Are you getting excited about shopping online? It seems the whole world is heading for the Internet to find everything from soup to nuts. There are advantages to online shopping. You have a really great selection and, if you do your homework, you can get rock-bottom prices for almost anything.

I’ve bought three computers, many computer accessories, books, and miscellaneous household items on the Internet, using sites ranging from Buy.com to the auction site, eBay. It has been a totally satisfactory experience.

Part of the reason I have been happy buying on the Internet is my natural skepticism. I expect to be taken advantage of and so I do my shopping very carefully and watch for problems. In this article I will give you the benefit of what I’ve learned so you too can have a positive experience.

First of all let’s put to rest the notion that shopping online is dangerous. That idea comes primarily from the press. After our Y2K non-experience it should be easier to convince you that the press likes to exploit people’s fears. I think they have done that with online shopping. I have had my credit card ripped off one time—at a restaurant in Iowa. The girl apparently swiped my card twice when I gave it to her to cover the bill for a family dinner. That is more likely to happen to you at a restaurant than it is online. In any case, you are responsible for only $50 if the worst happens. I’ll show you how to save that much on your first purchase. You must watch your statements to catch any case of over-billing, but I’m sure you do that anyway.

How does one go about shopping online? It depends upon what you want to buy. Let’s assume you are planning to buy a CD-ROM ReWritable (CD-RW) drive. Your computer is a notebook and you don’t want to run the CD-RW on the parallel port—that’s too slow—so you are looking for a USB (Universal Serial Bus) interface.

There are several considerations when shopping online. You could look for the cheapest item available, or for a particular brand you have confidence in, or you could decide to shop a particular business that you like.

Cost alone is not the best way to find a good deal, either on the Internet or at the local mall. You will want to know whether the item you’re buying is actually in stock and can be shipped immediately or if you’ll have to wait for it. Some Web sites will provide that information up front.

It is important to find out early, what the store’s return policy is. If you cannot get that information, be very cautious. Some places have a “re-stocking fee” that can be 15 percent or more. Some won’t even take the item back unless it is defective, and then only within the first fifteen days, after that you must deal with the manufacturer. You can run into that in a mall store as well. If you have ever bought anything from CompUSA, take a look at their return policy, which is printed on the back of the receipt.

Don’t forget to consider sales tax and shipping charges. Buy.com, Egghead.com, and several others offer free ground shipping and a small premium for second-day air. A store may look like it is offering the lowest price on a product, when it really tacks on an exorbitant shipping charge that jacks up the total price. Look for the store’s policy about shipping charges for returned merchandise also.

You don’t usually have to pay sales tax on Internet purchases, but there are exceptions. Often, you’ll have to pay your state sales tax if you’re purchasing from a company registered in your state. You’ll know when you complete your order form—if not before.

You have to recognize a good deal when you see it. For that you’ll need to know what local stores are asking for the same item. When I decide to buy something, I always check the prices in the Sunday supplements for CompUSA, Circuit City, Best Buy, Office Max, and others. I add 7 percent to the price to cover sales tax and that becomes my “high limit.” The question now becomes whether or not I can find the identical item for enough of a bargain to make it worthwhile to order and wait.

Don’t assume that everything online will be cheaper than local merchants. When my doctor prescribed a medicine not carried by my medical plan I called the local pharmacies and got price quotes and then went online. To my amazement every single online pharmacy was much higher than the highest local pharmacy. In the process I learned that the fancy local pharmacies with their grand, stand-alone buildings, were quite a bit higher than the little guy in the nearby strip mall.

When you’re ready to go e-Shopping, the first stop should be one of the online computer magazine sites. There you can find the results of product testing, comparisons between similar items, and recommendations from professionals who have access to laboratories where the products are put through their paces.

One of the best places to start is ZD-Net. This is the home of Ziff-Davis, which publishes Computer Shopper, PC Computing, PC Magazine, Family Computing, Yahoo Internet Life, and other magazines. Each magazine has its own address, but they all “live” on ZD-Net, so just start there.

