Report names the best online shopping sites this holiday season

[December 12th 2000]

Holiday gift giving begins in earnest in two weeks - and it is time to really get serious about online gift shopping. Consumer Reports Online (CRO) e-Ratings: Online Shopping Guide - looked at 130 top Internet shopping sites and found three sites that merited top overall scores. Babycenter.com, Webvan.com, and etoys.com stood out from the other sites, excelling in making their policies, usability and content accessible to the online user.

"These three sites had top marks overall while most of the 130 e-merchants we evaluated were "Average" or "Very Good," says Michelle Rutkowski, Marketing Director, Consumer Reports Online. "They excelled in the three key factors: good contents, both the products themselves and the information about them; easy usability, including top-notch navigation; and policies that ensure consumers' privacy and secure credit-card information. It's important to note that many of the products available at these three sites - particularly items that don't require first-hand inspection - are well suited to Web shopping."

A brief look at the top sites:

www.babycenter.com offers a large selection of baby products, a variety of fun tools, and an absolutely enormous amount of information about everything related to babies. All that, along with easy navigation and a low price guarantee.

www.Webvan.com currently serves San Francisco Bay, Sacramento, Atlanta, and Chicago areas. This site has very good privacy and security policies, and an especially good delivery policy that includes free delivery with orders over $50. This site is fairly easy to navigate and placing an order is clear-cut.

www.etoys.com has a huge selection of toys, with interesting categories for browsing, and helpful product information. There are many special features that make shopping fun such as an idea center with helpful gift suggestions.

e-Ratings selects sites for evaluation on the basis of site traffic (based on data obtained from audience measurement services) and sales volume. Some sites are included when they are determined to be of particular interest or relevance and are considered to be sites that subscribers should know about. e-Ratings approaches each site as an average -- but very disciplined --consumer would. In every case, a consistent shopping scenario is followed: browsing for products, searching for specific items and features, and actually placing an order.

Using an in-depth checklist, CRO takes note of all aspects of a site's policies, usability, and content. During the evaluation process, there is also room for discovery -- an opportunity to wander around and find what is special, unique, and new about a site. Using these two approaches, analytical and exploratory, e-Ratings offers an overall sense of the total shopping experience at each site. BizRate.com, an independent and unbiased organization, supplements Consumer Reports Online e-Ratings with shopper experience ratings, based on surveys of millions of online buyers each month, covering factors such as on-time delivery and customer service.

Links
Consumer Reports Online		http://www.ConsumerReports.org