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"It was something I really had to have," she said of the teapot. "I'm not a person to get up in the middle of the night, but I had to because that's when the bidding was. I had to make a sacrifice, and it was worth it."

"I'm totally addicted to just surfing thousands of items on Ebay," Gib Bergman, a cook in Sutersville, Pa., wrote via e-mail. Bergman, a shopper who has bid on scores of items, including knives, Beanie Babies and Elvis memorabilia, at Ebay, continued: "And it is so easy to spend money that you don't have just laying around. It's worse than being an alcoholic -- an obsessive gambler is more like it."

"I'm pretty much an addict," Bergman added. His wife, Helen, used to be able to restrain him from buying, he said, but no more. "I used to go to flea markets," he said. "You'd see stuff and she'd say, 'That's too much,' but here I'm here by myself. I'll put a bid in on something and later say to her, 'Guess what I got?' It's just like a candy store -- it is very addictive." In 10 years of conventional shopping he could never have acquired the number of Elvis items he has been able to buy via Ebay, he said.

Experts on credit and commerce readily recognize the seductions of E-commerce. Kimberly S. Young, founder of the Center for online Addiction in Bradford, Pa., said the auction sites were exciting -- shopping as entertainment.

"When you're the winner, that's reinforcing," she said. "For that moment, you're engaged, it gives you a favorable high. You're completely absorbed in this, and it's kind of an escape mechanism. You start to think, 'What else do I need?' "

Sometimes clicking fingers take over where the brain leaves off, said Wayne S. DeSarbo, a marketing professor at Pennsylvania State University. "There's so little time to think about what you're doing and rationalize it," he said. "As the result of just a few keystrokes, you're done and gone. For the compulsive shopper, this would provide a quick and easy fix from the stress and anxiety of everyday life. It's a temporary high one gets from shopping.

There's little time for rationalization."

Bill Furmanski, a spokesman for the National Foundation for Consumer Credit, said it could be easier to buy impulsively online than off. "In the mall, it's easier to recommend that you put an item down and walk away, and see if you still need it at the end of your trip, to ease the impulse purchases you make," he said. "On the Internet, it's not as easy. Maybe you should sign off first, and it will still be there when you sign back on."

Splurges online appear to differ from splurges off line. People watching the Home Shopping Network might end up with many lifetime supplies of cubic zirconia and Ginzu knives. But wired shoppers talk sheepishly of their "Amazon problems": a tendency to spend more at Amazon.com than they had budgeted for books, software and CD's, items that are, if you rationalize carefully, inherently useful for self-improvement.

Many aspects of the Internet encourage impulsive or compulsive buying.

"You're alone, and kind of nobody sees what you're doing," said the founder of Spenders Anonymous, a support group in Minneapolis, speaking on the condition of anonymity, "and when you're into your addiction, you want it that way." For shy people, an Internet auction provides welcome anonymity.

"For a lot of people that are shy -- not the competitive people who go to auction houses and compete with real people -- it's a much safer domain," said Dr. Young, who is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford. "It's anonymous, it's private, and there is a sense of winning."

The Internet can also empower shoppers, said Austan Goolsbee, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago, giving them the benefits of haggling and comparison shopping without making them take the chance of offending anyone face to face.

"You would feel kind of self-conscious asking someone at an airline to run through 100 scenarios for a flight you want to take," he said, so travelers can fiddle with schedules or destination cities more easily online. "And where you're comparison shopping, it oftentimes makes people feel a little bad for walking out of the store." But no Web site is going to call a person rude for heading elsewhere for a better bargain.

Offering power to the consumer can be the Internet's most effective way to lure buyers.

"Consumers are now in control, and it is so compelling" said Donna Hoffman, a professor of marketing at Vanderbilt University. "It's not the lack of sales tax, not the convenience, not the potential economic savings, that makes online shopping attractive. It's just the chance to be in control.

The balance of power between business and the consumer has shifted radically. If you're the business, you're no longer in 100 percent control."

Electronic shoppers want convenience, and they want it now. Where they can get it, they're willing to pay for it, plus shipping and handling.

"The modern analogy is the minibar in your hotel room," said Jerry Kaplan, a co-founder of Onsale.com, a discount retailer. "Would you usually pay $2 for a Diet Coke? Absolutely not. But in the minibar in the hotel room, you're more likely to go for it. Here you have people sitting at a computer all day, and a lot of sales take place. They're discretionary purchases due to convenience, where you've eliminated the cost of physically going out and shopping."

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