For those that would like a little more evidence and statistics of the online shopping trends, how ecommerce has changed and can help your business, you may be interested in the online shopping trends highlighted below.

Up to 53% offline purchases are influenced by online research.

According to Forrester Forecast – US Online Retail Forecast, 2009 To 2014, offline sales will be influenced by 48% in 2011 and up to 53% in 2014.“While $155 billion worth of consumer goods were bought online last year, a far larger portion of offline sales were influenced by online research. Forrester estimates that $917 billion worth of retail sales last year were “Web-influenced.” It also estimates that online and Web-influenced offline sales combined accounted for 42 percent of total retail sales and that percentage will grow to 53 percent by 2014, when the Web will be influencing $1.4 billion worth of in-store sales.” Quoted from TechCrunch.

Online sales growing at a faster rate than offline sales.

As economic times tighten a notable difference in the offline / online shopping habits are present.“Deloitte’s retail & distribution practice expects total holiday sales to reach between $873 and $877 billion, representing a 2.5 to 3 percent increase in November through January holiday sales, excluding motor vehicles and gasoline, over last season. This growth rate is smaller than last year’s 5.9 percent gain.

Additionally, Deloitte forecasts a 14 percent increase in non-store sales. Nearly three-quarters of non-store sales result from the online channel with additional sales coming from catalogues and interactive TV. “ Quoted from Deloitte.

Online shopping – a major for inspiration for the younger gift shoppers

According to online retail experts a 21% of U.S shoppers browse websites for gift shopping inspiration, where as 29% pursued physical stores. It also appears that the younger the consumer of products the more online influence has on them. This is one big indicator that online retail is only going to get bigger and that if you are not online already, you should be seriously thinking about it. Access the full report here. http://www.elasticpath.com/research-papers/holiday-digital-goods

For all online retailers – Act quickly and get your website optimised for the rapid changes in ecommerce.

5 ways to optimise your website to ecommerce sales coming soon..

What Is Ecommerce and what does it include?

The official meaning of Ecommerce is the act of making transactions over the internet. This can include starting up a website, advertising products or services, and subsequently generating online leads and sales. Ecommerce is an abbreviation for Electronic Commerce because all transactions are done over the internet (electronically).

The benefits of Ecommerce

Convenience and efficiency has drastically improved since Ecommerce has begun to take effect. Businesses are now able operate with less expense and in turn more profitability. In addition, they have a much larger access to users, usually on a worldwide scale (if your business allows for this) which will broaden your grounds for advertising.

Ecommerce typically revolves around selling and buying products online. More consumers each day are making online purchases instead of buying from offline stores simply due to the costs at which products can be sold online as well as the convenience at which the products can be obtained.

Forms of Ecommerce

While the general concept of Ecommerce has already been discussed, it can obviously come in several different forms which are outlined below.

Online Shopping – Even if you think you are not in tune with the latest technology available, you may already be an Ecommerce consumer. Online shopping for items including apparel, toys, building materials, and tools count as transactions of electronic commerce. Even ordering a concert or sporting event ticket over the internet constitutes as Ecommerce and is generally done in a Business to Consumer (B2C) fashion.

Online Auctions – Another common form of Ecommerce is online auctions. This type of transaction includes a specific product that is being sold for an unknown price. Buyers can bid just like offline auctions but do not need to be physically present at the auction, the transaction is normally then made with a credit card or direct deposit.

Online Banking – Most financial institutions have now added online banking facilities to their group of consumer services. This form of Ecommerce simply involves the ability to manage your bank accounts and transactions online. This eliminates the need to physically visit the bank just to perform simple transactions.

Types of Ecommerce

There are three main categories that are characterized not by the type of business it involves, but more the participant who makes the transactions.

Business to Consumer (B2C) – This type of Ecommerce refers to the most common transaction between seller and the general consumer. Commonly called B2C activity, this exchange is made by countless internet shoppers throughout the globe. This is the type of Ecommerce in which we offer with our free ecommerce software.

Business to Business (B2B) – Also known as B2B, this category refers to the business transactions between companies. An example of a business to business arrangement is when a manufacturer of a product sells to the retail seller.

Consumer to Consumer (C2C) – Commonly referred to as C2C, this type of Ecommerce involves a transaction similar to bartering. The most evident example of this is bidding and buying from an online auction like eBay or (in New Zealand) Trade Me.

Ecommerce retailers seem to struggle in keeping the search engines happy when it comes to SEO. This resource is going discuss some of the biggest issues around SEO for ecommerce, which you should look out for to ensure you are going to get the most out of being online.

Duplicated content

Duplicated content on ecommerce websites is very common. The more products you have on your website the more chance there is that some of those products is going to have similar descriptions / content to other products, on other pages of your website.

To optimise your website for these types of issues you should look into:

• Ensuring that irrelevant content, such as shipping information, size guides and anything else which is likely to be highly consistent across your website is in an area which is perhaps not crawled direct by the search engines when they visit that page. A good way of doing this is to embed an HTML iframe into the product pages of your website where all consistent content can be in one single location and then loaded upon the loading of the page.
• Ensuring that your product descriptions are different to those that your manufacturer has on their website. If this doesn’t happen then Google and other search engines will need to choose between your website and the manufacturer’s website when it comes to displaying unique only results.

