ALICE WAS BEWILDERED. After all, here she was-credit card in hand, pounding away on the keyboard-ready to spend, spend, spend via the Internet.
She felt a little guilty about abandoning the traditional catalogs she had bought from for ages. But hey, everybody was going electronic, and she was too busy to sort through the 3,000 or so paper catalogs that seemed to land in her mailbox every month.
Sure, a little voice in the back of her mind warned her about credit card fraud on the Web, but Alice had seen all the statistics about online holiday sales. While the numbers differed from source to source, they all basically said that Internet buying had gone from $1.2 billion in 1997 to $13 billion in 1998 and was expected to garner between $30 billion and $40 billion in 1999. All those people couldn’t be foolish enough to risk their credit cards, so she felt pretty secure about shopping by computer.
But doing the actual deed was turning out to be harder than she anticipated.
Not because Alice was a slouch when it came to computer savvy. No, she spent most of her day facing a computer monitor. Her problem was with the sites themselves.
Can’t Search, Can’t Order Popping on one gourmet food site, she tried to find some Chinese mushrooms. What-no search capability? Ah, here’s the item on another site. What-no online ordering capability? Alice mumbled, “If I wanted to use a phone or a fax, I wouldn’t be online in the first place.” As she groused, she deleted both of these sites from her favorite places list, knowing full well it was highly unlikely she would ever stumble back on either site if she didn’t keep them bookmarked.
Abandoning the search for mushrooms, Alice decided to splurge on some clothes.
But thinking like a modern day American, she wanted them at a bargain. She typed in the name of a site she had heard about which featured designer clothes at reduced prices. Here her luck started out well, but changed very quickly as she was led to a multi-split screen.
She hoped she was hallucinating, but no…this was for real. Tiny photos ran down the left side and along the bottom of the screen, effectively giving her about a 3-inch-square center viewing area.
“How am I supposed to choose something to click on and make bigger when I can’t even tell what it is to begin with?” she cried as she left the site. “If this catalog site was a store, I would feel that I was too big to get through the front door!”
As she clicked off she remembered her cat’s birthday was next week. Wanting to keep that smile on her cat’s face, she searched for and relatively quickly found a pet catalog site.
Clicking on the advertised special, she knew this was, at last, going to be her first purchase from the Internet and popped it in her shopping cart.
Heading for the checkout, Alice realized her aunt, who also had a pet, would probably like the same item. However, the order form area didn’t allow another item to be sent to another address without her literally going back to the home page and going through the process all over again. “Forget my aunt; she can act like a Queen of Hearts sometimes anyway,” Alice said-and didn’t bother to place the additional order.
Feeling better because she at last had actually bought something over the Internet, Alice decided to head to a gardening site. This time she simply went with the brand names she knew and was soon opening what seemed to be a very pretty site. It opened and it opened and it opened…
Alice played four rounds of croquet while waiting, then went back to discover that it was a truly beautiful home page-if you had the time to wait for it. No longer in the mood for gardening, Alice decided to buy some books.
Picking the site she had heard the most about, and seen advertised everywhere, she found herself on an easy-to-navigate home page that gave her simple options and delivered answers to her input as fast as a white rabbit late for an important date. The ratings system helped reassure her that these were books she wanted to read, and scrolling through the reviews was useful and easy.
Ordering two books, one she had known about and another that the site recommended based on the book she had initially chosen, Alice checked out. Almost instantly, like magic, she had an e-mail confirmation of the order she had just placed.
“You can really interact with this system,” she gushed. Alice had learned that this site, besides being friendly and fast, also could e-mail information about new books and such. It also could help you choose the right gift through the selection of certain criteria on the site.
“Isn’t it wonderful how consumer-friendly and efficient a business can be if it doesn’t make a profit,” she marveled.
While Alice’s trip to Internetland was more eventful than anticipated, she had successfully ordered three items and knew she would be back.
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