Unlike yellow pages ads, though, Web pages don't necessarily correspond to any particular physical location. In preparing this article, I contacted about 40 firms with pages on the Web. All had color photographs and little computer icons to click on. But the companies behind the displays varied considerably. Sometimes when I called, the phone was answered by a professional sales operator, and I could hear telephones buzzing and computer keyboards clicking in the background. But other times the phone was picked up by a staticky home answering machine or by people who identified themselves as relatives and once even by an eight-year-old. ("Frankie! Frankie! It's some guy from the computer!") From the information on the Web, there was no way to know Car Mats-R-Us belonged to a big automobile-parts chain in Georgia, while Alaskan Gold Nugget Jewelry was really an attempt by David Dorfmueller, a computer jock in Alabama, to introduce the beautiful jewelry made by his sister to a larger audience. "We know we're credible," he admitted. "But who else does?"
Partly because of the credibility problem, none of the businesses I spoke with were making much money. Leather and Lace, a mail-order lingerie outfit in Pennsylvania, had been on-line for five months when I called. About 135 people looked at the Leather and Lace page every day, said Michelle Hammel, who handles the Internet trade. Of those, about half went further and looked at the products. And about 1 out of 20 ordered a catalog. "But there have been no sales as of this moment," she said. (Perhaps that's why no one returned my calls when I tried to reach the company three months later by phone to make sure I had understood what she said.) Dorfmueller, of Alaskan Gold Nugget Jewelry, had a similar tale. "There's a lot of hype out there," he said. "But the numbers aren't mind-boggling."
Buying on the Internet requires customers to change shopping habits completely, says Glenda Shasho Jones of Shasho/Jones Direct, a direct-mail consulting firm in New York City. Shoppers go to malls partly to touch the merchandise and partly for a social experience. By contrast, shopping at home with a catalog is a desultory activity, something to do while doing something else. Shopping on the Internet is as intensive as shopping in a mall but not as social -- and as private as shopping through a catalog but much more intensive. "You look through a catalog while you're sitting in front of the TV or lying in bed at night or when you're in the bathroom," says Shasho Jones. "You're not staring intently into the screen." Companies by the score have already failed to persuade customers to buy from CD-ROMs. "Why," she asks, "should it be different on the Internet?" Nonetheless, Shasho Jones was optimistic about the long-range future of the Web, as were all the other small businesspeople I spoke with.
Rodney A. Jordan set up the Web page for Black Heritage Products, a North Carolina-based distributorship of goods made by African American manufacturers. Black Heritage had not sold a dime's worth of merchandise in its first month on the Web. But Jordan, a distributor of the company's cosmetics and hair-care products, was excited enough about its potential to have created MelaNet, a Web page for small African American businesses. When I spoke with him, MelaNet had just enrolled what Jordan believed was the first mortuary to offer services on the Internet: the Carlos A. Howard Funeral Home, in Norfolk, Va. "They are really coming on board," he said of the minority businesses that are his target. "We offered the first Kwanzaa information center on the Net and the first African wedding guide. And black florists and stores are able to advertise in them. It's really the wave of the future, I'm convinced." Still, he admitted, "I tell MelaNet shoppers not to use credit cards on the network."
The reason for the fear, of course, is that consumers worry about being cheated not only by merchants but by hackers -- and with good reason. As packets of information swirl through the Internet, special programs called "sniffers" can copy their relevant parts, such as their electronic destination. Because the Internet shunts information every which way, any location can see every kind of traffic. "That means that any computer system that is careless about security compromises dozens of other systems that are not," says Jeff Schiller, a computer-security expert and a professor at MIT. Which means that there is little way of ensuring that personal data will not pass through someplace where malicious versions of Dave from Texas lurk. Or that Dave from Texas will not use the information to contact unsuspecting merchants and bilk them.
"It is easier today for a hacker to go on-line and get hundreds of credit cards at once than it is for him to get a job as a waiter and pick up credit-card numbers one at a time by looking at the carbons in the wastepaper basket," says Tom Lytle, an electronic-marketing specialist at the New Hampshire-based Lytle and Co., which handles credit-card transactions for direct-marketing companies. "Until that is addressed, I am skeptical about how willing consumers will be to get involved."
Several companies have rushed to proffer solutions, among them Cybercash, of Reston, Va. Founded last August, the company plans to create a sort of on-line ATM. Consumers wishing to shop on-line can ask their regular banks to make electronic deposits into the Cybercash bank. When they make a purchase, they authorize the Cybercash bank to send the merchant an electronic "check" that can be deposited in a real, off-line bank. Schemes like this are sometimes called "digital cash" or "E-money." A full-scale trial is scheduled for this summer.
