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

• Author: Tedeschi, Bob
• Position: 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...