Charge it! Hoping to coax more teens into buying online, marketers offer teens their own brand of plastic. (National).

Imagine you own a shop selling CDs, or shoes, or clothes, or books, or sports equipment. A teen girl enters with $155, but all she spends with you is $1. It's not that your customer doesn't want to buy what you're selling. The problem is that your shop is online, and she doesn't have a credit card. To buy, she has to ask her parents for theirs.

That is the issue facing Internet retailers, or e-tailers, as they are known. Americans under 18 spend roughly $155 billion a year, according to Teen Research Unlimited, a consulting firm. And 80 percent of those teens are online already. But they spend a paltry $1 billion of their money there, according to Jupiter Media Metrix, an Internet research firm.

Many teens might like to do more than download free music, play games, and ping each other with instant messages. But the preferred currency of the Web--the credit card--remains out of reach for many teenagers. Often, they have to ask for their parents' plastic if they want to buy something online. Adding this layer of parental screening to the purchase process is enough to send teenagers straight to the mall.

The three major credit-card companies have tried products intended to enable and encourage young consumers to spend online. MasterCard International is reportedly testing a teenage-oriented card, although the company will not talk about such a project. Visa USA rolled out its Visa Buxx card in 2000, to mixed results. American Express killed its year-old youth-oriented Cobaltcard effort in November. Analysts say too few teenagers were interested to justify the higher-than-expected cost.

"The idea of a teen card is a good one," says Aaron McPherson, a consulting firm analyst. "The card companies just haven't found the right formula yet."

Companies seem to agree that the cards should simply be debit cards that allow parents or others to put cash value into the card account through an advance. Pricing has been tricky. Because the credit-card companies do not charge interest for these cards, the companies must instead charge user fees.

According to Zack Martin, associate editor of Thomson Financial's Card Marketing magazine, an industry publication, many teenagers "get the card thinking it's a good idea, but they realize they're getting nickel-and-dimed on fees, so they don't use them anymore."

Meanwhile, Internet merchants are not sure whether these cards have induced more teenagers to shop online. But some e-tailers are hopeful the debit-card programs will eventually make a difference in sales.

Consider Bertelsmann's CDNow music Web site. Sharon Siegel, a senior vice president for marketing, says about a third of its visitors are 12 to 24 years old, "so a big chunk are teens." But only about 3 percent of the site's paying customers are teens.

DEBIT CARDS OR ONLINE MONEY

The dearth of credit cards available to teenagers "is clearly an obstacle" to their spending more on the site, Siegel says. That's why CDNow is likely to promote the Visa Buxx card.

McPherson, the analyst, says teenagers would warm to the idea of online debit cards much more quickly if more companies followed the lead of Coca-Cola's RocketCash, basically online money for teens. About 2.3 million young people have deposited cash into their RocketCash accounts, which function like debit cards at scores of online merchants.

McPherson is even more enthusiastic about the company's customer loyalty promotions, like the one RocketCash has conducted with Sprite since late 2000. In that effort, Sprite customers find RocketCash codes beneath their bottle tops. The codes are redeemable for RocketCash that itself can be redeemed for merchandise at several online stores.

"We see loyalty programs like this as a way to prime the pump, and get more teens to try it out," McPherson says. If big brands are involved, marketing might be more effective.

Still, even if MasterCard, Visa, and American Express were to put a card in the hands of every teenage Internet user, analysts say it might not increase their online spending. Teenagers may still prefer the mall in most instances. Meanwhile, the few online categories that are aimed specifically at young shoppers seem to manage without the widespread use of teenage debit cards.

One example is Delia's, which sells clothes and accessories to teenage girls through catalogues, stores, and a Web site. Delia's has more than 3 million customers who shop online, with more than half of them buyers, according to Evan Guillemin, the company's chief operating officer.

Guillemin estimates that 1 percent or less of the company's online customers use debit cards, while 5 percent to 10 percent pay by check. The rest, he says, use their parents' credit cards.

"If you can deliver the right merchandise in a way that's compelling for the kid, and establish their trust, they'll find a way to buy it from you," he says. "Most kids have access to a credit card, one way or another."

FOCUS: Internet Retailers Search for Ways to Snag More Teen Shoppers

TEACHING OBJECTIVES

To help students understand a growing trend among Internet retailers and credit-card companies: the push to develop debit cards that teens can use to make online purchases.

Discussion Questions:

* Would you make purchases online if you had the opportunity?

* What do you believe are some of the major benefits and drawbacks of shopping online?

* Should online debit cards for teenagers have some type of built-in spending limit?

* Should teens be allowed to have credit cards?

CLASSROOM STRATEGIES

Critical Thinking: Refer to the opening paragraph and the example of the girl with $155 who spends only $1. Have any students had this experience--shopping online but buying little or nothing because of the credit-card issue?

Carry this thought to another level by discussing the differences between online shopping and mail shopping. Ask students whether online merchants need to employ selling strategies different from those of brick-and-mortar stores. What would e-tailers have to do to ensure that teenagers choose them over shopping-mail stores?

Follow up on the differing selling strategies of stores and online merchants. Have students role-play online merchants. Their job is to write headlines and five or six sentences of online copy that would emphasize the convenience of online shopping and pique teens' interest in their product.

Then refer students to the fee issue associated with debit cards. Are teens unrealistic about having to pay a fee to use the card? Do the nickel-and-dime fees take unfair advantage of teens? What would they consider a reasonable fee for using an online debit card? Should fees be based on the value of purchases each month?

Discussion: Tell students that critics of teen online purchase plans say the process brings with it the danger of enticing teens into a system of irresponsible spending because cards require no immediate cash expenditure. Is this a reasonable concern, or are most teens savvy enough to keep their spending under control?

BOB TEDESCHI writes the E-Commerce Report for The New York Times.