Search engine friendliness

Although this is not as much of an issue these days as what it was a few years back, it is important to note that your ecommerce software package has at least been modified or developed with a search engine friendly approach.
Ensure that your software (at the very least) has the ability to:

• Generate SE friendly URLs (i.e http://www.zappos.com/mens/wooly-scarf/ instead of http://www.zappos.com/?ProductId=1205&CatID=15)
• Generate unique title tags for your pages, based on what you specify the title tag to be. This will give you the ability to target different keywords on your catalogue and product pages on your website.
•  Generate unique META descriptions. Again this will help in targeting your researched (hopefully high volume) keywords.

Monitor reviews on your website

Allowing users to add their own content to your products pages, by way of reviewing can be detrimental to your search engine rankings. You will want to ensure that you are checking what people are saying in the reviews, and avoiding them to post superfluous links within their reviews.

Link Building

Possibly one of the most difficult aspects of ecommerce SEO would be finding websites to link to your website. Link building is a way for Search engines to determine the quality of a resource on the web. If a webpage has a few links from other websites, then search engines can value those as a vote of confidence that your website is worth linking to.

Ecommerce related websites, have a harder time getting these links unless they are earned naturally through the quality of the customer service or the products itself. Finding other websites to link to your ecommerce website is generally a struggle because it is evident that the only reason you are requesting a link is for commercial gain.

Look into meaningful ways to ensure your ecommerce website / business offers something which other websites don’t. This can often build a point of difference for website and is in tuen going to be more likely to attract links.

Premium WordPress Themes

Please note that we do not own the themes below, but rather are showcasing some of the best WP themes we found on the web.

Elegent Themes

Elegent Themes – So these themes are really some of the cleanest and professional looking themes one can get. I purchased my first WordPress theme on this website - Interphase.

Theme Shift

Theme Shift – These WP themes are of preofessional quality and are neaty coded. My latest theme (the one i am currently using, which is deVision) came from Theme Shift. It has a tonne of extra features like, image galleries, custom menus, jQuery slider and more..

My take on WordPress themes (probably very subjective)

Its not always pleasant fiddling with WordPress blog installations to get the theme looking perfect across all browsers. This has got to be one of the biggest frustrations i have found with WP. I think i must of spent about 15 – 20 mins max playing with the default free WordPress themes, before admitting that this just was not worth my while.. I begun my search for WordPress blog themes.

I purchased my first “Premium WordPress Theme” in January, 2011 and i don’t think i will go back to a free theme again. The amount of time and features that go into creating these themes is truly to a professional standard, not to mention the amount of professional support you get from the developer..  If you want my advice get a premium theme for WordPress.

Aside from being affiliated with both these WordPress theme websites (which means that if you take my recommendation and proceed to either of these websites through my links, i then get credit for that), there is an even bigger reason i am showing you these premium templates before the free templates… they will do so much more for you and your website.

Free WordPress Templates and Themes

I do think that free WordPress templates have place and there are some really nice templates out there also, some of which i have showcased below.

Free WP Themes – Have a large selection of what appears to be some really good looking themes released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License, which essentially permits both personnal and commercial use.

Skin Press – Has an awesome range of free WordPress templates as well as a few premium templates too (oh come on.. i hear you say) , im just big on the premium themes due to my experiences.

Other WordPress Themes

Although not websites dedicated to WordPress themes  Smashing Magazine and HongKiat seem to have a pretty big selection.

WordPress really is an amazing piece of software. Coupled with a web full of free and premium WordPress themes, web designers and developers don’t have to re-invent the wheel to create a fully functional and great looking blog or website CMS system for their clients.

So HTML templates are certainly going to make your job easier as far as giving you a head start into website design, but i need to recommend that you look at getting an HTML editor to make text changes and add content to your pages. I have personally worked with Adobe Dreamweaver and Coffee Cup HTML Editor. Adobe Dreamweaver would be my personal recommendation as it has advanced features built into the software when you are ready to use them while maintaining an easy to use interface for the beginner.

Sometimes you know exactly what you want to build and possibly even how to build it, but to do this from scratch can take a fair amount of work, which can put you off.

Luckily for us all, there are ways around this.

These templates will help you with coding your own straight XHTML / CSS website. You may also want to look at using a CMS or Blog engine like WordPress for your website. If you are interested in using WordPress for your website, you may want to check out these WordPress themes to help you get a head start.

Premium Web Templates

For a more professional website design, you might like to look at some premium website templates. Premium HTML templates will often cost you, but you do have a bigger range of templates to choose from.
Download Premium Website Templates

Here is a small list of websites that offer, free HTML web templates which i have found very handy in the past.

Free HTML Templates:

Open Source Templates – Open Source Website Templates. Eco Green Organic Web Design Templates are free to use under Creative Commons. Free Website Design Templates. Free CSS Web Template Downloads.

Free HTML and CSS Templates – Templates are completely free to use provided that you link back to the source in some way. Free CSS Templates are released under the creative commons license.

Open Source Web Design – Open Source Web Design is a site to download free web design templates and share yours with others. We help make the internet a prettier place.

Open Design Community – The Open Design Community (TODC) is a group of Open Source Website Designers providing free web design templates helping to make the global internet a prettier place.

Books to help you with building your own HTML website

Web hosting & web hosting providers

I can also suggest couple of pages where you can find info on web hosting and a comparative display of web hosting packages which you will definitely need to take your site online.