Too often online merchants lose sales because their web site portrays an unprofessional image. If you want to convert more visitors into buyers, consider spending time fine tuning your web site. Having a polished site creates confidence in your visitors, making them more likely to provide you with their credit card number. Having an unprofessional image can make you look shady to the potential customer, scaring them away and causing you to lose a sale.

How can you avoid this peril of an unprofessional site?

Invest the money to have your site designed by a professional web designer. If your site is designed by a web design amateur (even a very bright and talented one), it will invariably show, and customers are likely to assume, however unfairly, that your company is as amateurish as your web site.

Consistency is key, particularly in an online store. All product images should be consistently used and consistently sized. Product descriptions should have a consistent style, tone, and length. If you display SKU or part numbers for your products, display a number for every single one. Consistency always requires a great deal of time, care, and attention to detail, but would you want to give your money to someone who takes the easy way out?

Your site needs to appear trustworthy. Prominently display phone numbers, email addresses and other contact information. Prominently display your security certificate so customers know that their credit cards are safe with you.

Use a spell checker. You aren’t a high school kid with a cheesy homepage on AOL, so don’t let your customers view you as such. This may sound obvious but you’d be surprised how often web sites and e-commerce sites, even from names you know and trust, have misspelled words and typos.

Proofread. Like checking your spelling, proofread your web site’s copy and your product listings. We’ve all seen a site where you know they intended to write “he’ll” and it showed up as “hell.” It only takes a few moments to protect yourself from such perils. Make the time. It will be well worth it.

Be sure that your site looks clean and does not have lots of cluttered graphics or banners or excessive animation. This isn’t Las Vegas but it also is not a hospital waiting room. Use your gut instincts to find that happy medium between the two. Consult with friends and family. Consult your web developer, your consulting firm or your e-commerce software developer. All of these opinions should be carefully considered.

Make sure your color schemes match, unless you specifically don’t want them to do so. Make sure they match what you are selling. If you are selling holistic candles and meditation incense, you want to create a peaceful mood and use peaceful colors. In this case, avoiding hot pink on black as a color scheme would be a good idea. Then again, if you are selling industrial heavy metal band paraphernalia, choose a color scheme that is more appropriate to your audience.

Review your work on other computers. Remember, not everyone has the same monitor or the same monitor settings. Just because it looks great on your graphic designer’s latest and greatest 21-inch flat panel display with 1280 x 1024 pixel display settings doesn’t mean its going to look great on someone else’s 15-inch 5 year old monitor with 800 x 600 settings. Unless you’re only targeting the graphics artists with the latest and greatest, make sure your site looks good on all, or at least most of your target audience’s displays.

A call to all online retailers:

As we all grow in the world of online retailing, the combined experience and knowledge is becoming increasingly diverse. It is by drawing from this well of knowledge and diversity that we hope all of our readers might learn from one another’s strengths and weaknesses. Undoubtedly, the exclusively online business could learn from the experience of the exclusively brick-and-mortar veteran and vice versa. Likewise, a small start-up dot.com can learn from e-commerce titan, and possibly vice versa as well.

For this reason, we are calling out to all readers currently selling online to tell us what you have learned since getting started, what worked well for you and what did not, what surprised you and what did not, and what your advice might be for someone not quite as experienced as yourself. Write anything you want that you think might help your fellow e-tailers – the sky is the limit. If nothing else, gloat and brag to us. Tell us how and why this really is the season to be jolly. Tell us how great your sales were this Christmas. By almost all accounts, online sales for this holiday season are expected to shatter all previous records! Check out the following links to find out just how hot online sales are this holiday season:

http://news.com.com/2100-1017-976668.html?tag=cd_mh
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/perl/story/20203.html
http://www.internetretailer.com/article.asp?id=8131

Upon receipt of these stories, we will publish several of them over the coming months in the hopes that we can all learn from one another’s experiences and collectively grow our sales and our profits. As our way of saying thanks, all published entries will receive a $50 gift certificate to Cocoa Mill Chocolate Company, rated best overall by the Wall Street Journal! All entries must be received by January 10, 2003.

To enter, click here.

Let's face it, during the holidays it becomes increasingly evident that not everyone is easy to buy for. As much as we would all like to think that we plan ahead, there are always those last minute gifts that need to be purchased. The affect of this is that December 23 and 24th are crazy at the local retail stores and malls! As an online retailer, how can you take advantage of this buyer craze? Certainly if someone orders on the 23rd or 24th, you would be crazy to guarantee delivery of physical goods by the 24th. However, there can be a silver lining to this debacle. Why not send out an email to your customer reminding them that they can buy electronic gift certificates around the 22nd of December? The advantage? Electronic gift certificates can be sent in a matter of seconds...not days!

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