If your business has a website then it is at the moment one of over 2 billion on the Internet. Unless all your customers know the unique location of your site ( url ) the chances are that they have arrived at your site by searching on some word of interest to them. Do you understand why or how this process takes them to your site ?
Search engines first came into being in the early 1990s and the recognition that web sites could be optimised to make use of this indexation started to develop some years later. The early versions of search engines such as Altavista simply took the supplied url of the web page and stored it on it’s own server. A separate indexer program would subsequently extract the relevant links and cross references for use by the searchers.
The number of companies having web sites grew and marketers began to acknowledge the benefits that a high ranking or Search Engine Placement gave. Online Marketing came of age and bit by bit online retailing increased in number of transactions and turnover. Some companies were more suited to on-line retailing than others, for example electronic goods. Others may never quite take the place of conventional retailing e.g. women’s clothing as the requirement to touch, feel and try on dictates purchasing habits.
The success stories have been in the service sectors where online references have thrived of advertising revenue. It is now possible to access crossword dictionaries, thesauri and a host of other facilities to help solve a variety of puzzles, quizzes and simply to answer general knowledge questions. Travel companies such as RyanAir now take most of their bookings and over the last year have attempted to people to check in online to avoid luggage fees.
The US Census Bureau recorded in 2007 that some 3.2% of retail sales were done via e-commerce. Within this overall total the percentage of e-commerce transactions between different business trades varied widely with food and beverage stores less than 1% and mail order and electronic shopping at 44%.
In the UK Ocado has revealed this week that revenue soared 49% in the week Christmas, reaching