Bob Kolasky is the managing editor of IntellectualCapital.com. His e-mail address is bob@voxcap.com

Earlier this winter, the Saint Louis Galleria, a large shopping mall in metropolitan St. Louis, tried to stop the inevitable. Its owners issued an edict to the mall's tenants: Cease promoting your company's Web site on mall property. The ban applied to all store signs promoting dot-com sites, www-advertising and display promotions for the purchase of merchandise over the Internet. Weeks later, protests from its retail tenants and bad publicity forced the mall to back down.

Even after the reversal, however, the mall's management defended its initial decision. "We felt if our stores redirected their shoppers to an alternate sales channel through e-commerce promotion, it would not only hurt the individual store sales but all retailers at Saint Louis Galleria," Mark Zorensky, the president of Hycel Properties Co., which owns the Galleria, told the Associated Press.

This story is symbolic of a larger trend. Dot commerce has arrived, and the so-called "brick-and-mortar" retailers are clearly running scared. And perhaps they should be.

Hycel might have been fighting a losing battle but it is easy to see the root of its fear. Shopping malls are in serious danger, argues Andrew Whinston, the co-director of the Center for Research and Electronic Commerce.

"As more people go online, you have more choices and more competition," Whinston says, adding that eventually the now-dominant shopping-mall model will collapse. "E-commerce will eliminate malls. Big stores will have to cannibalize their own sales by opening their own Web sites, and small shops will realize why [they should not] pay rent when they can move their business to eBay."

The stark numbers

E-commerce is the genie let out of the bottle

Whinston is among an ever-growing number of people who are bullish about e-commerce's potential to fundamentally shift the workings of the American economy. They look at the dollar amounts, the sales trends, the revenue projections and the market potential, and see that the genie is out of the bottle -- no one can put it back.

Online consumer numbers are impressive. Forrester Research estimates that 17 million households will shop online by the end of 1999. It projects that consumers will spend about $20 billion on e-commerce in 1999, compared with nearly $5 billion in 1998.

The future seems even brighter, as many project the hockey-stick growth of e-commerce will continue into the next decade. Among the most optimistic is Sun Microsystems chief science officer John Gage, who projected revenues of $5 trillion annually by the middle of next decade at a forum on e-commerce taxation held recently in Seattle

Big offline businesses are increasingly resigned to the reality that is e-commerce, and the ones with the resources to compete are making sure they can. Earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal reported that K-Mart had partnered with Yahoo! to help promote K-Mart's fledging e-commerce offering. This comes on the heels of rumblings about a deal between Wal-Mart and America Online (AOL).

Because of trends and projections such as those -- as well as the fact that, through commercial advertising, e-commerce has become ubiquitous to the American consumer -- experts are looking at this holiday season as a bellwether for the future of online consumerism. If Amazon.com is really going to compete someday with Wal-Mart -- and if Outpost.com can put Circuit City out of business -- then it is probably time that consumer sales for these online upstarts begin to catch up with their brick-and-mortar counterparts.

At the virtual mall

With those questions in mind, I did what so many others need to do to justify the e-commerce hype: I embarked on an e-Christmas. I was not alone. Forrester has projected that consumers will spend $9 billion on the Internet between Thanksgiving and New Year's Day, and the early results have been impressive.

PCData reports that every day between Dec. 6 and Dec. 10, more than 600,000 Americans made purchases online, about 2.5% of the total number of Americans on the Web during that period. Meanwhile, Nielsen/NetRatings finds that traffic to e-commerce sites was up 22.7% between Dec.5 and Nov. 1. AOL, Yahoo! and Lycos are all reporting record online traffic and sales this holiday season.

I suspect my experience was fairly typical of most semi-early adapters to the technology. I am moderately technically literate and a regular user of the Internet. But before this holiday, my e-commerce experience largely had been the occasional impulse buy of something I knew I wanted, the booking of travel arrangements and regular trips to Amazon.com. Never before had I gone shopping, as in the mall, to browse the variety of stores in search of a not-yet-determined gift.

I visited more than 2 dozen sites. Some were as well designed as any store in the mall. (Living.com, Cooking.com, EnchantedMoon.com.) Others were incomprehensible. (Just what the heck is Mercata.com anyway? I'm still waiting for my BankOne "e-wallet" to work.) And others were, I think, the real strength of e-commerce: something different. (MySimon.com directed me to the cheapest price around. Buy.com is a discount superstore without that shabby "discount" feel. eBay found my mother that unique gift that I could never find offline.)

I am the kind of customer that Jupiter Communications suggests e-commerce sites should go after these holidays -- someone who is not likely to purchase all my gifts online. Jupiter reports, "Though 20 million online shoppers are expected to shop online this holiday season, they will spend just a fraction of their holiday budget online." Online shops need to get us browsers and occasional buyers to become regular consumers. If the holidays are indeed about marketing, count me as a marketing victory.

If not hooked, I am certainly convinced. For certain purchases, e-commerce makes all the sense in the world -- and I will rely on it more in the future than in the past. But I also remain somewhat of a skeptic. I cannot see most American consumers buying the bulk of their clothes and furniture online, nor can I see them abandoning the socialization of the mall in favor of the monotony of buying online.

Consumer-based e-commerce has a long way to go before it replaces traditional consumer commerce. For all the positive trends that analysts and e-commerce evangelizers note, even the most rosy projections have Americans spending only around $12 billion online this holiday season, compared with $175 billion offline.

Don't believe (all) the hype

The lesson is to beware the e-commerce hype -- particularly as it pertains to the retail season. It is making a difference, but it has not yet signaled a revolution.

Whinston, as big an e-commerce bull as there is, admits as much. Consumer e-commerce is, in a sense, "the same process with some variation. It is almost the same as taking catalogues and putting them on the Web," he says Whinston. "With Amazon.com and such, you get greater efficiencies, but not radically so."