With the holiday season in full swing and the streets and shops filled, many Irish computer users will opt to ring up their seasonal purchases on online tills.
But are Irish sites ready to perform? A shopping spree that took in several sites - including Amazon in the US and the UK - suggests Irish sites get a mixed verdict. While most were good at getting the merchandise out, site design was frequently poor and all the Irish sites failed to provide some pieces of basic information to consumers in an accessible way.
Not that this is a feature of Irish sites alone. Several US and European studies have demonstrated that even several years into the Web phenomenon, consumer concerns about what websites do with shoppers' personal details have not been addressed by most retailers.
Site design remains surprisingly poor even at leading-edge technology companies, and the majority of sites fail to provide obvious services or information to site visitors.
Nonetheless, online purchases are expected to hit $19.5 billion (€22.7 billion) worldwide over the holidays, according to analyst Gartner Group.
Web traffic analyst Media Metrix noted that shopper traffic is already up 40 per cent on last year. Industry analyst Jupiter expects a quarter of the 80 million Europeans who are online will buy holiday gifts on the Web, ringing up a total spend of €1.7 billion, which will equal 32 per cent of the total shopping done online in Europe for 2000.
Gartner says the top five categories of gifts are: books; CDs or cassettes; toys or video games; videos or DVDs; and computer software or games.
Retail sites must lure shoppers as well as deal with experienced online shoppers who will expect better service than last year - when many Christmas gifts failed to arrive on time - and more sophisticated, user-friendly sites.
So how did Irish sites fare? There is a limited number of products on offer. Irish sites that are online venues for traditional stores - so-called bricks and clicks retailers - typically offer far more limited choices than the real-world shops (a notable exception are booksellers such as Eason).
Most Irish sites offer a clumsy shopping experience with consumers forced to navigate lengthy menus of choices and then wait for pages to download, which is particularly tedious when a page includes several photographs.
Most are flexible on purchasing options, allowing more cautious consumers the alternative of faxing or phoning in orders rather than sending credit card details online - although nearly all sites have secure computer servers that encode card details.
Finally - and shockingly - nearly every Irish site either failed to offer a privacy policy or made it difficult to find. A top concern of online shoppers is how their personal details will be used - in a recent survey, 85 per cent of Americans told Pew Research that they were worried about this issue.
The US is considering legislation to force companies to make clear their privacy policies. In the Republic, the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner recommends privacy policies as a good way of complying with the existing Data Protection Act and the recent Data Protection Directive, which is close to becoming law.
Sites should clearly state what is done with consumer details such as names, e-mail addresses and shopping history and must provide consumers with the option of having such data deleted. Several sites claim the right to pass along consumer data to third parties, which a spokesman for the Data Protection Commissioner's Office says will probably be illegal under the new directive unless explicit consent is gained from consumers.
He also notes that this is a questionable practice under existing legislation and that hiding an opt-out policy away as small print in a privacy policy could also be illegal.
