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By Alan Cohen

The holidays always bring two gifts that are just too sweet to stomach. One is grandma's fruitcake; and the other, those insufferably cute dotcom commercials urging you to strip off your parka, toss away your car keys, put up your stockinged feet and shop from your PC. It's a tempting proposition: imagine avoiding long lines, cold weather and sales tax without sacrificing any of the conveniences of the mall. But maybe you're one of thousands who tried it last year and got burned. Perhaps the PlayStation you ordered arrived in January, or someone at the warehouse confused Pokémon with Pocahontas. Either way, you found yourself with an inconsolable child who will never forget (or forgive you for) the botched Christmas of 1999. Want to give it another go? Online merchants are anxious to set your mind at ease. They swear by St. Nicholas that all of last year's bugs have been exterminated. (To learn more about what went wrong and what toy dealers have done to improve service, see "The Ghost of Christmas Presents," page 84.) Beyond this, they have been hard at work, they say, bringing Web shopping closer than ever to the in-store experience. But how well are they really doing?

We decided to find out. Unsheathing our credit cards, we visited 37 popular sites in seven merchandise categories: toys, gadgets, apparel, sporting goods, beauty products, home décor, food and wine. We ordered gifts, returned them, sent questions to customer service and tried out all the new Web tools designed to make our shopping experience pleasant and worry-free. In short we were holiday shoppers from hell. But if online merchants want our business, they have to come through, not just when we know exactly what we want, but when we need help too. The good news: most of the sites delivered our merchandise promptly and undamaged (of course, our test was conducted well before the Christmas rush), and many replied quickly and helpfully to our nitpicky questions. The bad news: returns can be a real hassle — and costly too.

We began by asking each merchant to help us track down a product we couldn't find on their site, or to make gift recommendations. Most welcomed such inquiries (or claimed to), but not all provided terribly useful answers. For instance, we asked Target to recommend a housewarming gift for less than $50. In reply we received a form e-mail advising us that if we couldn't find what we were looking for on the site, we should "visit [our] nearest Target store." Fine, but we could have arrived at that solution on our own. More bizarre was the answer we received from Old Navy after asking if the site carried gloves and scarves for the winter. We were informed that Gap (this is not a misprint) regularly introduces new products and colors "to keep our stores and website fresh and exciting." While it's nice that Old Navy supports its sister retailer, we're not terribly interested in Gap's business plan. Martha Stewart simply refused to recommend any gifts, suggesting a gift certificate instead. This too was a strategy we probably could have come up with on our own. But at least Martha was courteous enough to respond. Igogolf.com and the Metropolitan Museum simply ignored us — and, shockingly, Amazon took almost two weeks to respond.

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