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To: Big Dog who wrote (567)	11/16/1999 9:17:00 AM
From: Big Dog	Respond to of 614

ShopAOL kicks off holiday season with new features By Monica Summers NEW YORK, Nov 15 (Reuters) - America Online Inc. (NYSE:AOL - news) on Monday introduced several new features to its ShopAOL service and opened its virtual doors to the more than 8.5 million households that will shop online for the holidays. The Dulles, Va.-based company said ShopAOL, its online shopping network, had added several new shopping features that are designed to make shopping through the site more convenient. AOL said the new services will be introduced over the next month as it heads into the holiday shopping season. With analysts expecting online holiday revenues to top $4 billion between Thanksgiving and the New Year, Web retailers are finding it necessary to reinvent their online shopping services in a bid to attract online shoppers to their sites. Shares of AOL continued their climb of recent weeks, adding 4-1/16 to 153-1/4 on the New York Stock Exchange, amid a broad upturn in Internet stocks on Monday. ''I think AOL actually will do very well,'' said Seema Williams, online retail analyst for market research firm Forrester Research. ''Shopping on AOL is not shopping on a(n) (online) mall.'' ''You're talking about being able to do things like single check out, single shipment and things like cross-retailer searches,'' Williams said. ''All those great functionalities that malls always promise, AOL is actually doing them.'' AOL said ShopAOL generates more than 400,000 online purchases daily, according to a study by market research firm Internet Research Group. The company said every day more than 30,000 new AOL members shop online for the first time. ShopAOL said it has more than 275 merchant partners, up from about 110 partners during the 1998 holiday season, which include eToys Inc. (NasdaqNM:ETYS - news), Gap Inc. (NYSE:GPS - news) and new additions iTurf Inc. (NasdaqNM:TURF - news), an online teen apparel retailer, and home furnishings company Crate & Barrel. ShopAOL's new features includes improved search tools designed to help consumers find products more easily, and AOL Quick Checkout, an ''electronic wallet'' service that securely stores customers' credit card and shipping information online. The new ShopAOL will also feature a shopping tool bar, designed to help consumers navigate from one ShopAOL department to another to locate products online, and a holiday gift guide, which through a survey service helps shoppers determine the perfect gift for people based on their likes and dislikes. Analysts said outside of fellow power retailers like Yahoo! Inc.'s (NasdaqNM:YHOO - news) retail network (http://shopping.yahoo.com), few multi-merchant sites will be able to draw in the number of consumers to use their services, primarily because it is more difficult to make Web shoppers aware of their sites. ''AOL is actually able to aggregate a lot of customers in the same place,'' Williams said, referring to the captive audience of more than 19 million AOL members, as well shoppers on its CompuServe service and several Web site properties. ''Most online malls have a hard time doing that because they don't have any brand and they don't have any good reason for shoppers to start there first,'' Williams said, adding that smaller shopping networks often have to spend a small fortune on advertising just to make consumers aware of their services. AOL also operates AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ (''I Seek You''), a youth-oriented online messaging service and Netscape Netcenter, aimed at Internet users at work. Collectively, these sites attract as many as 100 million unique visitors a month.