Online Shopping Keeps Getting Easier
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Well, if you're like me, you do not enjoy the frenzy of holiday shopping at the mall. Many people often seek solace by dialing up and logging on to the World Wide Web. But with literally a world of choices at your fingertips, how you can separate the weak from the chaff is a problem. So let's turn to a man with some answers. He is a technology editor for "Yahoo!" magazine. Don Willmott, he's joining us from New York this morning. Don, good to see you.</s>DON WILLMOTT, "YAHOO! INTERNET LIFE" MAGAZINE: Happy holidays.</s>O'BRIEN: Same to you. We've got a lot to cover, a lot of wood to chop, e-wood to chop anyhow.</s>WILLMOTT: Right.</s>O'BRIEN: Amazon.com. This is a site which anybody who's been on the web probably is relatively familiar with. What's new this year is you can get the best seller and you can get a cordless drill. It's changed, hasn't it?</s>WILLMOTT: Yeah, over the past couple of years, Amazon.com has expanded into about nine, 10, 11 departments. So it's become kind of a one-stop shop on the Internet. And that makes it really convenient. So if you're thinking of Amazon.com just for books, well, yes, but also music, kitchen gadgets, patio furniture. It can be really a fast way to shop if you've got a list of a wide range of presents you want to get all at one place.</s>O'BRIEN: Well, let's get a shot of it up there. It's a very familiar place. How do you rate it just for usability as we look at the welcome site, which is very common? You can search for books. And as I see down here, you can buy yourself a Palm III XE handheld. Is it easy to navigate around there?</s>WILLMOTT: Outstanding. Amazon.com basically invented the multi- department online store. And it's basically the best designed online store around. Easy checkout. One-click shopping. You can actually just go through there and never really have to fill out your name, address, any of that stuff, once you load it in once. They really know what they're doing. And their shipping is also excellent.</s>O'BRIEN: And toys also on the list, right?</s>WILLMOTT: Yeah, Amazon merged with Toys "R" Us after last season when ToysRUs.com did so terribly online. So now Amazon.com is in fact a giant toy store as well.</s>O'BRIEN: Interesting. All right, let's move along. If you're interested in finding, say, the best fruitcake in the world, the place to go is Chefshop.com, correct?</s>WILLMOTT: We gave this site a nod because it's actually quite educational. You can...</s>O'BRIEN: And by the way, I'm not kidding about this fruitcake. There's a Trappist Abbey fruitcake here featured. Are you familiar with this thing? I'm not a fruitcake fan.</s>WILLMOTT: No, but I guess it comes with a blessing.</s>O'BRIEN: Anyway, go ahead.</s>WILLMOTT: I was going to say that it's a very educational site. You can order olive oil for your friends, but also learn one heck of a lot about olive oil while you're shopping. It's well written, deep editorial content, so kind of entertaining to shop there. It's sort of the J. Peterman of food.</s>O'BRIEN: Ah, so a little story with each and every item. And I'm sure if that fruitcake could talk, it would tell a story. Let's move along to the next one. Electronics. Now, it's interesting because over the years there have been a lot of sites that have evaluated computer hardware and software, not as many in the consumer electronics field. This is changing now, isn't it?</s>WILLMOTT: Well, it has to change because you know there's 1,000 digital cameras, 10,000 DVD drives out there. It's really hard to shop. So you need a site that can sort that out and help you figure out what it is exactly you're looking for. So we definitely like 800.com also because as the name suggests, there's a human being at the other end of the phone if you need to talk to someone. This can be</s>O'BRIEN: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait, Don, Don. That's a news flash.</s>WILLMOTT: Yeah.</s>O'BRIEN: A human being at the other end of the line?</s>WILLMOTT: This is something to look for when you're shopping online. The last thing these sites want to do is talk to you in person because it costs them a lot of money to do so. So that's why we gave this site an extra credit because in fact there is good human technical support should you need it.</s>O'BRIEN: All right, all right, that's good to hear. It's kind of a quaint notion in this day and age to have a real person on the other end of the line.</s>WILLMOTT: Right.</s>O'BRIEN: All right, let's say you're just stumped and you're just not a very creative person. No names mentioned here, of course. And you just can't figure out what to get your sweetie or whatever. And is this Red Envelope the place to go? I mean, there's some ideas there anyhow.</s>WILLMOTT: Yeah, Red Envelope used to be called 9-1-1 Gifts, which connoted you suddenly realize, oh, gosh, tomorrow is someone's birthday and you could rush a gift. It's evolved a little bit since then. They have a lot of very elegant $50 to $100 kind of gifts, good for corporate gift giving, and also some really unique and entertaining -- race car driving lessons, golf on an exclusive course, spa treatments, those kind of really, really special gifts that show you put a lot of thought into it or at least thought to go to that site anyway.</s>O'BRIEN: Or if your budget doesn't permit that, we're looking at some holiday lilies and berries for 30 bucks. Not bad. All right...</s>WILLMOTT: Not bad.</s>O'BRIEN: ... Checkout.com is a place if you're into music. And what sets this one apart? A lot of music offerings on the web certainly.</s>WILLMOTT: A lot of people shop for music at Amazon.com or CDNow, of course. This site has deeper editorial content and communities. It's a real kind of Internet field here because there's a lot of chats and discussions. Kind of a good place to get some advice about what to buy your children, your friends, if you don't know exactly what it is they might like, or you know they like one thing. And they like that, what else might they like? This is a good place to get that kind of information.</s>O'BRIEN: All right, and briefly, you found a couple of clinkers, actually quite a few clinkers. And just to mention a couple of them, BlueLight.com, which is the K-Mart offering...</s>WILLMOTT: Right.</s>O'BRIEN: ... that's a clinker. Priceline.com, you know, Bill Shatner's deal. What is it about these sites that makes them bad? Is there any common thread throughout them?</s>WILLMOTT: Actually, all the big department stores that you know -- Wal-Mart, K-Mart -- on the web, they're new to the web. And unlike Amazon, they weren't built up from the ground up for the web. And it's taken them a long time to sort of get the hang of what it means to put a store online. Sears and Penney's both we slammed for just bad navigation, incomplete information, a lack of choice. They're moving quickly to improve that because they've gotten a lot of this feedback. So we'll hope that they'll catch up to sort of the online excellence that we see at a place like Amazon.com.</s>O'BRIEN: All right, undoubtedly we will be hearing from them. Don Willmott, who is with "Yahoo!" magazine, technology editor there, thanks very much for being with us on</s>CNN SUNDAY MORNING. WILLMOTT: Thanks.