It spells out the sad truth that although there are a handful of online retailers who are getting it right -- the vast majority of e-tail sites are a bit of a dead loss.

So just why aren't people shopping from their keyboards -- after all, it sure beats tramping around a hot, crowded city when it comes time to buy those Christmas prezzies eh?

You don't have to dig very deep to work out one of the key reasons why people are still beating the street in preference to clicking their keyboard -- and Chris has also spotted it.

There just aren't any bargains on the Web!

Just look at the meteoric growth of "The Warehouse" (where everyone gets a bargain) if you want to see just how much priority people place on the cost of purchase when they go shopping.

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Unfortunately for online retailers, even if you do leverage the lower operating costs of an online presence so as to offer a lower price to your customers -- the addition of packing and postage almost always pushes the total cost of purchase back above normal retail.

E-tailers will often cite "convenience" when extolling the virtues of online shopping -- but this ignores the fact that an awful lot of people seem to really enjoy the act of walking around the mall looking for that special something. I guess it's the "experience" versus the "convenience" -- and the winner, more often than not, remains the act of physically getting out there into the "real world."

The other problem is that even those e-tailers who have a great deal are finding it exceedingly hard to generate foot-traffic.

Unlike the "real world," just building a website is no guarantee that you're going to get people coming through the door. People don't sit at their computer and spend hours typing in near-random domain names such as joeshardware.co.nz, bikes4sale.co.nz, megagifts.co.nz, etc.

To generate virtual foot-traffic you have to create (and maintain) public awareness of your web-store -- and that means two things: good search engine placement and advertising.

Unfortunately, many small retailers seem blissfully unaware that the raft of services or software packages which offer to submit your site to half a trillion different search engines are little more than a waste of money. They don't understand that you're better to pay an expert (as opposed to an "expert") a reasonable amount of money to figure out how you can get good positioning on the top four or five search engines.

After all -- who gives a damn if the US$49 "Mega-turbo-hyper-submit-all" service has you listed on "Jim's Top 100 weblinks" page or on dozens of sparsely populated no-name online business directories that nobody ever visits.

What IS important is that you're highly ranked on Google, Yahoo, AltaVista, Lycos, and maybe a couple of others. These are the search engines that 95% of the people use 95% of the time. "Jim's Top 100 weblinks" probably gets less than a dozen visits a day -- and any money spent being listed there would have been better applied to getting a better ranking elsewhere.

Then there's the advertising option -- more on that tomorrow. Suffice to say that despite being constantly being told that the online ad market is depressed -- the cost of buying banners is still way too high for what you get.

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