Buying Is Only a Click (Oops!) Away

Spending thousands of dollars used to take some effort. You had to get dressed. Get out of the house. Make eye contact. Count change. It could take days. Weeks, even.

But getting and spending are easier online, and the membrane between impulse and purchase has grown thinner. Web sites draw surfers toward the shoals of indebtedness, offering novelty, speed, convenience, bargains, unlimited hours, coupons, new deals daily, limited sales tax and helpful suggestions from other shoppers. Simply click on Buy Now, and pay later.

As the credit card bills of history's biggest, most touted holiday E-commerce season are coming due and accruing double-digit interest, Internet surfers are shopping before breakfast, shopping alone and picking up an extra book or three -- causing some of them to wind up hiding the resulting credit card bills from their spouses. How did these people get hooked? What is so compelling about the Internet marketplace?

Although online shopping still amounts to only a tiny fraction of all retail sales -- 1 percent of consumer sales, according to Joseph Vause, vice president for electronic commerce at Visa USA -- it is expected to match the current catalogue and mail-order share of the market by 2003. And with 99 percent of Internet sales conducted with plastic, compared with 20 percent of conventional sales, the potential to run up a credit card bill is significantly higher.

The temptation to spend money online can be even harder to resist when a Web surfer taps into the excitement of an auction.

"Ebay is definitely addictive!" Jane Brasovan of The Woodlands, Tex., said via e-mail. She estimated that she had bought 1,500 to 2,000 items, most of them antiques and dolls, on the Ebay auction site.

"I am trying to stop this addictive cycle at the present time," she continued, "as I've spent far too much money and now have a houseful of 'things' that I would probably be better off without!"

In a phone interview, she added: "It's hard to stop. I've tried stopping, but I don't do too well. You get kind of carried away, bidding on something, and when somebody outbids you, you get mad because they outbid you. You go in and bid and know darned well you shouldn't. Sometimes you feel like saying, 'You're not going to get that if I can't get it.' " Ms. Brasovan said she had spent up to six or seven hours at a stretch on the Ebay site.

Allison Ector, editor and publisher of Covert Shoppers Anonymous, an online compendium of Web bargains, figures that she spends $800 a month online, far more than she used to spend when driving to stores near her home in West Chester, Pa.

"It's just clicking buttons," she said, "and it's easy to say, 'Well, I'll worry about this next month when I get the bill.' " She has found herself playing an economies-of-scale game with shipping and handling charges. "When I get to the end of that shopping cart transaction, I've often hit the Back button, gone back and purchased more things, to make it cost effective," she said.

It may be hard to find online shopaholics who have become so hooked on new-media marketing that they have resorted to pilfering from their children's college funds or have moved back to their parents'.

But there are many people, particularly at the auction sites, who find themselves powerless in the face of items for sale online.

Debbie Lunden, who collects McCoy kitchenware from the 1940's and 1950's, signs on to Ebay once a day to see what is being auctioned.

"For years I had been looking for a teapot," said Ms. Lunden, director of the McKean County Planning Commission in Pennsylvania. "I knew there had to be one." In October, she found one, and the closing bids were due at 5 A.M.

"I set the alarm and was up at 4:45 in the morning, thinking, 'That gives me 15 minutes to get connected,' " she said. She panicked when she discovered that her husband had packed away the laptop, but she got on line in time to buy the teapot, plus a creamer and sugar bowl, for $97, including shipping -- "a real buy," she said. Ms. Lunden lives in Bradford, Pa., population about 9,600, where the shopping possibilities are limited.

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