What sells online? That is probably the question we get asked most. At the risk of being repetitive, what sells online is work. In our experience, the difference in success between one store and another depends a lot more on how hard they work than on what they are selling.

I know of two stores, Store A and Store B, that are selling exactly the same products. Store A sells five times as much as Store B. The reason is, Store A works a lot harder. They work on their site almost every day, and they also do more to promote it.

But although work is the decisive factor, what you sell matters too. As a general rule, whatever sells in print catalogs will also sell on the Internet. If the customer has to see something before buying it, then you probably can't sell it in a print catalog, or online. Otherwise, you should be able to sell almost anything.

It's true that more men use the Internet now than women, so if you sell something that men buy, you are likely to have a slight edge. Someone who works with computers is almost certain to have Web access, so anything computer-related is likely to do comparatively well. And Internet users are richer and better educated than the population as a whole, so luxury items may do well.

But these trends are not set in stone. When televisions first became available, the first buyers were probably richer and more technologically inclined than the population as a whole. But TV rapidly became mainstream, and the same thing is happening to the Web.

More important than the type of products you sell is the size of the niche you choose.

In the physical world, niches are based on geography. I often buy food at the corner store near my house, despite the small selection and high prices. If this store were more than 100 yards away, I would never buy anything there. But in the physical world, proximity is king.

Not on the Internet. Geography is almost irrelevant on the Internet. Niches on the Internet are based on what you sell, not where you are. And whatever you sell, you have to be the place to buy it, because your customers can just as easily visit any other online store.

So you have to choose a niche small enough that you can dominate it. For example, if you are a tiny company, it would probably be a mistake to try selling top-40 CDs online. You would have a hard time competing with CDNOW. But you would probably have a chance at becoming the site for European folk music.

One certain way to dominate a niche is to be the manufacturer. For example, Harbor Sweets is going to be the site for buying Harbor Sweets, because they make them. Manufacturers may be the biggest winners on the Internet, especially small manufacturers who have till now been at the mercy of the channel.

Welcome To COMPUTER Help

in screen text, they often display

as gifs. Text rendered as a gif can be antialiased, meaning you don't see jagged edges. You can use any font, not just whatever the browser has, and you can also get 3D effects like beveled edges and drop shadows, which (used sparingly) make a site look richer.

When I say that better sites use more images, I do not mean that they use more k of images. Big images take a long time to download, and that is the kiss of death in an online store. In a top-quality site, images are the seasoning, not the foundation of the site. Use small, punchy images that will carry a lot of the surrounding area.

In particular, avoid the common mistake of putting a huge image on your front page. By all means put your logo on the front page, and in fact on every page, but make it download fast. Your logo is not what your customers came to see.

They came to see your products. But don't throw full-size product images at your visitors until they ask for them. Sophisticated sites begin with a page of smaller thumbnail images, which visitors can click on when they want to see more.

If you don't use thumbnail images, your section pages will be too slow. For example, this page was made with iCat, which cannot generate thumbnail images automatically. Instead, the designer has included full size images of each product. So the page weighs in at 330k, which takes 1 minute and 50 seconds to download with a typical (28.8kb) modem. You can't expect Web surfers to wait almost two minutes for a page.

If you don't use thumbnail images, your section pages will be too slow.

Make your product images as high quality as possible. Consumers won't buy from an image that looks like a badly lit Polaroid. So have a professional photographer take your photos. Images shot with a top-quality digital camera look brightest, but you can also scan transparencies or even scan images right out of your print catalog.

If possible, try to make the background color for the product images either the same color as your pages, or transparent. Product shots look better when the object seems to sit right on the page.

Finally, don't make spelling mistakes in your site. A few of those will undo all the other work you've done to make your site look professional.

4. Make Your Site Easy

It is no accident that the people who visit your site are called "Web surfers". They have the same short attention span as TV "channel surfers". The average visitor to a Web site looks at only three or four pages before going somewhere else. Visitors will leave at the slightest obstacle.

So if you want people to visit and order from your site, don't put any obstacles in their way. Whatever you do, don't force visitors to register. You have to create yourself an account, with a user id and password, before you can even order from

Wal-Mart. Do they expect online shoppers to remember a userid and password for every online store they visit?

Most major sites have learned not to require registration. They have also learned not to use frames. Frames are a lot more gratifying to the site designer than the visitor. To visitors, frames are merely confusing.

For example, frames make the Coach site so hard to understand that nearly all the text on the first page is navigation instructions. If the site were easy to navigate, Coach could use that space to present their products instead.

Another big disadvantage of frames: most search engines don't index sites that use frames. Most sites get most of their hits from search engines, so not being included would put you at a crushing disadvantage.

