Web-Free Shopping

By Chris Taylor

Attention, e-commerce shoppers: Your days of being tied to the PC for your product needs may soon be over. In the near future, currently being envisaged by engineers, you'll go shopping via PalmPilot, via TV with cable-modem hookup, via game machine, via intelligent refrigerator--via any means, it seems, other than a good old-fashioned desktop and keyboard.

A new kind of consumer is about to emerge as the Internet revolution spills over the edges of the computer revolution's territory. "The next wave is people who never wanted to buy a PC," says Barry Parr, an analyst at International Data Corp. Even as early as 2003, analysts expect, a third of online households will be spending around $50 billion through non-PC devices.

Many of them won't even have to open a Web browser to go shopping. Internet-ready cell phones already have e-commerce capabilities. Sony's latest terminal for WebTV offers split-screen shopping, so you can buy Christmas gifts without taking your eyes off the tube. Excite@Home's broadband cable service will launch an undertaking next year that lets you instantaneously buy the products you see advertised. Say you're watching a Pizza Hut ad when an animated stuffed-crust pizza floats across the screen; two clicks of the remote, and it's heading to your door. Excite@Home already knows your credit-card details and address. Just sit back and wait for the calories.

The slightly more active may prefer to use bar-code scanners, which a company called Symbol Technologies is embedding into Palm handheld computers. Here's the idea: simply scan the unique 12-digit bar code of each product in your kitchen as you use it, and a replacement is on its way. If you prefer to stay in the La-Z-Boy, munching on pizza, get your refrigerator to order the groceries. Electrolux and Frigidaire have already developed prototype smart fridges, which, we're promised, will automatically sense when your milk carton feels light or your cheese smells like unlaundered socks and will order more. In the wake of the smart fridge, food-industry experts are dreaming of a smart garbage can--we kid you not--that will read bar codes on stuff you throw away and notify the store--which would also be a major incentive for bachelors to keep their pads tidy.

Pie in the sky, you say? Yes, pie and pie squared. Just wait till you hear about land blimps. As more and more sites promise faster and faster deliveries (check out urbanfetch.com or kozmo.com which delivers videos, ice cream and best-selling novels to your door in under an hour in five cities), experts expect the arrival of what Paul Saffo of the Institute for the Future calls "convenience stores on wheels," vehicles on a permanent cruise between warehouses and your garage.

Not that an interstate full of delivery trucks will spell the death of your mall. "People will go shopping in stores as a social activity," predicts high-tech guru Esther Dyson, but "there may be a lot of showrooms and fewer places where you actually take things home." Should you buy off-line, automatic in-store bar-code scanning may make checkout lines a thing of the past.

And if you really don't want to walk away from your PC, the Web will still be there. Watch for more gee-whiz applications to draw you into retail websites, like the virtual dressing rooms at eddiebauer.com and boo.com or furniture.com's floor-planning program.

Watch also for increasingly intelligent shopping agents--like the DealAgent at dealtime.com--to create ever more complex offers for those shoppers who are really into bargain hunting. The DealAgent lets merchants look at minute-by-minute snapshots of how much users are willing to pay for a certain product--say, $400 for a Panasonic 27-in. TV--and change prices accordingly.

If all that makes your head spin, don't worry. You won't have to deal with shopping agents; you won't have to deal with the Web at all. Stay on the couch, watch the commercials, order stuff with your remote. Bottom line: future shopping is going to be as simple and convenient as you want it. Your fridge will handle the rest.

--With reporting by Owen Thomas

With reporting by Owen Thomas