E-tailers had better be good

Gallant, 32, and her boyfriend, Chris McDaniel, both of Somerville, had to quickly arrange returns and scramble for a replacement gift for his mother.

"I think we might have to hit the mall tonight," she said.

The mall was exactly what Gallant, and other holiday shoppers, have been hoping to avoid as many electronic retailers are experiencing their best year ever. The Northeast's major snowstorms on important shopping weekends boosted Internet sales higher than forecast at the beginning of the season, analysts said.

But the increased demand has caught some online stores unprepared this holiday season. Internet stores have struggled to keep up with the traffic on their websites, run out of merchandise they promised they had, and delayed or canceled gift orders, leaving customers to sweat over whether their gifts would arrive in time for the holidays.

It won't be clear until after the holiday shopping crush whether the problems may deter future online shoppers. Many shoppers with major complaints say they don't blame online shopping in general -- just the company that messed up their order.

But if they get burned enough, one analyst warned, consumers may keep shopping online for less time-sensitive purchases, like a book for themselves, but stop counting on online shopping for purchases with important deadlines, like Christmas, Valentine's Day, or birthdays.

"I think it will teach online consumers to shop earlier online and to trust the Internet less on high-impact holidays," said Carrie Johnson, an analyst with Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge.

Internet-savvy shoppers often prefer sitting down and comparing prices on multiple websites to throwing elbows in a packed mall. The US Commerce Department said shoppers spent $13.8 billion in Internet stores in the fourth quarter last year. A New York research firm, eMarketer Inc., predicted in September that online sales would rise 29.1 percent this quarter, to $17.8 billion.

By most accounts e-tailers, as electronic retailers are known, have vastly improved their reliability since the 2000 holiday season, when the failure of dot-com sweethearts like Toys.com in delivering gift orders hastened their demise. Online revenues are also on the rise. The median online shopper is spending $102 this year, compared to $82 last year, according to a survey by Harris Interactive, a research firm in Rochester, N.Y.

Yet as with buying from catalogs, shopping over the Internet requires confidence that the retailer will send the right package, on time. E-commerce still has many converts to win: Less than 2 percent of retail sales annually come from the Internet, according to the Commerce Department. And a bad experience can leave a sour taste.

Gallant, a human-resources manager, had never trusted e-commerce much, but began making smaller purchases from websites during the year to test them for the holidays. Several successful orders convinced her of the time savings and ease of digital shopping, so she and McDaniel started ordering Christmas presents.

On Dec. 13, when she tried to place an order at Gateway.com for a personal computer and a digital camera bundled with a printer, the screen told her the transaction had not gone through. So she placed it again.

A few minutes later she decided she didn't want the PC, so she canceled it online and ordered one each of the following: Palm hand-held computer, digital camcorder, memory card for her digital camera, and back-up storage system.

"We've been receiving packages ever since," she said.

So far she and McDaniel have received two PCs, two camcorders, two Palms, four memory cards, and five back-up storage systems. No digital camera, no printer. Just $3,600 in credit card charges and a stack of computer gear.

Gateway first said it had no record of the order and tried to get her to pay the return freight, plus a 15 percent restocking fee, Gallant said. She finally talked a customer service supervisor into picking up the tab, but Gateway would not ship the missing items until it received the returns -- several days after Christmas.

McDaniel's mother won't be getting a printer this year.

"History has shown it is a safe, secure, successful way to shop," Bob Sherbin, a spokesman for Gateway, based in Poway, Calif., said of Internet commerce. "That said, there clearly are instances when things don't go right, and this was a very bad version of that."

Most customers recognize that mistakes happen. Often it's a matter of how well the e-commerce site responds to those mistakes that determines whether the shopper returns.

In late November Ethan Balakier, 29, a consultant from Wellesley, ordered a TiVo digital video recorder from Amazon.com for his brother's birthday. He eagerly opened Amazon's shipment a few days later to find a steam-pot for cooking rice.

"I love rice," he told Amazon's customer service agent, "but I love TiVo even more."

Amazon responded swiftly, arranging for UPS to pick up the rice cooker and sending the TiVo for overnight delivery the following day. Balakier said he was satisfied and will use Amazon again.

"People make mistakes, and they did their best to take care of it," he said.

Jonell Rusinko, 29, a public relations manager in Boston, wishes the Bombay Company had been as accommodating. Browsing its website, she found a wine-bottle holder adorned with faux jewels that she thought would nicely match the remodeled living room in her parents' Minnesota home. The item was listed as in stock, and she placed the order in early December.

The gift never arrived. Concerned as Christmas approached, she visited the website and learned that her order would not arrive until well after the holidays. She waited on the phone for 30 minutes to cancel the order. The customer service representative never apologized.

Instead of spending her first day back in Minnesota with her family last weekend, she spent it shopping in stores, braving the crowds that drove her online in the first place.

Chris Gaither can be reached at gaither@globe.com.