ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, November 6, 1996 TAG: 9611060025
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B-6 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: Marketplace
SOURCE: MEGAN SCHNABEL
I'm the kind of Christmas shopper who tends to flee at the first sign of a crowd.
If you aren't quite up to facing the pre-holiday mobs either, and if you have access to the Internet, you may want to give on-line shopping a try.
Dr. Livingstone's Online Shopping Safari Guidebook, from Maximum Press, is, as its title suggests, a guide to navigating the often overwhelming world of Internet commerce.
While a 421-page guide to on-line merchants may be a bit excessive for all but the most serious Web shoppers - or Web surfers with plenty of time on their hands - it's also a lot of fun for browsers. Even if you don't plan to order anything off the Internet, you can at least get some ideas and maybe compare prices.
The yellow pages section of the book, organized by product category, includes listings for more than 2,000 on-line merchants selling everything from the "World's Best Toilet Seat" (with two heated water bidet streams and a hot air dryer) to equally exotic orchids.
Author - and the doctor's "chief scout" - Frank Fiore compiled "Secret Scouting Reports" for more than 200 merchants. These one-page reports rate retailers in five categories: price, selection, convenience, service and security. Highly recommended sites are denoted with a "Jungle Jewel" logo.
As I quickly discovered, however, there is at least one drawback to on-line shopping. If you get frustrated tracking down merchants in the real world as they move or go out of business, you'll become even more exasperated with the Web marketplace, which is still more fluid. Not all the merchants listed in Fiore's book are still at their same addresses - or even in existence.
Other sites may be under construction and therefore unavailable. Fiore suggests that if you can't find a merchant at the address listed, you use a search engine - Yahoo!, Excite, InfoSeek and so on - to look for it.
If you want to search for a particular product or comparison shop among merchants, try a product search engine such as Open Market's Commercial Sites Index (http://www.directory.net/dir/directory.html).
Before you order anything, read the entries about on-line security. Fiore rates the security of the sites he reviews. One star means not secure - use the company's 800-number or fax your order; four stars denote a secure server with encryption - feel free to transmit your credit card number.
He also discusses payment methods, such as putting money in escrow, that may be useful when you're dealing with an unfamiliar merchant or an on-line classified ad. The book lists seven escrow services, which will act as the middleman between you and a merchant. You send your money or credit card number to the escrow service, which tells the merchant that payment has been received. The merchant sends you the product; once the escrow service gets a return receipt, it releases your payment.
This isn't free, of course. Some escrow services charge a flat fee, others charge a percentage of your total order. But for a large purchase, your peace of mind could be worth the money.
A real help for people who are new to the Internet is a chapter on what equipment and software you'll need to hook up to the Net, plus a rundown of the pros, cons and quirks of the Big Three on line services - America Online, CompuServe and Prodigy.
The book comes with a disk that contains a copy of Netscape Navigator 2.0 for Windows and software that will give you unlimited Internet access for 30 days for $5. If you use a Mac, you can download Netscape from the Maximum Press Web site.
The 421-page softcover book retails for $24.95. Happy hunting.
LENGTH: Medium: 69 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Cover of "Online Shopping." color.by CNB