Yet it became the standard for e-commerce because it was the standard for delivering information to a variety of operating systems and browsers. Furthermore, most consumers used dial-up modems to access the Web in its early days. HTML was simple enough for dial-up connections to digest, so that webpages didn’t take 10 minutes to load, says Darryl Gehly, vice president of Molecular, a Web design company based in Watertown, Mass. Because most e-commerce sites used HTML, and those sites were designed to accommodate the slowest computers, all websites began to look and function the same way.

"The main way you shop, by clicking on categories and drilling down until you find or don’t find what you’re looking for, is the experience everywhere," says Matsumoto. But that’s no way to make your brand stand out from hundreds of others in the Web universe, or give customers any reason to return to your site a second time. What’s more, the kludgey user interface has led to shopping cart abandonment rates of more than 50 percent, according to Forrester.

The solution to e-commerce’s problems is rich Internet applications. These are mini-applications that run inside a browser and function like desktop applications in that they respond instantly to user input. For example, rich Internet applications let users drag and drop images and text without having to get information from a server to refresh the page. They also enable information to pop up automatically when a user rolls her mouse over a graphic. Rich Internet technologies work by taking advantage of the capabilities in browsers, such as Flash plug-ins, that support such functions, says Gehly.

Because these technologies make online commerce more fluid and intuitive, they can reduce shopping cart abandonment rates and increase transaction sizes, say Matsumoto and Gehly. In 2003, Yankee Candle deployed a Flash application on its website that allows customers to create their own votive candles. According to Gehly (whose company helped design the application), that capability led to a 25 percent increase in the number of items purchased per order and a staggering 1,400 percent increase in conversion rates. In addition to using rich Internet applications to improve the online shopping experience, companies are using streaming audio and video, artificial intelligence in the form of avatars and bots, as well as real-time analytics.

Jeffrey Rayport, coauthor of Best Face Forward: Why Companies Must Improve Their Service Interfaces With Customers, says it’s in companies’ best interests to try out new Web technologies. "If you don’t find a way to experiment with these new technologies to find out which will be relevant to your customers, and your competitors get it right, you’ll have a lot of catching up to do," he says. let your customers customize