American consumers love e-commerce so much that despite growing fears about identity theft, they spent $172 billion shopping online in 2005, according to Forrester Research. But on the Web, customers tend to be more fickle and price-sensitive than they are when shopping at the mall.

According to a recent study by BizRate and Shopzilla, 59 percent of online shoppers use search engines and aggregator sites like PriceGrabber to research products and compare prices before they go to a particular merchant’s site. In the virtual world, companies have always been challenged to make their websites user-friendly and engaging so that when the customer gets to their site, he sticks around and spends some money.

However, differentiating websites is becoming easier for companies thanks in large part to the proliferation of broadband in American homes. Among American households with Internet access, 40.1 million have broadband connections (about 3 million more than use dial-up), according to eMarketer, a market research company. With more consumers accessing the Internet via broadband, companies now have the opportunity to create competitive advantage by deploying flashy new technologies that will make their sites more engaging—and thus more likely to keep customers shopping.

These bandwidth-hogging technologies, which include Flash, bots and multimedia, as well as the trendiest of the bunch, Ajax, aren’t accessible or practical for users with dial-up connections. These technologies enrich and enliven the online shopping experience. In the case of bots, they can improve customer service, while Flash, multimedia and Ajax can make the entire process of shopping more intuitive. (For more on Ajax, read "Ajax Arrives for the Enterprise," www.cio.com/021506.) Some companies are also using the next generation of Web monitoring tools, which enable them to track individual consumers’ online behavior in real-time, to identify precisely how to improve their sites.

The point of these technologies, says Troy Brown, senior director of e-commerce for boot-maker Timberland, is to "replicate in the virtual world the experiences people have in our stores." Leading-edge companies such as Timberland, Ikea, auto auctioneer Manheim and Safeway.com have increased their transaction sizes, boosted conversion rates of visitors to buyers and improved customer service by deploying advanced Web technologies.

Your company can achieve positive results too. Here’s what you need to know in order to keep customers returning to your website for more.

What’s Wrong with What You’re Doing Now

HTML is the cause of most of the usability problems associated with e-commerce. The programming language was developed for linking scientific papers and retrieving information, not for multistep transactions such as ordering galoshes online, says Fumi Matsumoto, cofounder of e-commerce vendor Allurent.