OK, yet another company has come up with a way to promote its business and give away free gas.

Actually, as far as I'm concerned, the free gas is kind of a bonus. EBillme sounds very interesting, and just the sort of thing I should tell my mother-in-law about or any other person I've ever met, who is uncomfortable shopping online.

Some people (and you may be one of them) tend to feel weird about putting their credit card information online (but they feel no reservations about handing their credit card to a teenage waiter, who takes the card away to run it through a machine and, for all you know, jot down the numbers and later steal your identity, but I digress). Anyway, eBillme is a web site that takes that fear away.

So about that free gas: people who spend $100 or more online and pay for their products, using eBillme for the very first time at the checkout, can get a free $20 gas card that can be used at Shell, Exxon or Chevron -- your choice. There's even more information here.

So what is eBillme? Well, here's how it works. You shop online, and when you're at checkout, you "select eBillme as your payment option," according to the web site. "A copy of the eBill will be mailed to you for your records."

After you select that, you go to your bank's web site, and you go to the bill pay section. There will be instructions in your eBill (which was emailed to you) that explain how to add eBillme as a payee, and then," according to eBillme's web site, "you pay for your order -- the same way you pay for your other bills."

Not every retail web site in the world uses eBillme, so you have to either look and see if there's an eBillme option at the checkout of any online retail web site or go to the following specific stores that does work with eBill, and the major ones include: TigerDirect, Crutchfield, Buy.com and Shopper's Choice. So if you happen to doing any major shopping soon and know you'll be spending at least $100, you might want to consider doing it through eBillme. The free $20 gas card promotion lasts from now until September 30.

Alas, this is only for first time users of eBillme, and so you can only get the $20 gas card once. And if you're already a user of eBillme? I guess get a relative to pay for something online and split the card? I don't know -- don't blame me -- I'm just the messenger.

Geoff Williams is a business journalist and the author of C.C. Pyle's Amazing Foot Race: The True Story of the 1928 Coast-to-Coast Run Across America (Rodale).