This doesn't come naturally to me, but I have to say, I kind of like this on-line shopping thing. No crowds, no lugging bags home, no snippy sales assistants, no shoes. Just me, my mouse, and all those on-line sites with the pretty colors and the happy copy.

It's not completely perfect, though. There is something profoundly frustrating about not being able to touch and turn over the stuff you're going to buy, to hold it up against you, or read the labels. And sometimes, stylists and photographers can make scarves and silverware look gorgeous on your computer screen, when in real life they might be cheap and nasty.

Mindful of these dangers, I forged ahead, into the rosy world of the Web site, Christmas list in hand.

The sweater for, uh, maybe sister Catherine

For my sister Catherine, I decide to hop on line and get her the beautiful merino wool V-neck I tried on in the J. Crew store a few weeks back. This is because I love my sister very much, but also because I am thinking that if it arrives in the mail and I really like it, I will keep it for myself.

So I visit the J. Crew Web site (www.jcrew.com), thinking it'll take five minutes, tops, to hunt down my, um, her, quarry.

No such luck.

Okay, number one, the J. Crew home page is nice, but the pictures - which are all of headless models lined up side by side - aren't very clear. All the clothes look like bits of them are under water.

But I quickly forget this little imperfection when I see the ''everyone wins on line'' icon, and click to find that if I order on line, and it's my first time, they will deliver my goodies free, provided I order before Nov. 1.

No problem.

The Web site is organized according to clothing genre. I click on sweaters, and scroll across 35 of them, only to find that my merino V-neck must be in another category. I try the Weekday Knit Collection, and there it is. I think. It sure doesn't look like the one I saw in the store, but it must be it, right?

I forge ahead to find it is, indeed, my sweater, but that it is not available in the color I want. It does come in haze (Is that really a color?), black, blueberry heather (How do they come up with those names, I wonder?), but no burgundy.

At a loss, and willing to cheat, I head into the living room and grab one of my J. Crew catalogs, two of which arrive at my house every day. The catalog says I've been missed over there at J. Crew. That's nice.

I find my sweater and enter it into the ''order by item number'' box, and there it is, in a whole bunch of completely different colors. There, I discover that my burgundy won't be available until Dec. 10. Too late. So back I go, and decide on the blueberry heather, whatever that might be.

But the sweater costs only $48, and I need an order of $50 to qualify for free delivery. What to do? Socks, I think. And what better for winter than a pair of wool heathered tipped socks in gray? Especially because, at $8, they're the cheapest way to make it to the magic $50.

But when I click on the wool heathered tipped icon, J. Crew gives me the marled ragg sock. I don't want the marled ragg sock. I want the wool heather tipped.

When I click on marled ragg sock, hoping the two have simply been swapped, I get the semi-opaque tight. I don't want the semi-opaque tight, do I? Click on the multi-thin stripe, and I get the mini-argyle anklet, both of which are incredibly ugly, even if they are cheaper.

I can't buy the wool heathered tipped to save my life, and I'm darned if I'm going to go back to the catalog for those. But I do, only to find they're not in the catalog anyway.

The J. Crew site seems to be trying to defy me. It seems to be taking pleasure in thwarting my buying experience, and this is profoundly annoying to me.

So, I decide to buy my husband a T-shirt instead. This involves breaking a firm rule I have recently established, which is never to buy my husband another item of clothing as long as he lives, because he doesn't defer to my tastes with enough unquestioning gratitude. But I need free delivery, so I spend the $14 to save $8.95.

Having saved the $8.95, I tell myself I can now afford 3-day express delivery, which is only $5 extra. My total is now $67. And it all arrives in three days, as promised.

If I had bought just the sweater and chosen normal, 2 to 7-day delivery, I would have spent only $56.95, but we won't talk about that.

The mini food chopper for me

What? I don't deserve a little something too? Besides, a part from my chopper melted in the dishwasher.

To find the best deal on some items on my list, I used Yahoo!Shopping (shopping.yahoo.com). Throw in the name of your product, and Yahoo!Shopping will come back, like a good doggie, with all the places you can get them, and all the prices.

Excite also has a shopping site (previewshopping.excite.com), but for the items I wanted, it wasn't as good as Yahoo!. Sometimes it fetched a list of all kinds of unrelated products that I had to wade through.

I wanted a mini food processor. Yahoo! gave me six options, with prices ranging from just $26.67 from Adatom's Internet Superstore (www.adatom.com) to $39.79 from Hector's Hardware Store (st13.yahoo.com/hectors876). In real life, these little mixing marvels run about $30, so bye-bye, Hector.

And on closer examination, Adatom's wasn't such a deal either: Delivery time on the tiny appliance would run as long as 22 days, according to the Web site.

I'm a busy woman. Besides, Adatom's says the recommended retail price on the mini processor is $48, and that price is so high, it gives me an icky feeling.

So, I go with the nice folks at electronics.net. Their price is reasonable at $29.97, so I take the plunge. Since I want three-day delivery, however, the price is bumped to $39.37, but it beats fighting the crowds in Lechter's.

Three days later, my little package of joy arrives.

Which is more than I can say for the CD I ordered on the same night, also through Yahoo!Shopping.

