* Attain and maintain high rankings in search engines. This is always important, but never so important as during busiest shopping season of year. If you are not good at this, and many people aren't, retain services of a site promotion specialist like http://www.successpromotions.com. And make sure your site is search engine ready.

* Advertise via email to all your past clients, your leads, and everyone on your mailing list. You should be doing this regularly, but now it is more important than ever. Consumers are very savvy and they will go where they get most bang for their buck AND where they get best customer service.

* Don't oversell. Know in advance what your Christmas delivery ordering deadline must be to guarantee delivery and stick to it.

* Offer shipping alternatives that alleviate Antrax scare. The US Postal Service cannot protect us from all evils. And this year, people are more interested in germ free delivery than they are saving money on shipping.

Friday, November 24, 2001 marks beginning of holiday shopping frenzy. Make sure you get your share of market. Because this is best year ever to shop and to sell online.

Among those retailers who did survive, news continues to improve. The report finds that online retailers have been able to reduce their losses as a percentage of revenues. Operating losses decreased as a percentage of revenue from 19 percent in 1999 to 13 percent in 2000. As for elusive profitability, even more happy tidings. By Internet retail type, 72 percent of catalogers (sites owned by offline catalogs), 43 percent of store-based retailers (sites owned by brick stores) and 27 percent of Web-based retailers (Net-only retailers) are profitable at an operating level.

The report finds that movement toward profitability is due, in large part, to online retailers placing tighter controls on their marketing budgets. You think?. As a result, customer acquisition costs for all online retailers fell from an average of $38 in 1999 to $29 in 2000. Web-based retailers (the stickiest of wickets), in particular, were able to bring them down from a high of $82 (ouch) to $55 (still not great) over same period. The best-performing Web-based retailers (the top 50 percent) reduced acquisition costs to an average of $14 (yea!) per customer rivaling performance of catalog-based retailers.

The report concludes that Internet retailing is alive and very much healthy. Yet it also warns that each category of Internet retailer still has plenty to learn about running online stores. "Web-based retailers need to learn basics of retailing," said Peter Stanger, vice president and leader of Boston Consulting Group's business-to-consumer topic area. "Store-based players are new to home delivery and selling to consumers one-on-one from a distance. Catalogers have a leg up in many dimensions, but they need to perfect ways to exploit relationship-marketing opportunities. The winners will be those companies that can most effectively acquire or develop capabilities they lack and integrate them with their existing strengths." Amen.

Hats off to Net boom. They say king is dead. We say, long live king.