Best Places to Buy

Buying Online

Room for Improvement Online

Photograph: James AronovskyAlong with dell.com and store.apple.com, hpshopping.com earned high marks, but most of the other sites got mediocre reviews. In our survey, hpshopping.com finished just below dell.com, with about 52 percent of respondents who had visited the site rating it a 6 or 7 overall. A number of them called HP's site well designed and praised its plentiful and accessible information. Judd Sills, a project manager who works in Orange County, California, said, "HP had the most complete information; but even if you could compare other brands, I wouldn't expect it to be without bias."

Feeling that the online information about pricing and rebates was inadequate, many respondents chose to visit a retail store instead. Andrew Blau of New York City voiced a common complaint: "None of the stores go out of their way to make sure that the customer understands that the lowball price they exhibit is for a system with a CRT and not the flat screen shown in the picture."

Best Buy, Circuit City, CompUSA, and Staples all tout the convenience of ordering products online and picking them up at a local outlet, but a few readers reported glitches in this process. Their advice: Phone the local store to to confirm that your purchase will be there when you arrive.

The lowest-rated online stores were staples.com and compusa.com, where just 35 and 37 percent, respectively, of respondents rated them a 6 or 7 in overall quality of buying advice. Several readers felt that staples.com offered too little information on its site about computers and other hardware. As for compusa.com, more than a few respondents expressed dissatisfaction with the site's search engine, complaining that it was poorly designed, too finely categorized, and hard to use.

Photograph: Alex PhotographyWinston Chow, an IT specialist in Honolulu, Hawaii, agrees that the sites don't provide enough facts. He says, "My problem is that there's too little info given online about products and their features. So I do research at expert sites that really care about how consumers use the products, and then go back and see who has the best price and shipping."

Good advice. But remember to check return policies, warranty information, and other details before you choose a seller (see "Best Return Policies: Staples Shines" for a comparison of the return policies of the retailers we looked at).