(FORTUNE Magazine) – I like browsing the Internet. I like my computer (most of the time). I like buying things, but I don't like shopping. In other words, I'm a perfect target for retailers on the World Wide Web, the graphically accessible part of the Internet that gets all the attention these days. Judging from the number of commercial domain names being registered, retailers are streaming onto the Web in droves.

Analysts love the Web: They predict retail sales will more than triple this year and top $4 billion a year by 2000. Information age superstars dream about it: Bill Gates calls the Web the consumer market's first step toward "friction-free capitalism." (He imagines being able to say to a PC: "See what kind of a deal you can get me on that blue Donna Karan ensemble Hillary was wearing on Jim Lehrer last night, tailored the way I like it, delivered by six o'clock next Friday." A short time later your intelligent agent replies, "Madame, Saks in Singapore has the Donna Karan for $799, but for $825, Labels por Menos in Havana will ship you the outfit plus a bottle of Dom Perignon for your brother's birthday, which, you may recall, is next week.")

But do consumers love the Web? According to Jupiter Communications, a research firm in New York, in all of 1995, more than eight million of us Webheads spent a paltry $132 million buying things there, hardly a drop in the $57 billion home-shopping bucket. Not to worry, say digerati. Online retail will presently achieve that great marketing satori known as a "positive feedback cycle," in which a growing number of users inspire a growing number of merchants to offer a growing abundance of goods and services online, attracting even more consumers, and so on. It happened in the early days of radio and TV, we're told. Just give it time.

I'd never looked for signs of the coming electronic shopping boom in all my hours online. So I fired up the old web browser and headed for Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.com), the closest thing to a Web yellow pages. It didn't take long to click through Yahoo's hierarchical categories to Products and Services. There I found listed for sale things from A (for advertising, as in "Happy birthday, Sis. I bought you a year's worth of personal ads on the Web!") to U (for Usenet, where consumer discussion groups opine about products). Subcategories such as Books, Hobbies, Paranormal Phenomena, and Sex made me think that online shopping might be fun.

I was wrong. I was looking for that feeling you get when you find something you didn't even know you needed until you saw it sitting on the shelf waiting for you. Instead, poking around these categories turned up what's best described as digitized inventory lists. L.L. Bean's website (http:// www.llbean.com), which is better than most, had pretty much the same look and feel as the company's printed catalogue, but the pictures were tiny and the descriptions less complete. Ordering entails calling an 800 line--not a very novel shopping experience.

It seemed to me that the perfect merchandise for sale on the Web would be items that are hard to find in local stores--unusual CDs and backlisted books, say. Indeed, the Web's numerous CD outlets offer a broad selection at acceptable prices. Similarly, some bookstores on the Web are useful, especially for those of us who despair of finding a knowledgeable salesperson at the local B. Dalton. The Amazon.com booksite (http://www.amazon.com), for example, will keep a record of your reading preferences, suggest books, and alert you by e-mail if there's something new by an author you like. You order right online. But like much on the Web, Amazon is a good idea executed poorly: When I told it I liked suspense novels by David Ignatius, the suggestions turned out to be no-brainer references to best-sellers in the same genre.

Marginally better are some of the Web's computer superstores. Software.net (http:// www.software.net) has a wide selection of products at decent prices and provides links to reviews in computer magazines like Information Week. It's not the most exciting reading in the world, but it's a great resource if you're comparison shopping for software. You can even buy and download a handful of programs right from the website, though with most you're still stuck waiting for overnight shipping. Apart from these bright spots, there's not much available on retail Websites that you can't get more quickly and cheaply from an informed salesperson in RL (real life).

