There is a lot of buzz this year about the rise and rise of online shopping. E-retail giants like Yahoo Shopping and Amazon.com have already broken season al sales records, and the air is ringing with merry predictions that this holiday period will see the world's first online-retail profits.

Wait. How can that be? If e-commerce is so huge, how come it has not been profitable already? The answer, of course, is simple: It is not that huge, after all -- not yet, anyway. Growing, yes, but universal? Not by a long shot. Everybody shops, but of the whole global sea of shoppers, only a small proportion shops online, and of that tiny pool of trendsetters, only a positively minuscule proportion has dipped its toes into anything besides books, music and maybe videos, e-commercially speaking.

That is why the retail dot-coms are keeping their fingers crossed ahead of this quarter's returns. This is being touted as their breakthrough season, but they are quite aware that in the big picture of global commerce, they are still no more than, well, a dot. A succinct reminder that skepticism is still in order was offered late last month by a Merrill Lynch Internet analyst with the wonderfully sobering name of Mr. Henry Blodget. On hearing that Lycos and Yahoo! had just recorded their strongest online shopping days to date, Mr. Blodget said coldly, "We do not regard this information as particularly meaningful."