Internet Retailer, citing comScore figures, said that online sales for the first three quarters of 2005 are up 24% from the first three months of 2004.

Keeping on top of these figures is important if you’re and online retailer, and comparing these figures to your own is a good benchmark for your site’s sales performance.

If your 2005 sales show below 24% growth, it’s time to analyze your business and figure out why. Do a higher proportion of your sales come at the end of the year (most sales do come during the holiday period, so this might not be the best indicator)? Perhaps your site isn’t converting visitors to buyers, or perhaps you can’t be found in the search engine results. Maybe you’re having an issue with your paid search marketing clickthrough rates or conversion from paid search ads.

If you’re unsure what the issues are, contact me and I can help you determine where the gaps are and how to get your sales up to snuff.

Today’s E-commerce Times contains an article that is worth a read if you are an online retailer who’s just starting out, or if you’re an entrepreneur thinking about starting an ecommerce web site. The article discusses your site’s response times and your customers’ willingness to wait to view your web site. The article is on the technical side for the novice, but underscores an important aspect of web usability. If a customer has to wait to see your site, they are going to go elsewhere.

If you’re not happy with your site’s performance or especially if you’re considering starting an online retail web site, be sure to do your research on potential hosting and ecommerce application providers. Find out who their clients are and visit the clients’ web sites to see what the performance is like. Too often, many people don’t consider this aspect when starting an online retail site, and it bites them later. Established sites often face problems when their product database grows to a size that bogs down the server they’re running on.

From personal usability lab experience, I can tell you that people are not patient when it comes to site load times. Long site load times will cause the customer to think negatively about your business, and if they are trying to purchase on your site and the purchase process hangs or is very slow, it can cause a great deal of confusion and frustration.