By Jimmy Guterman, Globe Correspondent

CATEGORIES Books Music Bootleg CDs Clothes Electronics Drink Toys Medicine Pets Travel Autos Food Auctions

We columnists may hype the power of the Internet to unite disparate communities and the like, but the secret truth is that most people like the Web because it's an easier way to buy stuff, from groceries to CDs.

Armed with a Web browser and a credit card not quite yet at its limit, I surveyed some of today's top-tier e-commerce sites.

This is not a comprehensive list - with tens of thousands of secure commerce-enabled sites, that's impossible - but it may provide some initial direction for those looking to buy on line.

BOOKS

This was the category that proved e-commerce could work.

amazon.com

Online-bookselling leader Amazon remains the fastest, easiest way to buy books via the Web. The company has diversified, and now sells everything from PalmPilots to Legos.

barnesandnoble.com

The leading pure-play dedicated new-book store (even if it has a toe in e-cards and a few other categories), . the Barnes & Noble site is much easier to navigate than it was only a year ago. and Its out-of-print section is sensibly organized.

amazon.co.uk

If you're interested in English-language books published in England but not yet available stateside, this site mirrors its American site nicely, and appears to work off the same customer database so you don't have to register again.

bookfinder.com

You don't go to Amazon or Barnes & Noble for used books. There are some excellent sites that focus exclusively on the used, rare, and hard-to-find. BookFinder is a search engine that glides through eight different networks of used-book dealers and shows you what is available.

longitudebooks.com

If you have more narrow reading desires, say travel, sites like this one do an adequate job of presenting a bit more detail than you'd get on a general site like Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

bigwords.com

This another niche site sells ing textbooks. Unfortunately, it's too busy producing ugly color schemes and digitized clips of its annoying television ads to consider making make the site a pleasant shopping experience.

positively-you.com

This site promises to donate up to 10 percent of your purchase to a non-profit organization of your choice. However, its three categories of books - bestsellers, kids, and Oprah - emphasizes its relative lack of offerings.

fatbrain.com

This site appears to have two conflicting business models. It claims to sell expert tech books to tech pros (sample hyped title: Novell's ''NetWare 5 Complete Documentation Kit''), while it also offers self-publishing from people who merely claim to be experts.

MUSIC

Because the large bookseller sites Amazon and Barnes & Noble have taken on selling CDs in a big way, pure-play music sellers are having trouble on line.

cdnow.com

Even after absorbing Music Boulevard, CDNOW is less well-organized than the Big Two, although those looking for import CDs are more likely to find them here (and, usually, the imports are less expensive than they'd be at cdeurope.com).

everycd.com

Avoid this one. It socks you with a membership fee and does not, in fact, have access to every in-print CD.

towerrecords.com

The Web site has far less specialized merchandise than even its local stores.

spun.com

The real action on line is in used CDs and LPs. Used-record dealers have yet to develop a network as comprehensive as BookFinder, but there are some reasonably useful sites, among them Spun, which works on more of a barter model than a money-changing-hands one.

love4oneanother.com

Artist-run music sites tend to stink, but in some cases they're the only place you can buy certain CDs. I was unable to find one that didn't either work or that dropped me into some elaborate navigational maze; representative of these sites is the former Prince's Love 4 One Another, where you can help him party like it's 1999 by helping him cleaning out his purple garage.

BOOTLEG CDS

You can find these - ah, sorry. I'm not allowed to tell.

CLOTHES

Anyone who has ever met me knows I'm not much of a trendsetter in this area. But even someone who has never used the words ''heather'' and ''turtleneck'' in the same sentence can tell that some on-line clothes sites work better than others.

landsend.com

Lands' End does a good job of replicating its catalog on the Web, and it adds enough additional material, like pictures of the witty cow sculptures now strewn along Chicago's Michigan Avenue, to keep you interested if you're more in a browsing mood than a purchasing one.

llbean.com

Similarly, L.L. Bean mixes product information with guides to national parks and wildlife refuges. This is nice, I suppose, but it's worth pointing out that neither llbean.com nor landsend.com offer sales, which is what consumers want.

gap.com

This site does offers some sales along with many pictures of annoyed-looking models. Their commerce-enabling can sometimes be confusing, but the site does a good job of showing which items are available in stores, which can be bought on line, and which can be purchased via the 800 number. The question of why the Gap has three different sets of stock is never answered. If you have a special order, the Web won't work - you'll have to call.

rei.com

Those of you who enjoy playing outdoors might want to visit this site, which has good prices on everything from in-line skates to winter footwear, although it's a good rule to beware of any site company that tries to foster community merely by spraying the word ''community'' all over its site.

shop2give.com

This site tries to ease your guilt over being such a consumer by letting you combine shopping with philanthropy, but if you want to give to charity, why are you buying something at the same time? It's hard to answer that question, since the site's navigation appears to have been designed by the same people who built the parking lot at the Tweeter Center.

bluefly.com

For the fashion-conscious who are also conscious of their bank balances, Bluefly aggregates discount items from big-deal designers like Calvin Klein, Donna Karan, and others.

fashionmall.com

It tries to offer something similar to Bluefly, but it succumbs to the ultimate fashion-site mistake - with so much effort put into making the site look cool, there wasn't any time left over to make sure it would do anything useful.