None of the most heavily visited sites use frames. In fact, the more important the site, the simpler the design. Look at what is probably the most important site on the Web, Yahoo. There are no bells and whistles to distract you. The design of the site is so simple that you get it at a glance.

Most of your visitors will not start at your front page. Most of your hits will come from search engines, and when someone searches for a phrase in a search engine, they are sent directly to the page in your site that contains that phrase. So most of your visitors will drop right into the middle of your site, like paratroopers. The design of your site has to tell them immediately where they are, and what their choices are.

Most major sites solve this problem by putting a row of buttons at the top of each page. Within the buttons they include a small version of their logo. The logo serves two purposes: it brands the site, and it serves as a link back to the homepage. For example, look at these interior pages from CDNOW, ISN, and Frederick's of Hollywood. They all use this approach. So does Yahoo. It has become the accepted convention for the way a site should be organized.

Make sure you put these links at the top of the page. You don't want new arrivals to have to scroll down to the bottom of the page just to find out where they've landed.

6. Emphasis Service

As I mentioned before, most of the people who visit your store will still find the idea of buying online a little strange. You have to reassure them. The most powerful confidence builder is a top-quality site: high production values go to work directly on the visitor's subconscious. But it's also important to reassure visitors explicitly.

For example, if you are determined to provide great customer service, tell your visitors so, right on your site.

Guarantee that they will be satisfied with what they buy from you, or you will refund their money with no questions asked.

Your site should offer secure online ordering, and you should advertise this to visitors. Some sites put the Netscape key icon right on the front page.

But If you try ordering online yourself, you'll find the biggest concern that you have is not security. I bet what you'll find yourself thinking is, who are these guys? Did they actually get my order? Are they going to send me the products? When?

When someone places an order from a Viaweb store, we always generate a confirmation page thanking them for their order, and telling them their order number. That is a good first start, but you as the merchant should also send them an email thanking them for their order and telling them when it will arrive.

And make sure that you ship orders quickly. Web users want fast results. They don't want to hear that they should expect to wait 4-6 weeks for delivery. This is not 1910. Tell them they will get their order in 3 days.

And make sure they do. The consumers ordering on the Web this year are like the scouts of an oncoming army. They will determine your reputation for service for years to come. If you do a great job, they will tell all their friends about you.

Ordering online is still an unusual thing to do, so people who do it are proud of how adventurous they are. Have you ever listened to someone talk about ordering online? "It was no big deal," they say, swelling visibly. "I just went to their Web site, found what I wanted, and gave them my credit card number. Three days later the stuff arrived. No problem."

People love to be able to tell such stories to their friends. It's the most valuable kind of free advertising for you. So make sure that your customers have good stories to tell. If you do a bad job, your customers will also tell all their friends, and you will be in big trouble. Word spreads very quickly on the Internet.

Especially this year, treat your Web customers as if each one were as important as ten customers. Because if you treat them well, each one will turn into ten customers.

Do you want to hear what your customers have to say about your Web site or your products? You should. Tell them that you want to hear from them, and put a prominent email link and/or phone number in your site. Try including a link that will let visitors send email directly to the president of your company. Few will bother to send mail, but everyone who sees it will be impressed by your attention to customer service.

When a customer does send you mail, respond promptly! Customers who have taken the trouble to send you email are like gold. Talk about qualified prospects. So treat them like gold. If you can, make it a corporate policy to respond to email within an hour or two at most. You have to reply eventually, so why not do it right away? Customers will be delighted to see that you care about them.

7. Promote Your Site

Having a great Web site is not enough. You also have to bring people to it. Most sites get most of their hits from search engines, so step one is to make sure that you are indexed in all the major search engines. If you are using Viaweb, our software will do this for you automatically (except for Yahoo, which you should do by hand). Otherwise, make sure to submit your site to all the major search engines.

You don't need to pay a service to submit your site to hundreds of search engines and indices, because there are only 7 that matter: Yahoo, AltaVista, Excite, WebCrawler, InfoSeek, Lycos, and HotBot. All other search engines and indices might account for 1% of your hits, combined.

Don't expect your site to show up in search engines immediately. It will show up in AltaVista in a couple days, but most other search engines are slow to add new listings. Some only seem to rebuild their databases every couple months.

The second most common question people ask us is: How do I get my site to appear first in the search engines?

There is no easy trick that will work in all cases, because (a) all the search engines are different, and (b), if there were a trick, everyone would use it, and it would be just as hard to come up first.

As a general rule, someone searching for "chocolate" is more likely to get a page in your site if the word chocolate appears often on that page, especially if it appears in the title. But it will not work simply to have your page begin with the word "chocolate" repeated 100 times. Most search engines filter out sites that try that. The best approach is to use key words frequently in your site, but not in a way that appears unnatural.

