Shopping online can be an intimating experience in that there are so many ways to do it. You have to first decide whether it is one item or many that you have to get. Then you have to decide hot to find what you want and where to get the price. Then you have to decide whether buying online is even the best way to even do it.

Lets say that you would rather shop online than go to a typical brick and mortar shopping mall. Lets also assume you have more than one item to look for and lets assume that all of what you have to search for may not be at just one store. So you have to decide, do you go to multiple web sites of various types of stores or do you go to an online shopping mall. You do a search using on the major search engines for online shopping malls and find a lot of them but some are repeated more than once because of how they are defined.

You find that all online shopping malls are not created equal. You may find that some have just a few stores or categories for a certain niche market, some may not accept major credit cards or even some require you to actually leave the online mall site to make payment arrangements. Upon further analysis, you may find that some online shopping malls act as a go between where, although the merchandise passes through the mall, the actual supplier may be another store that just uses the mall as a broker to sell their goods and the actual merchandise comes from the store and not the mall. For this go between processes, you may have to pay a little more shipping and handling fees.

There is another way to shop through an of online and that is through a portal. This portal affords the customer to register, and then shop the actual stores that would anyway. The actual store handles the sale, credit card arrangements and customer service. The benefit of going through the portal is that the store you are shopping pays a cash rebate back to you for shopping through them. This rebate is credited back to the customer�s portal account and at the end of each period, typically monthly, and then the customer is issued a check for their rebate purchases. The of portal shopping mall works with the stores to give the highest rebates possible and varies these amounts as they see fit. Each month, the portal shopping mall offers specials like free shopping or coupon codes applicable for certain items or additional discounts for certain quantities. The more you shop at these particular stores, the more you save. Both the customer and the stores benefit by this process so it is a win win situation for everyone.

The portal shopping mall concept does have a customer service contact to assure you get your rebates. If for some reason you don�t get credit for a purchase, you merely contract them and they work with you to resolve any dispute. Clearly, this may be the best way to of online .