Another great place to get information is PC Novice, which specializes in plain, easy to understand articles with simple drawings and step-by-step procedures. You may have seen its “Guides” series on the newsstand. At the other end of the scale is Byte Magazine, and in the middle is Windows Magazine.

When you have read enough to have a good idea of what features are valuable and which are just bells and whistles, you’re ready to search for a good buy. There are several ways to proceed. Until recently you had to surf from one store to the next, searching each one for the item you’re looking for, similar to a real world shopping trip. These days you can have a robot do the legwork for you. These “shopping robots” or “shop bots” will search the entire Internet looking for the item you want and present you with a list of sources and prices. The list will come with clickable links to the particular site that carried the product.

Be aware that some, if not all, of the shop bots will either ignore or give low priority to online retailers who do not subscribe to their service. Be prepared to visit at least a couple of them to get a complete picture.

Computer Shopper will do the job for you. The site has some features not provided by others. If an article has been written about an item on its list, the item will have a “report” symbol that you can click on to read the article. You can also select several items from the list for a direct, side-by-side comparison in chart form. The comparison wasn’t useful in shopping for a CD-RW however; most of the comparison fields came up “N/A.”

One of my favorite sites for general merchandise—but which is also useful for computer hardware—is mySimon. At that site they have given the shop bot a face, which seems to make the site friendlier. Others are Bottom Dollar, Store Runner, and Deal Time.

Once you’ve found what you’re looking for at the best price, you will want to know about the store you’re dealing with. This is the time to use a new service called Gomez.com. Gomez ranks and reviews online retailers. You will find a ranking of online stores with an explanation for the ranking. Gomez is currently ranking Buy.com as the best site on the Internet overall and for price. You will see what I mentioned above when your shop bot comes up with a list of items and Buy.com is not included on the list. You can read the reviewer’s comments on all of the sites that are listed. You will learn why for instance Egghead, with its experience selling at the mall and online, is not ranked at the top.

A relatively new and novel site can be found at Accompany.com. We all know that quantity buyers like the U.S. Government or FedEx can get a great deal when they buy a quadrillion of something. Accompany attempts to do something similar. You can register an item at Accompany and as more and more people sign up to buy the same item the price will go down, sometimes dramatically. At the moment, for example, they are listing an ALPS Micro Dry 5000 Color Printer. The starting price was $661 and it is now down to $258.05, with between 21 and 51 people having signed up. The software program “Baseball 2000” by Microsoft is down to $8.95 from the initial price of $39.99. If you can wait for your purchase, you might want to let Accompany arrange it for you. What a great way for your genealogy club to purchase an expensive program that many are interested in.

When your new purchase arrives, open it carefully and don't throw anything away. If you decide to return it you’ll need all of the original boxes, cables, manuals, and your receipt. Don’t remove the UPC code until you’re sure you won’t be returning the item and be sure to save the UPC after that because it is considered “proof of purchase” for various offers you may encounter later.

I routinely remove the UPC code from the box and tape it, along with the receipt, to the inside of the back cover of the instruction manual. That has come in very handy several times in the past.

In researching this article, I was disappointed to learn that two of the “giants” of the Internet did very poorly. Those two sites are AOL.com and Amazon.com. The first several days I tried it, AOL’s search just failed. Several days later the search worked, returned fourteen items, but not the HP 8100 that I had decided upon by then.

Amazon.com was really off base. A search there on key words “CD RW EXT USB” returned three items, an internal CD-RW drive and two 4-port USB hubs.

After all was said and done, I was able to purchase the HP 8100e CD-RW external drive with USB hub for $272 at Comp-U-Plus. The best price at the local mall was $299.99 plus 7 percent tax, or $321 plus gasoline to go back and forth to the nearest store, which is twenty miles away. $321 – 272 = $49, just about enough to cover my expenses in case somebody swipes my credit card more than once.

Jerry Hale, retired from the Navy and U.S. Merchant Marines, currently resides in Deltona, FL. He is just growing out of the “Baby Genealogist” stage, and beginning to crawl.