There are two million e-commerce sites on the Web. Here are some easy ways to get yours noticed.

It's been a tough 12 months for e-tailers, but that's not to say customers aren't spending money online. They areââ,¬"in droves. Online retail sales are expected to reach US$65 million this year, an increase of 45 percent over 2000, according to a Shop.org study conducted by the Boston Consulting Group.

But in the short-term, online sales growth in categories of physical merchandise like books and technology products threatens to level off this year, as consumers throw more money toward sites that hawk travelââ,¬"rated the most lucrative online category at $13.8 billion last year by the Boston Consulting Groupââ,¬"and related services.

For e-tailers, stiffer competitionââ,¬"and leaner timesââ,¬"means you have to step up efforts to bring customers to your site and encourage them to buy. But you don't have to spend a fortune. Web-based services can give your site an instant liftââ,¬"from easy 3D product imaging and personalisation tools to expanded payment options and real-time customer surveys.

Sometimes the only incentive to buy your customers need is a better view of your products. Just ask John Rogers, director of e-commerce for Orvis, a national outdoor outfitter.

Although the company generates $300 million in annual salesââ,¬"mostly through mail orderââ,¬"Rogers suspected that a dynamic online catalog could encourage sales of Orvis's high-end fishing gear. But he didn't want to spend a lot of time and money integrating complex 3D imaging software into his existing site's back end.

Point Cloud, a 3D image-hosting service, offered to take care of that. "They had the technology to shoot the products for us and serve the images up to our customers," Rogers says. "All we had to do was link to their site."

With Point Cloud, Orvis.com shoppers can see selected products from any viewing angle, zooming in and out on fine details. The service offers two options: Photograph the products from several angles yourself, or let Point Cloud take care of it in about five working days. Then add the links for the 3D product shots to your site. Point Cloud charges $8.50 per hosted image per month; it also offers a revenue-sharing pricing model.

Rogers now uses Point Cloud to showcase 70 to 100 Orvis catalog products. Though load times can be slower for shoppers with dial-up connections, Rogers isn't disappointed. "The products with the biggest lift in sales are detailed products like expensive fly reels or specialty waders where people want to see the extra features," he says.

Top five reasons to enhance your e-store

1. Give customers convenience. Smart search tools and multiple payment options create a hassle-free shopping experience at your Web site.
2. Let products sell themselves. Visual enhancements like 3D imaging make your products pop off the page and give your customers the info they need.
3. Avoid tech headaches. Add-ons can cost pennies on the dollar compared with full-featured solutions. Plus, someone else handles installation and maintenance.
4. Boost sales. Don't wait for customers to fill their cartsââ,¬"use a personalisation tool to suggest related products.
5. Make comptitors jealous. Impress visitors and woo them away from rival businesses by offering unique services and features.

Attract more customers

West Marine, a leading aftermarket reseller of boating accessories in the United States, has 240 stores nationwide, plus a successful catalog and Internet business. The company figured it could improve Web sales even more by offering customers a personalised shopping experience.

When Tony Gasparich, vice president of Internet operations for West Marine, went looking for a way to up-sell and cross-sell products online, expensive setup costs nearly killed the project. "We didn't know whether we'd get a huge pop in sales or see increased conversion rates, so we wanted to experiment in a way that wouldn't be too risky," he says. "Making an investment of, say, half a million dollars in one year for licensing software and hiring one to two people to manage the personalization program just didn't make any sense for a site of our size."

Gasparich found an affordable personalisation service that was also easy to add to the West Marine siteââ,¬"a simple matter of pasting HTML tags on each page. For six months, the hosted service successfully tracked online shoppers and instantly offered up specials based on the products that customers were considering. The personalisation serviceââ,¬"along with other site additionsââ,¬" helped boost the time spent browsing by 20 percent and the number of page views by 30 percent. But then Gasparich noticed the system's performance dragging, so he removed the feature from the site. At press time, the company that offered the personalisation service sat on shaky financial ground.

Though frustrating, the experience has not soured Gasparich on personalisation technology. "I absolutely believe that there is value in it," he says. "We would give another chance to a service that's affordableââ,¬"and secure."

And Gasparich hasn't shied away from using other hosted services to drive sales. For example, West Marine customers can search and view sailing maps. The free service from MapTech also links shoppers to maps and books for sale. West Marine gets a small profit for every MapTech item its customers purchase. "After we turned it on, the sales of MapTech products rose 5 percent more than total online growth," Gasparich says.

If you're looking to give your customers a unique experience at your e-store, Be Free Bselect offers a personalisation service at prices that won't rile the folks in accounting. Setup costs around US$5,000; after that you pay $5,000 per month, plus 15 cents every time someone buys a suggested sale item. Bselect works by tagging and tracking each page of your site. Frequent guests to your online store see products based on where they've been in the past and what they've bought. Bselect saves profile information by key, not a name or address. The system tracks customers anonymously, and they can delete profile details or opt out of future profiles through an online control panel (although Bselect saves customer purchase information indefinitely).

Steven Laff, Web developer for Supergo Bike Shops, started using Bselect about a year ago for the company's e-commerce site, Supergo.com. Before that Laff had developed his own recommendation tool, which didn't allow him to keep track of sale items. "If you have 600 items, manually recommending something becomes a nightmare," he says. "Bselect is ingenious. It doesn't recommend the same thing twice, and if it's a consumable product, you can set it up to be recommended again. Best of all, [Bselect] pays for itself five, 10, 15 times over per month."

