(FORTUNE Magazine) – IT'S THE MOST wonderful time of the year, as the holiday song reminds us. Yes, once again it's the season to wonder why so many people choose to suffer traffic jams, suffocating crowds, fistfights over $29 DVD players at Wal-Mart, surly sales clerks, and the incessant drone of holiday music instead of shopping the easy way, on the Internet. (Ahh, now this is the way holiday shopping should be done, in front of a glowing PC with a roaring broadband connection.)

Still, it is likely to be the jingliest year yet for e-commerce, thanks to the growing number and variety of online merchants, the rising popularity of high-speed broadband connections, and the proliferation of comparison-shopping sites, which can help consumers locate the lowest prices for the best products from the most reliable online merchants. We'll compare the most popular comparison-shopping sites after this brief public service announcement.

Have yourself a very wary holiday shopping season. Online grinches are on the prowl this year, more so than in holidays past, hoping to steal credit card and bank information from consumers by using increasingly sophisticated scams. To keep your online holidays merry, remember: No legitimate online service or merchant will ever call or e-mail you to ask for your password or Social Security number. If you get e-mail alerting you that there's a security problem with your account--that someone is trying to place an order using your name or that you may be a victim of identity theft --and you're asked to verify your account information, just say no. It's a trick.

And while the overwhelming majority of online merchants themselves are nice, some are naughty. They may advertise an alluringly low price, then stick it to you for outrageous shipping and handling or insurance charges, or bogus "Internet taxes." Some will assure you they have an item in stock just to get your order, when in fact it's probably still on the slow boat from China. Or they send refurbished (used) merchandise instead of the new, factory-fresh item you were expecting. It's hard to complain when the merchant doesn't list a phone number or physical address on its website and does not respond to e-mail queries. Despite the fear that a crook will steal the number, using a credit card online offers greater protection than using a debit card or other form of payment.

But with a little bit of caution and some common sense, and the liberal use of the newest features of the web's leading comparison-shopping sites, you the consumer can get some great bargains this holiday season while minimizing risk and avoiding the customary ordeals.

There are dozens of comparison-shopping services on the Internet, including giant portals such as AOL--like FORTUNE, a unit of Time Warner--Yahoo, and MSN, and standalone sites like Shopping.com, Shopzilla/BizRate, NexTag, and Pricegrabber. Google, the general Internet search engine that's so popular it has become a verb, offers a no-frills comparison-shopping search engine called Froogle.

To compare the comparison sites, I made a list of several favorite digital toys and plugged those items into a dozen different shopping bots to see which one served me best. Hours later, poorer but wiser, I reached the conclusion: The more the merrier. It doesn't cost anything to use two or three shopbots, and while the actual price differences among the various engines varied little--often no more than a buck or two at the low end--the real money saving comes from the other services they offer: merchant ratings, customer feedback, product specifications, amateur and professional product reviews, the ability to compare the features of two or more products side by side, and buying guides. Comparison sites that include product reviews are particularly valuable. After all, saving a few dollars on a camera isn't much of a bargain if you don't choose the right camera, and the right seller, in the first place.

Warning: It's a common if lamentable practice among some search engines to accept money from selected merchants in return for giving them top listings in the search results. And surprise! The "featured merchants" that pay for top listings often have the top prices too. With a click or two, however, most sites allow users to reshuffle the results based on lowest price or highest merchant rating.

After a week of comparing the comparison shoppers, I added the following four shopping bots to my browser toolbar:

● Shopzilla.com. This is the new name of BizRate.com, a venerable comparison engine that boasts of listing more products and stores than anyone else. BizRate will stick around, but Shopzilla gives it a facelift to make it more attractive to consumers. Shopzilla updates its prices and inventories more often than any of the others. It has detailed merchant ratings, and sends misbehaving merchants to purgatory for bad service or if they attempt to manipulate their own or competitors' ratings.

● Yahoo Shopping. Despite crawling through thousands of merchants, from the biggest names to small boutiques and catalogs, Yahoo Shopping (www.shopping.yahoo.com) never retrieved the best deal in my experiments compared with its rivals. Its real value arises from its large assortment of customer and professional product reviews and buying advice, including top ten lists and gift guides. The merchant ratings are sketchy, however; one merchant received a top (five-star) rating on the basis of a single anonymous customer review.

● Shopping.com. Formed through the combination of DealTime and Epinions, two of the pioneers in comparison shopping and customer reviews, Shopping.com is far more helpful than 99% of the sales clerks at your local electronics store when it comes to advice. While it's candid about "featured store" placements, it also pins a "trusted store" logo on merchants based on positive customer feedback and accurate pricing and shipping information, and it makes helpful smart-buy recommendations. But some of its smart-buy sellers reside in Shopzilla's purgatory, so be careful.

● AOL InStore. The newest kid on the shopping block wraps the BizRate listings in an attractive and mostly efficient package that appears to be designed to appeal to women, who make up the majority of online shoppers. It located the best price on a Sony Cyber-shot DSC-P150 digital camera, but fumbled a search for the Star Wars Trilogy DVD set.

Some online merchants even offer service with a smile. After I ordered several T-shirts from a Canadian company, www.splitreason.com, the following shipment confirmation arrived by e-mail:

"Your ordered item(s) have been gently taken from our shelves with a set of sterilized, contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.... Our packing specialist from Japan lit a commemorative candle, and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your item(s) into the finest corrugated cardboard box that money can buy. We all proceeded to have a wonderful celebration afterwards, and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire city of Vancouver waved 'Bon voyage!' to your package. Your picture now hangs on our wall as Customer of the Year...."

It was worth every penny of the shipping and handling fee. And it even sent the shirts to the right address.

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