The key difference between traditional retail and on-line retail is that salespeople build a personal relationship with the customer. They ask questions, listen to responses, and observe the customer’s behavior. Customers do the same thing: react to answers, observe the salesperson’s behavior, and form opinions about the product, the salesperson, and the process, any or all of which can strongly influence their decision. By contrast, the plain world of Web pages lacks these important interactive social mechanisms. A clickstream is not a conversation.