Before Bselect, e-commerce orders made up only 33 percent of Supergo's overall mail-order sales; now they make up 60 percent.

Let them help themselves

ComfortLiving.com, a personal care site, offered its customers more than 3,000 items to choose fromââ,¬"but no search button. After receiving one too many complaints, Webmaster Joey Elbaum knew something had to be done before the company started losing customers.

Atomz Search turned out to be the solution Elbaum was looking for. "We went from nothing to a full site search in 20 minutes," he says. "It literally took just a few minutes to get up and running, including customising the look and feel of the search results page and integrating it with our existing site."

Atomz Search's advanced options include synonym searches, automatic word endings, and the ability to push specific products or documents to a customer in response to certain keywords. The system also indexes your entire Web site, either on demand or automatically according to a schedule. To ensure that your customers get the most appropriate results for their query, a Web-based panel lets you decide exactly which pages are pulled up when specific keywords are entered in the search box.

And you can keep tabs on buying trends with a reports feature. For example, search patterns on ComfortLiving revealed that customers wanted a brand of air cleaners and filters that the site didn't carry. "As soon as we started stocking that particular line of products, it quickly became one of our best-selling items," says Elbaum.

Prices for the Prime version of Atomz Search start at $100 per year for 50 pages. The Enterprise edition, for larger sites, averages between $30,000 and $100,000 per year for more than 1,000 pages. It also includes important extras like session ID support, which keeps tabs on your customers' shopping carts as they conduct searches and move from page to page.

Cash, cheque, or credit

As president and CEO of Donation Depot, Brandon Fix knows his nonprofit clients count on every penny they receive. Each month, the site handles up to $65,000 in cash donations for more than 17,000 nonprofit organisations in the United States and Canada. But not all of the money ended up at the charities. "When we do credit card and electronic funds transfer (EFT) processing of donations, the bank charges 3 to 4 percent of each transaction plus a monthly service charge," Fix says.

The fees represented a total of $18,000 in lost revenue for Donation Depot's clients last year. However with CheckSpace, which is providing free service to nonprofit organisations like Donation Depot through the end of 2001, Fix eliminated those losses altogether. Now, he says, "Everything goes to the charity. Even when we eventually incur charges, we expect to save 60 percent over normal EFT and credit card charges."

A hosted service, CheckSpace lets you accept electronic checks by transferring money from a customer's account to yours. To pay, shoppers click on a link to open an eCheck. The first eCheck your company receives each month is free. After that, you're charged $1 per check. CheckSpace also provides credit card payments, which cost $1 plus 2.4 percent of the transaction.

Most of the contributions made to Donation Depot average around $100. So even paying $1 per eCheck, Fix says, his organisation saves about $2 each transaction.

With CheckSpace you can also invoice or make payments to vendors, suppliers, or partners, the way Donation Depot does for its member nonprofit groups. "Now we're using CheckSpace on the back end," Fix says. "It's much less expensive than any other form of processing."

The service, which is free to set up, takes only minutes to add to your site, although integrating it completely with your accounting system (as Donation Depot did) takes a couple of weeks.

Expanding payment options isn't the only way to pull in more online sales. Until last fall, when customers surfed to the Robert Andrew Day Spa they could look but not buy. "We would send them to the Web site for information about our services, but then they'd have to call back to place an order for a gift certificate," says Melissa Hafh, vice president and general manager of the spa.

Amazia Gift-Connect, a hosted gift certificate service for small businesses, made it painless for the company to start selling its spa treatments onlineââ,¬"all the spa did was add a link to Amazia's site. The hosted service costs $39.95 a month; if you sign up for a full year, Amazia throws in two extra months free.

Gift-Connect manages the process from purchase to delivery. Robert Andrew customers order certificates either in dollar amounts or for specific spa packages, and then choose to pick up the certificates at the spa or have them delivered by e-mail, U.S. mail, or courier. The service processes orders and keeps a running list of customer contact information for future marketing efforts. Robert Andrew staff manage their end of the process via a Web-based interface.

Since activating Gift-Connect, the day spa has sold more than $10,000 in online gift certificates, nearly 25 times the amount it has paid for the service so far.

Ask them if they like you

Sometimes the truth hurtsââ,¬"but if your customers have a beef with your site, your products, or your company, it's in your interest to know about it. Online surveys from Clientize.com helped CatalogLink, a catalog request site get customers' honest opinions.

"[The survey] was a low-cost, highly effective way for us to gather information from our customers about their feelings toward our Web site," says James Ferrier, general manager. The company had Clientize design, host, and collect survey responses.

Boilerplate questions range from product feedback queries to purchasing plans. Each survey contains around 10 questions, which include multiple choice, yes-or-no, or free-form responses. For example, the standard product feedback survey is tailored to find out which products your customers use, how often, when, and why, among other things. The templates make it easy to customise each survey, and Clientize consultants can also help you create a survey from scratch.

To activate the survey simply add a link to your Web siteââ,¬"or send it to a specific customer list via e-mail. As responses roll in, Clientize tabulates them and presents the results in an Excel report. Clientize charges a one-time setup fee of $795, plus a monthly fee of $100 to $150.

In addition to giving Ferrier a better idea of who his customers are, survey responses helped him target promotions. His first online survey generated more than 1,300 responses plus 660 opt-in e-mail addresses in just three weeks.

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