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Now the success stories: home-décor site Frontera, beauty mavens Eve.com (since closed) and Indulge.com, as well as Drugstore.com, not only offered detailed suggestions but also provided links to items. eToys — an online champ with terrific site-navigation tools and pain-free returns — gave us the exact release date for the Dreamcast version of Half-Life we sought. And Bluefly helped us find the clothes we wanted by telling us what links to click on (after which, Emily of customer service urged us to "Have a fly day!" whatever that means.)

But the winner in shopping help was Lands' End, whose site was more like a real store than any we visited. There's a virtual dressing room where you can build a model to your exact measurements (sorry, guys, women only) and try on virtual outfits. Lands' End Live lets you exchange real-time messages with a customer-service representative (a few other sites, such as Gadget-seller 800.com, offer a similar feature), or you can use shoppers@landsend.com to e-mail questions to a "personal shopper." After we logged on to the live help, it only took a few seconds for Wendy in customer support to greet us. We asked her where we could find khakis. In a surprising bit of technical hocus-pocus, Wendy took control of our browser and pushed a Web page full of links onto our screen (each took us to a different kind of khakis). Next, we asked our personal shopper what was appropriate to wear to an informal wedding, and we got a quick, personal answer: khakis would be fine, we were told, as long as they were dressed up with a sport jacket and tie. (Too bad: we were hoping to avoid the tie.)

E-shoppers can expect more such tools to come online in the near future as retailers make service — and not price — their new battleground for customers. After all, cheap goods are of little use if you can't find them on the site or if they're delivered late or damaged. That's not to say that sites don't still go to war on prices. Wal-Mart was consistently the cheapest site for toys, though its selection failed to match that of others. (Many sites also seek to undercut competitors on shipping costs: Outpost.com topped them all, overnighting our electronic gear free of charge.) But even sites that have historically focused on price are turning their attention to the broader shopping experience. Early next year, for example, Web discounter Buy.com will be offering Amazon-like personal recommendations, analyzing your previous purchases and suggesting new items you may want to buy.

Such tools may help you find the products you want, but they won't get them to your door any faster. Last holiday season many sites underestimated both consumer demand and shipping logistics, which resulted in delayed orders and angry customers. But this year we're cautiously optimistic that such foul-ups will be much less common. Most of our orders arrived in a timely fashion (typically, within five days), and there was only one product mix-up (Macy's sent us the wrong skin-care aid). There were some nice touches too, like beautiful gift wrapping at no extra charge from Eve.com and a complimentary shipping upgrade from Amazon.com (eToys also upgraded our shipping).

But some sites still have a long way to go. Indulge.com took six weeks to deliver our order and didn't even notify us of a problem until three weeks had passed. Fogdog took three weeks to deliver one golf club — and never warned us to expect a delay. And when we checked out at KBkids.com, the site informed us that because of "dramatically increased demand," orders might be delayed. If the site was already having trouble keeping up, we wondered, how would it handle the December shopping frenzy?

Much worse, however, is the way many sites handle returns. Most will tell you not to worry: if you don't like your gift, why, just ship it back. No questions asked. But when we actually went through the returns process, we often found much more grief — and cost — than we were led to expect.

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