brandchannel.com | Trends in Online Retailing | Better Promoting Products Online a few pertinant points....

"While the offline retailing market is growing in low single digits, online retailing has doubled in size in the last 24 months to become a US$ 144 billion market.

1) Merchants benefit when customers associate their positive shopping experience with the sellers' brands, elevating the third-party retailer in the eyes of the consumer.

2) We see a trend toward SKU-level or item-specific merchandising. Your brand image is critical, but if you're not thinking about merchandising in terms of the most detailed product attributes and variables—pricing, title, description, keywords—you're not fully leveraging available merchandising control.

3) Online shoppers are becoming savvier at evaluating competing product offerings and merchants on the web. Whether they purchase online or offline, shoppers increasingly base their perceptions of a retailer's selection, service level, and brand image on the online experience. The depth and quality of information that retailers provide through online marketplaces and shopping portals exceeds that of other promotional tools such as search engine marketing. So, we see these channels as critical for establishing credibility with consumers.

4) To be competitive, you have to present the most current information in terms of inventory and pricing to your customer, whether they are on your own e-commerce site or within a remote channel. With the advent of more structured tools based on XML web services, it's possible to greatly improve the timeliness of data presented to customers through third-party channels. "

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