For example, Vitanet is a site selling dietary supplements. The section selling DHEA contains a lot of information about DHEA. The purpose is not only to sell the product, but to draw hits from search engines. The more text in your site, the bigger a target you present to search engines.

One thing not to do, if you want traffic from search engines, is use software that generates your pages dynamically. ICat works this way, for example. Search engines don't index dynamically generated pages. Any part of your site that is dynamically generated does not exist, as far as search engines are concerned.

The highest-paying traffic does not seem to come from search engines, however, but through links from related sites. And the best way to get other sites to link to you is to give them a percentage of the sales generated by that link. Industry leaders like Amazon.Com have used this technique with great results. (Viaweb has built-in tools to help you create and manage revenue-sharing links.)

Which sites should you get links from? Put yourself in your customer's position. If you are selling Star Trek merchandise, go to AltaVista and search for "star trek". The sites you get sent to are the same ones your customers will get sent to, so those are where you want to start asking for links.

Another way to get traffic is to buy banner ads that lead to your site. For example, you can buy banner ads on search engines that are tied to particular keywords. When you search for "books" in many search engines, you will see a banner ad for Amazon.Com.

Be careful when you buy banner ads. Banner ads are expensive, and even if they bring lots of visitors to your site, there is no guarantee that these visitors will place orders. Our data suggests that few online purchases are impulse purchases. Most buyers show by the keywords they use that they meant to buy before they even reached the site where they placed the order.

So if you buy a banner ad that just brings thousands of random people to your site, few of them will place orders. I know of one online store that bought a banner ad on Playboy's Web site. I can't disclose the name, but let's say they were selling modems. Most of their buyers were men, and they knew that thousands of men visited Playboy's site, so where better to put an ad? And in fact, they did get thousands of visits from this banner. But not one order. Why? Because those people were not thinking about buying modems. The mere fact that they were at the Playboy Web site showed that.

In retrospect the advertiser might have done better to put an ad on a site giving advice about which modems to buy. An ad like that might bring far fewer visitors than a Playboy ad, but they would all be people who actually meant to buy modems.

If all you know about your site is how many hits you get, then of course you tend to think that hits are what you should maximize. But hits are not what you need in an online store. Sales are what you need. So you should find the sources of hits that turn into the most sales, and focus on them.

How do you do that? Tracking tools. Good tracking tools can tell you where all your visitors come from, and how much visitors from each source spend. Viaweb's tracking tools can even tell you which search keywords your visitors used in search engines, and how much money people searching for each phrase spent.

(Viaweb's tracking tools are currently the best in the business. They've earned rave reviews from press and analysts.)

For example, if you are selling Star Wars products, you will get a lot of hits from search engines. You may find that you get ten times as many hits from people searching for "darth vader" as for "darth vader figurine". But I would bet that the people searching for "darth vader figurine" spend more money at your site. So what keyword do you buy from search engines? If you want sales, buy "figurine", not "darth vader".

Finally, if you have a catalog business or retail stores, don't forget to promote your site to your existing customers. If you have a catalog, include your URL in it. Your Web site is the perfect place to sell limited quantities of closeout items that would not be worth including in your print catalog. I know one company that includes messages throughout their print catalog telling customers that closeouts are available on their Web site at special prices. They say there is a noticeable jump in orders each time their catalog goes out.

9. Change Your Site

Want to know how your online store did last week? Here is a quick way to estimate your sales: How much time have you spent working on, and promoting, the site over the last couple weeks?

Overall, the more time a company spends on its online store, the better it tends to do. I doubt anyone can say now what the perfect online store should look like. The whole business of Internet commerce is barely three years old. You are unlikely to get things exactly right on the first try. Like most sites, yours will evolve.

So you should be constantly improving your site. And even if you think your site is perfect, you should still change it regularly. A Web site that has not changed for months is boring. It feels abandoned.

Have you ever visited a store in a remote area where the turnover is obviously very low? Where the items on the shelves are faded, or have dust on them? Do you want to buy from a store like that?

Big department stores seem to know that a certain amount of bustle is necessary to show that they are alive. They are constantly changing their displays. Change is even more important on the Web. Especially since so many of your competitors don't know it, and leave their sites unchanged for months at a time.

Regular change in a Web site is a form of high production values. Having high production values means, in short, looking expensive. And a site that changes regularly looks expensive: for most online stores it is expensive, because the site is maintained by Web consultants who charge by the hour.

Fortunately, with the latest generation of store building tools, it is easy to change your site regularly. Many of our users edit their sites several times a week, and some do every day.

One easy way to make your site change regularly is to list featured items on the front page, and to rotate them every few days. In Viaweb, at least, you can do this in under a minute.

Another slightly more laborious approach is to have some kind of news component to your site. For example,

10. Think Globally