The CD for friend John

This was going to be the easiest of my gifts: My friend John is a bit of a world music buff, so I decided to get him a CD called Rai Rebels, a bunch of very beautiful songs by Algerian artists.

Yahoo! lined up all the sites for me again.

All Direct (www.alldirect.com) can give it to me for $11.24, with a delivery time of two to three days.

CD Connection (www.cdconnection.com) will charge me $14.89, and shipping happens in three to 10 days. No thanks.

W3CD (www.w3cd.com) will charge me just $11.95, the CD will ship in two to three days, and the site has a really cool logo.

I went with W3CD, which boasted ''the lowest domestic and international shipping on the Internet!'' It promised me ''the same deal the guys in the warehouse get for their mothers!''

It did seem like a pretty good deal, especially for buying just one CD - $1.75 per order, and 95 cents per item, which brought my charges to a total of $14.65. As an added bonus, these folks promise prominently that they will not give anybody my personal information unless they ask me first. How nice.

And I like the idea of buying from someone other than the big guys, so I pull the trigger, and wait for the CD to arrive.

I wait a long, long time.

The site says shipping time is normally three to seven days. But 11 days after I place my order - and they tell me the CD is immediately available, mind you - still no Rebels.

Wine for sister Thelma

First of all, can somebody tell me why all the wine sites are so darned tacky looking?

Yahoo! threw a bunch of them at me. I went through 12 of them, one by one, and they're just not that pretty: some of them look like they were set up five years ago, with their boring graphics and grainy photographs. Sure, I'm shopping in my PJ's and furry slippers, but that doesn't mean they should skimp on aesthetics.

A case in point: www.spiritz.com. On my first visit, its home page delivered a grainy picture of a woman flanked by two men, all of them in ecstasy over some white wine or other, mouths agape. ''Good friends bring out good spirits,'' says the banner. At least they didn't spell that with a z, but yeesh, not the kind of image that has me leaping for the mouse.

(A couple of days later, the home page has been completely changed. It still looked a little dinky, but the happy folks of yore had been replaced by some cute little no-nonsense icons that made the site easier to navigate.)

Yet despite my artistic objections, I wade into some of the sites, looking for nice Aussie reds for when my sister Thelma comes for Christmas this year.

After several fruitless searches on other sites, I settle on K&L Wine Merchants (www.klwines.com), which bills itself as ''The Internet's Best.'' I'll be the judge of that, thank you very much.

And in fact, they're not bad at all. Huge selection, nice full descriptions of wines. In the end, I settle on a Riesling from New Zealand, an Australian Merlot, and a red from California, and proceed to the checkout, popping in my address and selecting three-day delivery - where I discover that my entire shopping experience at K&L has been in vain.

Sorry, they tell me, they don't ship to Massachusetts. I would have been grateful for this information a little earlier in my shopping experience, thank you. Perhaps a warning that this might have been a possibility could have been more prominently displayed on the home page?

It'll be far less trouble to head over to the wine store a block away, which I resolve to do.

Chew toy for Max

I wanted to get something really special for Max, my friend Mark's very nervous North-American Shepherd. Mark told me Max would simply kill for a Kong chew-toy, which bounces every which way, driving dogs crazy with delight.

Yahoo! gave me a bunch of pet stores to choose from, but Petcrazy.com was the prettiest, immediately presenting me with the day's specials, then a list of mini-cyberstores organized by species.

From there, the Kong was easy to find, and the medium size clocked in at just $6.39, compared to a recommended retail price of $8.48. Cha-ching. Add another $3.50 for shipping, and a few days, and Max is a happy boy.

Naboo Starfighter for Peter

Six-year-olds are capricious creatures. For the whole of November, they will plead for Santa to bring whatever toy is de rigeur. This is often the same toy of which the stores have been cleaned out in October, and for which Santa's little helpers must scour the city.

But come Christmas morning, the little beggars are sometimes underwhelmed by said toy: In kid time, a month is an eternity.

So, it was with some trepidation that I entered eToys.com, looking for a present for my friends' son Peter. Luckily, however, eToys will show you what everybody else is buying for kids right now. If Peter is crestfallen on Christmas morning, I will at least have the satisfaction of knowing that hundreds of other misguided adults are feeling as stupid as I am.

A list of top sellers for six-year-olds reveals that Star Wars toys are still hugely popular, even though the film was panned by the critics.

The Naboo Starfighter by Lego ($19.95) allows kids to recreate the ''sleek'' vehicle Anakin Skywalker uses in his ''final struggle against the evil Trade Federation.'' This should keep the kid happy. Just to be safe, I also throw in Episode 1: Lightsaber Duel, also by Lego ($5.99), which included Qui-Gon Jinn and Darth Maul figures.

To the checkout I go. With $9.90 for delivery, my grand total is $35.88. It all arrives in about a week.

How happy this whole experience has been, errant CD notwithstanding. And so good for my self-esteem.

Site after site tells me how glad it is to see me, how it hopes I'll enjoy my shopping experience, how overjoyed it would be to keep in touch until the goods hurtle to my home, how it hopes to see me again real soon.

They really genuinely seem to like me. Yes! Feel free to send all manner of junk e-mail to my address. Thanks ever so for asking. Of course I'll come again!

Yvonne Abraham covers City Hall for the Globe. Her e-mail address is abraham@globe.com.