The worldwide web may work well as a fancy display device, but its real power lies in interactivity. With the right interactive programming, an e-commerce site can be transformed into a sophisticated marketing and sales tool that offers every potential customer a personalized, responsive experience.

"Multimedia applications have transformed the web from a publishing medium to an interactive medium. The word 'interactive' has come to represent the most dramatic demonstrations of user control," says Stella Gassaway, co-author of "Designing Multimedia Web Sites."*

Innovations in web interactivity are emerging all the time. What follows is a sampling of key interactive elements that every global e-commerce website should consider.

To begin with, no e-commerce site offering a wealth of data, products and/or services can go wrong by including a site search engine on its home page. The reason: currently, too many websites are little more than elephantine filing cabinets floating in cyberspace - there is plenty of information, but digging for it can be irksome.

On-site search engines help solve this problem by offering visitors an easy, quick way to fetch very specific product data. A good example can be found at jobTrack Online. Here, job seekers can quickly find opportunities by searching the online database with keywords and/or words describing their skills.

Fidelity Investments also exploits its search engine skilfully. Here, visitors can search for information by fund, products and services or general information, and then further customize their search by entering in their own keyword.

Another very useful interactive time-saver are sites that offer visitors the ability to surf in "text-only" mode. While many websites seem to feature all sorts of technological bells and whistles, smarter e-commerce site builders realize there are still many people cruising the net with relatively slow 28.8 kilobit-per-second modems and low-power PCs. If these potential customers are offered "text-only" access, they can quickly reach the product data they want without being forced to endure interminable download times for the fancy graphics, frames and the like.

Indeed, with just a little forethought, a business can design a site with time-saving interactivity that puts it leagues ahead of its competitors. Elegant English Hotels, for example, creates big efficiencies for its multinational visitors by offering its site in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Japanese. That is a big advantage over competing sites that are rendered in only one language.

Meanwhile, as some critics of the net continue to bemoan the medium as yet another agent of modern-day alienation, smarter e-commerce players are busy using interactive web tools to build communities such as those created by online "bulletin boards" or "forums."

Elite Trader, a virtual community for stockmarket "day traders", for example, offers a wide variety of bulletin boards featuring ongoing virtual discussions on online brokerage evaluations, trading strategies, general information on day trading and the like. Essentially, such bulletin boards are the wired world's answer to the office water cooler of days past.

Then there are "chat rooms," one of the community building tools which were so crucial in the development of America Online into the world's largest internet service provider. A kind of point in cyberspace where people can "congregate" and exchange text messages with one another in real time, the chat room's continuing appeal is that the experience is "live." Everyone participating in a chatroom gets to read instantly and respond to another's words scrolling across their PC screens.

Not surprisingly, a number of e-commerce sites have added chat rooms to help promote community. But BestCalls, a free access virtual community, is offering an interesting new spin on the concept. Visitors here can listen in on telephone calls between select analysts and company officials, which are regularly made after important companies issue earnings reports.

Yet another play on interactivity that helps establish a sense of community are "members only" tools and domains to foster the feeling that customers are more than a number in cyberspace. Vanguard, for example, takes great pains in communicating to fund members that they are indeed special with domains within the site devoted exclusively to institutional investors, investment advisors and overseas investors.

Finally, many net users cannot get enough of what has come to be known as "cool tools," or new breakthroughs in interactive technology that enliven the net surfing experience. At The 1st Music Shop, for example, potential customers are able to sample free downloads of tunes in the new MP3 and Real Audio music format. Visitors to the Financenter can take advantage of online calculators for working out and analyzing home and car loans, credit cards, investing, budgeting, retirement and more. And at BankNet, customers are among the first to write electronic, digitally signed cheques.

Meanwhile, visitors to Beauchamp Estates' can take virtual reality "walk-throughs" of select properties. And visitors to Luxottica Eyewear can play with several interactive tools to determine which products best suit their facial structure and preferences. Calgary's CICT television, gives web fanatics access to a live camera or "Webcam" view of the city that is updated periodically. And at the website for Edward Domanskis, a California-based plastic surgeon site, prospective patients equipped with cameras on their PCs can schedule a consultation for plastic surgery online - from the comfort of their homes.

Of course, the prospect of upgrading a site with all this new interactivity may cause some grumbling among web designers who may have just recently finished building an e-commerce site. But given the high financial stakes involved, it appears inevitable that interactivity will soon be considered de rigeur for e-commerce. And in the process, the medium will be transformed into something eminently more useful, personable - and profitable. Contact Joe Dysart

* By Stella Gassaway and Gary Davis. Hayden Books, Indianapolis, US. ISBN 1568303084.