Block · one region of the page, as the scanner read it. It may hold a whole story, part of one, several, or an advertisement; stitching blocks into articles is the next step. Text is supplied OCR.
Page 49 · column 1 of 4 · from the scan, no model involved
By John Pitts
Times Newspapers Writer
Planning to surf the Internet for holiday gifts? This season, online retailers promise it will be better. For their sakes, it better be.
For many consumers, the 1999 holiday season was the first for a serious effort at buying gifts on the Internet. For some, it was sufficiently disappointing that they may not try it again for a long time.
The textbook case for what happened is Toys-R -Us. In mid-November last year, the amount of traffic to the toy retailer's site, www.toysrus.com, so outstripped its capacity that the site crashed and remained somewhat unreliable throughout the holiday season.
But the site made other mistakes as well. It offered discounts on selected items purchased before Dec. 1 and then ran out of many of those items. An estimated 5 percent of the site's customers who bought toys before Dec. 11 for "guaranteed'' Christmas delivery got the cyber equivalent of lumps of coal in their stockings, as the company couldn't deliver. (They did give unhappy e-customers $100 gift certificates,
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