Like many new media devotees, I'm hoping for a way to transcend online catalogues. Fido the Shopping Doggie promises just that. When you visit Fido's website (http://www.continuumsi.com/cgibin/Fido/Welcome), you're prompted to enter keywords for whatever product interests you, and a price range. Fido then, er, fetches a list of products from a database of participating vendors. As with most computer searches, the results can be irritatingly obtuse. A query using the word "shirts" works fine, but "ties" brings up a list of ingredients for Thai food and, inexplicably, everything else in my price range from computer equipment to upholstery cleaner. Worse, the basic problem remains: Nothing Fido dug up was half as compelling as what you might find at the local mall on a sale weekend. (I suppose if you lived in the Yukon, things might be different.)

I decided to regroup. InfoSeek (http://www.infoseek.com) pointed me to Shop.com (http://www.shop.com). This is a list of virtual malls, storefronts, and other information for the online shopper, all intelligently categorized, accompanied by short descriptions, and rated on a system of one to five stars. Shop.com's site has been around for about a year, with only one update, and is far from exhaustive. But for me it was like hitting the mother lode--so I thought until I saw that the offerings were the same disappointing webalogs.

A site that fairly successfully evokes the shopping mall experience is eShop Plaza (http:// www.eShop.com). The first time you connect, you're prompted to download free software that lets you tour the stores in this virtual mall. The software works with popular Web browsers like Netscape or Explorer and only on Windows machines, and typically takes a half-hour to download and install. But it lends sophistication and realism to the shopping experience--you can even get coupons and make impulse purchases. At the Tower record outlet in the eShop mall, for example, you can use your PC to explore music categories, search an inventory database, and even click down to detailed information on individual CDs, such as cover art and song lists. To buy, enter your credit card number and click to add items to your shopping basket. eShop is a step in the right direction, but its need for special software is a serious drawback. If every online mall required its own program, we'd all run out of disk space before ever getting online. It would be like having to set up a separate charge card for each mall near your home.

The last stop on my tour was Time Warner's mammoth Pathfinder site (http://www.pathfinder.com), my virtual corner store. Pathfinder's online catalogues look pretty good, but the offerings are limited and the prices are high. Worse, if you want to order multiple items, say, a shirt from Spiegel and a sweater from Eddie Bauer, you must conduct a separate transaction with each retailer. It's the sort of misstep that makes you wonder why sensible businesses forget their own marketing and customer-service smarts when they go digital.

Retailers are sure to keep flocking to the Web. Conservative estimates put more than 30 million potential buyers online by 2000, a body of technically adept, affluent consumers that is rapidly outgrowing its male-skew and computer-geek image. On the other hand, some of the most demographically desirable Web users seem determined to resist the commercialization of the Internet. The FAQ (or "frequently asked questions" list) for one of the Internet's liveliest discussion groups, alt.society.generation-x, is a shot across the bow of would-be online marketeers: "We are not a target market. Say it--and repeat it, again and again until the words are burned into your subconscious. WE ARE NOT A TARGET MARKET."

Ultimately, however, my digital confreres will prove wrong. The question is not whether the Web is going commercial, but how quickly and what form it's going to take. Marketers have begun to realize that despite the whiz-bang graphics on the Web, the Internet is first and foremost about communication. That's why the best model for online commerce may be not the shopping mall but the town square. Elaine Rubin, recently named by Advertising Age one of 20 "Digital Media Masters," calls community building "the key to any commerce online." She's part of iVillage (http://www.ivillage.com), a venture that aims to assemble affinity groups of consumers online and sell to them. Says Rubin: "A shopping mall is not a community. Instead of pretending to create a community out of merchandising, we create a community and offer merchandising in it." iVillage's first offering, Parent Soup, is conceived as an "interactive kitchen table." Parents will congregate there to share child-rearing tips, talk to experts, and just chill out when they have a free moment (and when little Kelly isn't monopolizing the PC). Where's the profit? "The key here is the impulse buy," says Rubin, "which has never been done on the Net. You're sitting there in a chat with a pediatrician about potty training, and up pops the Fisher-Price potty."

It should be interesting to see how the alt.gen-xers react.

Reporter Associate Sheree R. Curry