Secure transactions for transfer of funds is certainly the major problem with Internet purchasing, but there are a number of other significant limitations to the budding online marketplace. While a big- name retailer may be on the Net, it is still a rare exception that makes its entire product line available to the Net wanderer. The common theme among all Internet information sources is the difficulty in locating an applicable resource. There are plenty of Internet yellow pages in print, but none come anywhere close to comprehensiveness for businesses on the Net. Stores come and go on the Net much quicker than they ever could downtown or in a mall.
Virtual malls provide an opportunity for more in-depth searches.
What is missing from all of the directory listings is a way to quickly distinguish the big stores from the small specialty shops, the storefronts with three items from the one with 300 and a network-wide product index. Two strategies can be the most successful. For the known item search, try to find the company with Yahoo, Lycos, or InfoSeek. Once you find a company's central server, it is usually, but not always, easy to find where the product information is located. The second strategy is to look for the type of product.