I can’t believe I didn’t write something like this first, but my good friends over at the Rimm-Kaufman Group recently wrote an article called 19 Tactics for Supressing Online Sales. It’s dead on, and a great read for online retailers.

I especially identify with the design by committee point. Recently, in fact, I was told to redesign the color scheme and navigation scheme of an award-winning site just so the boss would pay attention to the new design. True story.

In addition to the 19 rules proposed by Larry and Alan at the Rimm-Kaufman Group, I submit two more, just for fun.

Blindly follow your designer’s advice
Many designers today don’t consider analytics, usability and objectives. Hire a designer that doesn‚Äôt ask questions about your core business and designs intricate Flash animations with no content.

Don’t set objectives before you test or redesign
Don’t have a reason to redesign the page and don’t decide how you’ll measure success.

Many online retailers and site owners are probably not taking note that Internet growth‚Äîthat is, the number of new Internet users‚Äîis slowing. Online sales have been strong, partially because there are more people online. When the potential market for your products is bigger, it’s easy to increase sales.

But what happens when the internet becomes saturated? Online companies should start to turn their focus to market share and new technologies. Marketing Vox reported today that internet saturation is not far away, noting that internet penetration will slow this year.

Sooner or later, small online retailers learn that they have to pay close attention to their competitors. Large multichannel online retailers already know this from years of operating in the offline world. Competition is fierce in the brick-and-mortar retail space, and to be competitive online, many take the same rigorous approach to shopping their competition online.

Small online retailers have to leverage their ability to act quickly to top their competitors. They can’t afford to have a site that doesn’t convert visitors to paying customers and must venture into new technologies to be the first to test new sales channels.

Here are some new technologies that online retailers (and other businesses) should be paying close attention to:

• Blogs
• RSS feeds
• Podcasts
• Pay per call marketing
• …and more

The quicker small online businesses can embrace these new technologies, the better they will be at using them as marketing tools when their larger competition starts using them.