accept orders electronically, relay those orders electronically to a supplier, and the supplier ships the products out, for a small fee. A few stores charge you exactly what they pay, making not even one used dime on each transaction, because they hope to sell advertising on their sites, on the theory that extremely low prices will bring people through, exposing them to the banner ads as they buy other products. Next up the scale are stores that must have a physical warehouse. For instance, Amazon.com and eToys have found they can ship more efficiently if they handle warehousing themselves, rather than counting on a big wholesaler. But suddenly these companies discover they must hire workers to run the forklifts, pour Styrofoam pellets into boxes, label the packages, and hand them over to the delivery services. So the discounts at these stores, while dramatic, are a little less than at the rock-bottom locations. And so it goes. When a store supports retail storefronts and paper catalogs, as well as their online operation, the amount they can discount goes way down. But you should still get products for a little less than you would if you walked into the showrooms. Most of these stores also feature overstocks, discontinued items, and remainders, at even deeper discounts. You will almost always get a product for a lower price online than you could in a retail store, so that, even including your shipping charges, you are ahead of the game. But remember that the amount you save is only part of the incentive for shopping online. When you take into account the convenience, time-saving, and information available online, you may well find yourself ordering products even when you are only saving a buck or two over retail.

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How Do I Order and Pay?

Q

Are there different ways to pay?

A

Most stores offer several ways to order, but only the larger, more professional stores offer four or five methods. If you prefer the familiar, you can still pay using the old-fashioned ways: Calling an 800 number and placing an order, using your credit card over the phone (just as fast as it has always been, with shipments going out within a day or two, usually) Taking the information about the product, writing a letter, slipping a check or money order into the envelope, and sending it to the store’s snail mail address (delaying the date of shipment by a week or two) Cutting a purchase order and sending it in by mail (again, causing a delay of a few weeks as they verify credit and set up a formal account) If you want to order electronically, there are several ways to do that: Going to a secure server, filling out the form with your credit card info, and submitting it Printing out the form, filling it in, and faxing it to the store (causing a slight delay, perhaps a day or so, as they verify the credit card by phone) Emailing the form to the store with your credit card information (the least secure method, and not recommended) Of all these methods, we recommend ordering online, as long as you are dealing with a reputable store that has a secure server. The very worst is email. By mistake, you can send your credit card information to your department list at work, or the people on that newsgroup you’ve been following. Uh-oh!

Q

What is checkout?

A

As in a real store, when you have finally decided what you want to buy, you wheel your cart by the checkout counter. In many stores, this is the time you have to enter your credit card info, or confirm the info you gave when you registered, which now shows up again (except for your password). For instance, your billing and shipping addresses appear all filled in, but you can change them now, although many stores insist that your shipping and billing addresses match the address to which the credit card company sends its bills. You also get one last chance to edit quantities and remove products. Pay particular attention to the shipping method to make sure that is really what you want. (In some systems, you must wait until checkout to pick a shipping method, and find out how much it will cost only during checkout. Ugh.) When everything is the way you like it, click Submit or Order to send your order in. In a well-designed site, you should immediately get a page confirming the order details and asking you, one more time, to confirm that this is really, really what you want. One more OK, and the order is really, really sent in. (Poorly designed or greedy sites just accept your order the first time, not giving you a moment to reconsider.) In a few minutes an email should go out from the site confirming the purchase. (You may get the confirmation in a quarter hour, or a few hours, depending in part on the traffic on the Internet and the speed with which your email is delivered.) Be sure to save this confirming email, in case anything goes wrong with the order. You might even consider setting up a folder to save mail from stores so you can find it quickly.

Q

Why do I need a billing address?

A

Your billing address helps the credit card company confirm that you are who you say you are. Most stores will reject your order if the credit card number is wrong, or if your address does not match the address the credit card sends its bills to. At most stores, then, you must enter a billing address, and for many that must also be the shipping address, so they can be sure you are not a criminal who has stolen a card and wants stuff sent direct to a motel room. Sites specifically set up for gifts do allow you to have the present sent directly to the recipient, but that is unusual.

Q

How safe is my credit card information with an online store?

A

Your credit card information is safer online than at your local gas station, convenience store, or restaurant—at least if the online store uses a secure server for your order. A secure server is a computer that uses software that protects your personal and credit card information. Just make sure that you have gone to a secure site before you hand over credit card info. How can you tell? Well, every time you leave a "nonsecure" area and go to the "secure" site, you are notified with a little pop-up window, saying, "You are about to view pages over a secure connection" (unless you have told your browser to stop showing you this little message). Although this alert sounds like a warning, it is actually a reassuring signal that your transaction will, in fact, be private. Other good signs: the address line changes from http to https, meaning you are using a secure site. Also, in Internet Explorer you see an icon of a lock in the status bar at the bottom of the screen; or in Netscape Navigator, you get a bright yellow key on a blue background at the bottom of the screen. You may also see the letters SSL, which stand for Secure Sockets Layer (a set of standards for plugging in to the secure server), or SET, which stands for Secured Electronic Transaction. You should also see the address change from http to https, for secure, and an icon of a key or lock appears in your status bar.

Q

What exactly is encryption?

A

The purpose of encryption is simply to keep messages private and whole, so they cannot be read by outsiders and cannot be tampered with en route. Encryption takes your order and turns it into a secret code so that only the intended recipient (you or the store) can read it after mutual authentication—that is, confirmation that the store is who they say they are, and that you are who you say you are. How does encryption work? That computer, the secure server, has two secret codes, called keys. One is a public key: a big complicated number sent to you, which is embedded in your messages back to the site, which is itself coded, or "encrypted," which is just a fancy word for "made secret by turning it into code." The other is the private key, for you alone, which is what the site uses to match up with the public key, to authenticate that this message comes from you. When the keys match, the system can unlock the code to translate your scrambled information.

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