How much of your buying do you do online?

I definitely will go online to check out a product line initially. However, I've been burned by ordering online, and ended up with product that I didn't think looked to be the quality that is up to my standard. So I have stopped doing that unless I'm already familiar with the product and the company. About 90 percent of the time, I buy my products at shows. The rest of the time I do some buying online if I have been able to see the product before in person.

I must be old fashioned, because even for reorders I'm still much more comfortable ordering from catalogs. I find it more convenient being able to go through the pages and write up my order, even though I do use my laptop a lot.

I think it is especially difficult to use an online catalog when you're doing design work with a client. You're fumbling around trying to get to the website and it is time consuming.

Online research is something we do a lot. We are always out looking at new things; it is a good way to see things that are not available here, and the Internet is our first point of contact for those companies.

As far as buying new product on the Internet, we don't do a lot of that because it is a touchy-feely business, and it's nice to see the quality. It is often difficult to see size and scale and get the colors right, and all those things that are so important to planning your stories and your store. Even a catalog is easier. So for new products, online is probably only about 1 percent of the total buy. The only place that may be a little bit more useful is in books and music. My husband, who buys those, does a lot of his purchases that way. But that is a whole different ball game from the rest of the store.

Reordering, we love that. It's such a joy when a company has a website that is up to date with friendly reordering. I think a good example is Department 56; even credits and claims can be done online. It makes my office manager happy. It has been a big time saver for us and I think, in the long term, for them too.

We do about 25 percent of our buying online; we certainly do a lot more sourcing online than that, but some companies aren't set up for [e-commerce]. They want to restrict access; they don't want to put all that information out there. Some have security protected sites where repeat customers can use a password. We buy from our three major suppliers that way, and that relationship works out very well. They put specials on there and we can pass the savings on to our customers. The rep still gets paid, but we don't have to wait.

But a lot of companies don't want to deal with stuff online. Some are very comfortable with it and some are not. The thing that is really annoying is when the website asks for a zip code instead of a zip or postal code. You know that company is not going to be Canadian friendly. If the company is set up to deal with Canadians, it is easy. If they haven't taken Canadians into account, it is one thing after another.