ELECTRONICS

As with other categories, the best electronics deals on line are most likely to be found at general sites like Amazon or buy.com. If you're looking for specific parts, start at the manufacturer's site, although be warned that you will be directed to call an 800 number to complete the order in most cases.

electricwish.com

Unlike most of sites in this category, ElectricWish is geared to people who are not electronics experts. The verbiage on its site is sometimes trite or condescending, but if you want to buy a DVD player and don't know a thing about DVDs, too much information is better than too little.

DRINK

Would you like something to drink with that? Perhaps, but it might be hard to get it. Various laws make it difficult or impossible to get any sort of alcoholic beverage delivered via the mail.

Example: I ordered a bottle of wine for my stepfather from virtualvin.com (now wine.com). He received it 23 days later, after the one modest bottle had been shipped via truck from California to the East Coast, then delivered by a local retailer.

Laws are easing, but wine over the Net remains a chancy proposition.

TOYS

Have any cash left over after buying your kids all those Pokemon cards? etoys.com and smarterkids.com

Coming from different angles, both of these sites have good deals, a fine cross-section of products, and useful information for parents. The site eToys, for example, will sell you any of 143 different Pokemon items, and but it will also give you a page explaining what those little rascals are all about.

MEDICINE

Pharmacy sites online are in their infancy.

drugstore.com and planetrx.com

Some sites, like Drugstore and PlanetRx, seem to be adopting the Amazon model: market heavily, sell cheaply, grab customers before they learn about the competitors.

soma.com

This site operates on a different model. It's the CVS site on the Web, and it does a good job of letting you order a prescription refill on line and pick it up at a local CVS store, just like its phone service. Also, it's the only site that will tell you when National Pharmacy Week is coming.

PETS

We're talking supplies here - you can't sell live animals over the Net (yet).

pets.com

This site will sell you pretty much anything you can imagine your pet would want. It's amusing that it was offering 25 percent off Halloween treats for your mutt, but nowhere on the site did it explain how to get your pet to understand that it was Halloween.

petsmart.com

This site seems more focused on useful information and discussion to go along with your purchase, making it a better-rounded site.

TRAVEL

You can get great deals on line - if you're willing to suffer through some extremely hostile sites.

travelocity.com / expedia.com

Both of these sites are filled with great deals, but the various steps involved in getting that information might make you want to call your travel agent.

previewtravel.com / trip.com

Similarly, Preview Travel and Trip are formidable sites, but there's no way to test them until you've given the site all sorts of demographic information about yourself. Don't these outfits realize that they have to prove to consumers that they're useful, not the other way around?

AUTOS

cars.com / carsdirect.com

Both offer lengthy listings that are easy to get lost in. You may want to tip the scale in favor of Cars, which has a ton of associated material (some of it from this newspaper), while CarsDirect has the most information-free home page of any commerce site I surveyed.

FOOD

webvan.com

Comrades in Silicon Valley assure me that Webvan, now available there and expected to show up here some time next year, is an ideal way to buy groceries on line thanks to its quick service.

peapod.com / homeruns.com

As for those services now available in the Greater Boston area, Peapod and HomeRuns both work well - in particular, both have excellent customer service and exceedingly polite delivery people - but they won't be truly useful to most people until broad bandwidth becomes more common. Constant refreshing of pages on a 28.8 modem may make it faster for most people to go to the market in person.

food.com

This site offers a mix of prepared food and groceries, but its offerings are limited and the site is overly focused on presenting ads about its partners. And one other thing, the site's search engine didn't work the four times I tried it over three days.

streamline.com

This site offers much more than merely groceries, but the food portion of its service appears to be a step above Peapod and HomeRuns.

AUCTIONS

Finally, don't forget auctions, where everything from the original Ten Commandment stones to pieces of lint appear to be available.

ebay.com

The undisputed king of this category has spawned a small army of competitors and copycats. Indeed, some other sites that have nothing to do with auctions, like Amazon and Yahoo!, are trying to graft auctions onto their sites.

ehammer.com

This site handles the narrow area of antiques reasonably well.

auctionwatch.com

It can't decide if it's an auction site or an information portal.

up4sale.com

This site has an image of the virtual auctioneer Auction Arnie on its front page, ensuring that the only people using its site are those who like feeble images.

auctions.com

This site is trying to challenge eBay by building a network of various auction sites. Indeed, if you liked the Chicago cows you saw on the Land's End site, make a bid. Everything is for sale on the Web.

Jimmy Guterman runs the Vineyard Group, an editorial consultancy in Chestnut Hill. His e-mail address is guterman@vineyard.com.