YOU can hear all the retailers revving up for Christmas - and many are looking to their online stores to provide a considerable slice of business this year.

BMRB, the market researcher, estimates that 4.8m Britons have already shopped online in 1999 and that 2.4m more will do so over the Christmas period. Online spending will amount to £400m this December alone, reckons pollster NOP, three times as much as was spent last December.

The good news is that there is far more choice around for the online shopper and retailers are, in theory, much more clued up about how to do it. But providing a website that is easy to navigate, fast to download, and robust, is hard enough. Making sure things are delivered on time is even tougher.

Tomorrow Virgin Net (www.virgin.net), the internet service provider (ISP) and web portal, launches Virgin Recommends, a selection of preferred retailers covering a range of shopping categories, from lingerie to computers.

Virgin has vetted the retailers for reliability and quality of service - and each will offer 5% cashback on their goods. Virgin will operate as a kind of shopping agent on behalf of the consumer, chasing deliveries where necessary.

It's a good idea. My only concern is whether Virgin Net is geared up to handle the likely demand. About half of its 1m members already shop online regularly, yet there are just 20 Virgin Net staff so far in a call centre to handle customer service enquiries. Let us hope that is enough.

Freeserve (www.freeserve.net), Britain's biggest ISP owned by Dixons, relaunched its shopping channel - Shop@FreeServe - over the weekend.

More than 60 retailers have signed up to the service so far. They have to put their name to a quality guarantee that includes, among other things, the right for customers to cancel their orders if goods aren't delivered within an agreed period.

This kind of quality assurance is necessary to convince more people to shop on the net. The main issue is not security any more, but the quality of the shopping experience, from order to delivery.

Further help for shoppers comes from British Telecom, which has just launched BTSpree (www.btspree.com), a comparison shopping agent. It allows surfers to compare prices on products from 21 categories, as well as buy online from both British and American retailers.

BTSpree claims to offer more than 2m items for sale, including all the usual suspects, such as flowers, lingerie, clothing, books, games, CDs and gifts. More than 70 retailers have signed up already.

And Letsbuyit.com opens for business tomorrow claiming savings of up to 70% on some high-street prices. It aims to use collective consumer power to bring prices down.

From tomorrow you will also be able to buy gift vouchers online via Jomono (www.jomono.com). You specify the amount and your chosen retailer, then pay online using your credit or debit card. Jomono will send the voucher on to the recipient with your message. So far it has nine participating retailers, including Hamleys, HMV and Jigsaw, but expects to have 25 by the end of the year. You can even send a voucher by e-mail and let the recipient choose the retailer at the Jomono website. How about that for the ultimate lazy Christmas present. I think Jomono should do well.

The Egg debacle continues. My e-mail inbox fairly sizzled with the frustrations of its online credit-card and banking customers. From the scores of e-mails I received, two chief complaints leap out.

Balance transfers on the credit card are taking up to 17 working days to effect and there appears to be a discrepancy between what the customer sees on screen and what Egg's computer systems say is the case.

The other problem - and this applies across the whole of e-commerce - is that e-mails are replied to either late or not at all. This is simply not good enough.

At least Egg acknowledges its difficulties and is trying to employ more customer-service staff. But for every day's delay, serious damage is being inflicted on its brand image.

A couple of readers did write to say their experiences with Egg have been extremely favourable. But they were outnumbered 40 to one.

As a postcript, I have now ditched the Gateway in favour of a lovely Dell computer, with its splendid three-year service warranty. It works beautifully so far.