Hmmm, why not combine the two, I thought to myself. (Yes, it&singlequot;s true, I do draw a salary doing this.)

My criteria for the shoes was relatively simple: I wanted running shoes suitable for hiking, priced less than $100 that would also look decent enough to wear with casual clothes. But, shopping for shoes online, that was a scary prospect. It would have been one thing if I simply wanted to replace a pair that I already knew and loved. Such an online transaction would entail little more than finding the right model and size at the best price from a site that struck me as being relatively secure. This was different. I was venturing onto the information superhighway as a casual browser, unsure of exactly what I wanted.

Interestingly enough, before setting out on my adventure, I discovered that I fit the demographic profile The Yankee Group says is most likely to abandon an online shopping cart. That is, I&singlequot;m between 25 and 44 years old, with household income over $50,000, live in the suburbs, have been online for more than three years, have been shopping online for more than one year, and have shopped online in the past three months.

Well, Yankee Group, here goes nothing.

I decided I would limit my shopping to three sites:

1. The Athlete&singlequot;s Foot--For years I would only buy sports shoes at a friendly, neighborhood Athlete&singlequot;s Foot. It&singlequot;s a brand I recall fondly.

2. The Sports Authority--There&singlequot;s a Sports Authority store close to where I now live so I figured that if I bought something online and needed to return it doing so wouldn&singlequot;t be too hard.

3. FogDog--This was the big gamble. Someone recommended it a while back (whether it was a person or a magazine article, I can&singlequot;t recall) and I figured I&singlequot;d give it a try.

The Athlete&singlequot;s Foot (www.theathletesfoot.com)

Note the precise spelling and use of the article "The" in the URL, because failing to do so, you&singlequot;ll end up, like I did, at a cyber-squatter site and a comprehensive guide to the foot fungus of the same name.

Whatever enthusiasm I once had for the Athlete&singlequot;s Foot brand quickly evaporated when I landed at the site&singlequot;s home page. While the page loaded quickly enough and lacked flashy graphics--just like the consultants recommend--it was as if the company followed professional advice a little too literally. I was met by a confusing array of search options, so many that I had a moment of panic in deciding which one to choose. Did I want to search by category, by department, by category tabs (which were, strangely, different than the other category descriptions), by searching normally or by brand?

I finally located a beckoning tab marked "Running." Click. What?#! Only four pairs of shoes came up! Actually, I knew I had landed at some sort of "featured items" page because every e-commerce site I visit nowadays seems to have one, but finding the link that would take me to the site&singlequot;s full running shoe inventory proved to be a little like playing "Where&singlequot;s Waldo?"

When I did find the link, a selection of 209 models appeared, accompanied by a helpful filter that could sort by gender (never mind that I was in the Men&singlequot;s Running Shoes category), price-range and brand.

I organized the inventory list several different ways using the site&singlequot;s filters and found a couple possibilities. But nothing really reached out and grabbed me (shoes or site features). After navigating through 15 pages and feeling thoroughly uninspired I decided to move on.

The Sports Authority (www.thesportsauthority.com)

In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I have a strong aesthetic preference for Spartan simplicity. And SportsAuthority.com, like its brick-and-mortar counterpart, assaults one&singlequot;s senses with Normandy-like brutality. Like The Athlete&singlequot;s Foot, this site sported fast-loading pages and, unlike its competitor, leaving off "The" in the URL caused no problems. But I had to get off that home page before I went blind or cross-eyed.

Talk about going from one aesthetic extreme to the other, the "footwear" page was so Spartan, it made text-only wireless sites look flashy. But I shouldn&singlequot;t complain, I soon found the men&singlequot;s running shoe portion of the site (some credit must go to the previous site for helping me shorten my learning curve). Here, I found 98 models of shoes and the exact same filters as the Athlete&singlequot;s Foot side had--gender, price-range and brand.

Whether this is a credit to the site or not, I don&singlequot;t know, but it didn&singlequot;t take long for me to see that the store didn&singlequot;t carry many of the "trail" running shoes I wanted. Of the ones they did carry, however, there was a pair I had seen and considered as a possibility on the last site. They were the same price at both places. "I guess I should get them here," I unenthusiastically thought to myself, figuring that I should buy them from the Sports Authority because of the store&singlequot;s close physical proximity.

Just then my wife called and asked what I was doing. When I told her I was shopping for shoes online, she told me I was crazy, that it was a big waste of time because I really should try shoes on in a store before buying them. Apparently the Boston Consulting Group agrees with her, reporting in a study released in May that online items should not "require physical inspection prior to purchase."

Ignoring such sage advice, I soldiered on in the interest of market research.

FogDog (www.fogdog.com)

I must admit, I had little hope for FogDog. My patience had started to wear dangerously thin. I took a deep breath as I braced myself for the prospect of spending a wonderfully sunny lunch hour battling hordes of angst-ridden teens at the mall, despite all my online efforts to find a pair of shoes. "Online browsing sucks," I thought to myself, just at The Yankee Group study predicted I would.

But, hark, what yonder window breaks? It is the East and FogDog is the sun!

Seconds after typing the short, quirky, easy-to-remember URL into my browser appeared a home page that actually looked like it had been created by professional Web designers, not a bunch of boardroom yokels fresh from a company mandated seminar on how to use MS FrontPage.

The FogDog home page was relaxed and informative, uncluttered but effective. After lingering a moment to gaze at the cool graphics and breezy pictures of suburban-esque athletes to whom I aspired to be like, I clicked on a large, easy-to-spot link marked "Running Shop." Best of all, it happened to feature a background of someone running along--you guessed it--a hiking trial.

I effortlessly navigated to a whole section of shoes dedicated to "Trail Running,"--exactly what I&singlequot;d been looking for. Not only that, but I also discovered a link with tips for measuring your correct shoe size. My wife would be so proud.

I&singlequot;ll spare you the details of my sizing adventure, saying only that this hopelessly flawed measure-your-own-foot-with-pencil-and-paper exercise indicated that I wear a size 6 (which I definitely do not). Despite the unfortunate detour to the sizing page, I returned easily to where I had been shopping, finding in mere moments a pair of shoes that had all the elements I sought and more: They were in my price range, they were made for trails, they would look nice with other clothes, and they were the same brand as my favorite pair of shoes. "These are the shoes I want!" I thought to myself, this time enthusiastically, ignoring any brand loyalty or physical proximity issues that had attracted me to the other two sites.

Though at first I was leery of handing over my credit card number to an unknown online merchant, especially one named FogDog, the BizRate logo and the ever-trusted golden padlock icon in the lower-left corner of the browser set me at ease. After easily navigating through five sections of a secure checkout and printing out an order confirmation number, I was on my way, along with a new pair of shoes...hopefully.