At malls and stores around the country, retailers are bracing for a slow holiday shopping season, with little or no growth expected over last year. But in the virtual world, it could be a different story. Online holiday revenue will jump 17%, to $13.1 billion, Jupiter Research predicts. One factor is the growing number of consumers using high-speed lines from homes and offices to shop online.

The challenge for E-retailers is to figure out how to best serve both dial-up and broadband customers to maximize sales. Broadband customers "buy more because they have the overall better experience," says Dave Towers, VP of E-commerce operations at clothing retailer J. Crew Group Inc. The average broadband shopper plans to spend $287 this holiday season, while dial-up users plan to spend $211, according to Yahoo and ACNielsen's most recent Internet Confidence Index, a quarterly survey of 1,000 adults. Still, J. Crew has designed its Web site to serve the majority of its customers, those with 56-Kbps modems, Towers says.

Yet the percentage of consumers with broadband access is reaching the point where it makes sense for at least some retailers to add capabilities such as zoom, streaming video, 3-D graphics, and high-resolution images to make their products more attractive to those online buyers. About a quarter of households with computers -- 17 million -- have high-speed access, up from 17%, or 10.5 million, last year, according to Gartner Dataquest.

Increasingly, E-retailers offer options on their Web sites that give broadband customers the experiences they want while not forgetting about the dial-up majority. Victoria's Secret gives online customers the option to click on its "12 Days Of Sexy Gift Ideas" movie, followed by a screen that shows the products featured, a description of each, and a convenient Buy Now link. It also added product pages to let customers view items from different angles. "We knew customers wanted it and had broadband to use it," says Ken Weil, VP of new media. The National Hockey League, which found that 76% of its 12 million monthly visitors log on via broadband, now offers hour-long clips of streaming video and audio at 56 Kbps and 300 Kbps. "You keep reading that broadband hasn't been adopted much in the home," says Keith Ritter, president of NHL Interactive Cyber Enterprises. "But that's not true for hockey fans."

E-retailers don't have hard figures on how broadband access translates into dollars -- or won't share them. "We know that broadband has a positive impact on our sales and profitability," says Noel Nelson, director of online sales and profitability for Recreational Equipment Inc. REI's Web site generated $81 million in sales last year, about 11% of the company's total, up from about $64 million in 2000.

Sharper Image Corp.'s site generates the most dollars on an hourly basis in the middle of the day, when many people are accessing the site over high-speed links from the office. "Broadband is a major segment of our business," says Greg Alexander, senior VP of IT. The company, which gets about 15% of its business from the Web, gears its site for broadband users: The main image of the product on each page is big, the site uses Macromedia Flash technology, and customers can view video clips of selected products. "We don't force it down their throats, but we give them the option to use the rich media so they can understand our products visually," Alexander says.

A variety of services and software lets retailers know how customers access their sites. Tower Records uses a tool from Fireclick Inc. to track the 46% of shoppers who connect at speeds faster than 56 Kbps and the 26% who use speeds greater than 100 Kbps. Knowing that a significant percentage of visitors use high-speed links "helps us determine how heavy our pages can be," says Kevin Ertell, Tower's VP of online operations.

REI uses software and services from Keynote Systems Inc. to measure how quickly its pages are being displayed and whether customers access the site via broadband or narrowband. REI found that customers who access the site via broadband stay online longer and view more pages. "We used to be careful about access speeds and used small images," systems architect Rod Ketchum says. "Now we can do a lot more because of broadband and caching. We serve very rich pages." For example, customers can get detailed product information and learn how to use a kayak or put up a tent. REI even bolstered its site to handle more feature-rich content: It recently upgraded to IBM WebSphere 5.1, added Oracle's database clustering for redundancy, and installed a second DS-3 line for improved disaster recovery on its 45,000-page site. "We'll look at more tools to leverage broadband as we move forward," Nelson says.