FOR online merchants and customers alike, the first guilt-free holiday shopping season has arrived.
Thanks to the breakneck growth of residential cable modem and D.S.L. services, this is the first year when most Internet users do not have to rely on their workplace for high-speed connections. Instead of hiding the Amazon checkout page when the boss approaches, more shoppers are logging on after work and sparing their nerves.
As a result, e-commerce executives are operating with clearer consciences, unapologetically building sites with video, zoom and other advanced features to please high-speed surfers at the risk of outraging customers using dial-up connections. The reward to the companies, they said, has been an increase in sales of items that would have previously collected dust, and surprisingly few complaints from low-bandwidth users.
"The equation has changed dramatically for retailers," said Ken Cassar, an analyst with the Internet research firm Nielsen/NetRatings. "The portion of users they'd potentially alienate with a broadband feature is really small," he said, using industry shorthand for tools intended to work with fast connections. "And those users tend to be less affluent and less likely to purchase anyway."
According to surveys by Nielsen/NetRatings, 53 percent of home Internet users had high-speed connections last month. July was the first month when high-speed users eclipsed dial-up users at home. The firm has collected such data since 1999. For many of the Web's largest retailers, he added, broadband users make up a vast majority of visitors.
Not only do those visitors browse more, but they also spend more, according to Paul Gainer, who oversees merchandising for a Disney Web site, Disneydirect.com, and catalog division. The site recently introduced a feature that lets consumers browse through about 30 of Disney's more expensive items using a 360-degree rotating image.
On the product detail page for the $78 Mickey Movie Magic Hourglass Snowglobe, for instance, is a button offering both zoom views and a 360-degree view. The image rotates fully in a few seconds on a high-speed connection. Using a dial-up connection, the process takes at least five times as long.
"For a lot of high-end gifts, " Mr. Gainer said, "our guests want to see it from all angles, the way they would in a retail store."
The feature has been available for a month, but so far, those who see the rotating-item image are 25 percent more likely to buy than those who do not, he said.
To date, not a single dial-up user has complained. "I think those folks know going in that it'll be a somewhat slow experience," Mr. Gainer said. "They know that's the cost of using dial-up."
Mr. Gainer said that in recent months he had noticed an increase in the number of shoppers coming to the Web site at night -- a trend observed by other retailers as well. According to Bill Bass, who oversees the Web site and catalog divisions of Sears, Roebuck and Landsend.com, his sites still attract the most visitors during the middle of the day. "But now we have a secondary peak," he said, "around 7 p.m. when people get home."
Even so, Mr. Bass says, the overall percentage of high-speed users on the site has not changed. "We've always had about two-thirds of our customers coming in through broadband," he said. "So I don't think we'll see big increases in the usage of broadband applications because more people have broadband at home. What it means is the workplace probably becoming more productive."
Still, Mr. Bass has rolled out more features in recent months suitable for high-speed Web browsing, like the Virtual Kitchen on Sears.com that lets visitors create and view a three-dimensional facsimile of their kitchen and plug in various Sears appliances in different colors. The Virtual Decorator, which had been previously introduced, allows users to do the same for other rooms in the house.
Lands' End has also added more zoom photos in recent months, as well as a feature that allows users to change the color of an item. Mr. Bass said he had been careful, though, to place these features "where people can use them, but where they don't have to use them, like in the checkout process."
"The virtual rooms are pretty excruciating if you don't have broadband," he said, "so you still have to worry about alienating the dial-up crowd."
The zoom and color-change features have helped sales in several ways, he said. With zoom, items with intricate fabric patterns can be sold over the Web site, where before only solid colors sold well. And in the past, a color shown on the model posted good sales -- though not the sweaters or shirts stacked near the model to show color options.
Vendors like RichFX, Scene7 and others who sell the technology for features like zoom, color change and product rotation say their sales have climbed significantly this year, as online retailers seek to capitalize on the trend toward high-speed Internet access.
Some online retailers are using a combination of homegrown features and those sold by vendors. QVC.com, the online division of the QVC network, has for more than two years offered demonstration videos of its best-selling items, using clips created in the company's production studios.
But many more consumers began viewing those videos starting this summer, when QVC.com added more photos for each item and a zoom feature from Scene7. Bob Myers, a vice president, said there had been double-digit increases in sales for those items. "And it makes sense," Mr. Myers said, "because consumers can close the sale in their minds when they have so much information available to them."
Still, he said, the company has not abandoned its dial-up users. Among other things, it gives them the option of viewing text-only product descriptions, or smaller images, in case they do not have the time or patience to wait.
"We don't want to get overly enthralled with all of this," Mr. Myers said.