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It seems that online shopping is bucking the trends continuing to grow at a healthy pace in the current economy, which in a way is not surprising. The really interesting question here is why?

We think the answer is simply increasing comfort with shopping online generally allowing more sales to move from the shop front to the online store, with nothing to do specifically with the economic climate.

What does this mean for you?

If we are right and this is just a continuing trend then you can no longer ignore the potential of online commerce as it will represent an increasingly larger slice of the pie. What you need is to match this trend in increasing your focus on your website and ensuring you look at it in the same way you view your shop front.

This goes beyond online shopping to every other activity undertaken by a customer when shopping, from researching the product to comparing prices to evaluating brands and confidence in a retailer. This is reflected in what you have to consider for your website, let's just look at three  

website design

Your website design must be the perfect balance between form and function. Appealing, attractive, engaging but also robust, easy to use and feature rich. It must reflect your brand identity, market position and desired image accurately without turning into a pretty picture that does very little. 

digital marketing activities

The best way to reach online shoppers is online so you need to consider your email marketing strategy, online advertising on search engines, directories and other popular sites and how you will track all this activity and measure it. Sophisticated digital promotion techniques like random serving, scheduling and cross linking are no longer a nice to have but a crucial part of attracting and retaining online shoppers. As an added bonus they also help with your SEO! 

depth, currency and relevance of content

Simply having a product name, price and expecting people to buy it is at best optimistic! If your business website is the destination of choice to research information about your product, chances are the sale will also happen on your website. So you need an easy way keep your content fresh, relevant and cost effective. You simply cannot afford to have limits on how many pages your website has, how much content you can add or how many times you can change it.

Of course there's a lot more to it than that, but taking care of these points will have you truly on your way to an effective website and enable to claim your piece of the growing online shopping pie.