MAC-O-RAMA IS about as close to an Internet garage shop as you can get.

Except it's in the living room and dining room and sometimes even the kitchen of a family home at the end of a dirt road in Puyallup, Wash. Customers of this software retailer, which helps Macintosh enthusiasts locate hard-to-find software, know it as the company that runs cute little promotions on popular Mac Web sites. Every package sent out includes a caramel apple lollypop. Each week Mac-o-rama runs a free drawing for Mac stuff. And every three months customers are mailed a Mac-o-rama reminder card that sometimes includes seasonal chocolates.

"We're focused on service so people who come to us are satisfied with what they buy, what they need, and who we send them to," said co-founder Jason Dietrich.

Mac-o-rama's service shows in small ways. During the winter holidays each package is handwrapped and finished with a bow. The owners talk to customers who call with questions (a toll-free number is prominently displayed on the homepage site). But Mac-o-rama is at a crossroads. The Internet startup is growing faster than its owners ever expected. Although it's less than two years old, it is already facing the growing pains that are forcing the owners to take a step back and assess its direction.

When the Lindsay sisters and Dietrich started Mac-o-rama, they never expected the company to sell more than $1 million worth of products in the first 18 months and grow at a rate of about 24 percent a quarter. They didn't really know what they were getting into.

"Last year we knew we had to make it happen fast or we weren't going to make it," Alicia Lindsay said. "Our financial management wasn't really good at first." During last year's holiday season, Alicia said, "we made a ton of money. But we spent a ton and a half." The company is not yet profitable but expects to be by 2001. Now Mac-o-rama has a budget that Lindsay checks each day to make sure revenues are keeping up with expenses.

The founders have been to seminars that teach dot-com startups how to find the venture capital and executives needed to take the company public. They hear the stories of other 20-somethings who get rich off their ideas. But they aren't sure that going public is the road they want to take. If they bring in outside executives, they wonder, will they still be able to focus on customer service and carry one or two copies of software?

Friends and family members have already invested $500,000. If they take a wad of venture capital will they lose control? "We like having control of the company," Alicia said. Right now the Mac-o-rama Internet site is essentially running itself. The company's 7,500 customers order regularly and keep the pace inside that brown house fairly calm.

So during the quiet summer months the Mac-o-rama founders are working on new partnerships and business arrangements, plotting their next moves, and trying to decide what to do about their increasingly cramped quarters, where all the software is warehoused.

To expand their business, they have started an affiliate program in which they will refer customers to brick-and-mortar Mac retailers for computers in exchange for a promotion from those dealers. They want to create Spanish- and Japanese-language Web sites for the growing number of Macintosh users in those nations. And they're working on creating communities for Macintosh users on the Mac-o-rama site.

And they have to move fast. Because by September they'll be too busy with the holiday rush to think about anything more than wrapping packages and filling orders.