The results of a survey by Akamai and Jupiter Research in which 1,058 online shoppers participated has been released. If you have an e-commerce site, you should study this report and take a critical look at your web site to ensure you’re living up to shoppers’ surprisingly high quality standards. For example, the report reveals that about a third of those surveyed say they would abandon a web site if a page takes longer than four seconds to load.

You can download the entire report (for free) at the Akamai web site.

Industry research shows that most e-commerce sites are not well optimized for organic search engine rankings. A 2005 study by OneupWeb revealed that 83% of Internet Retailer Magazine’s top 100 websites fail to use basic search engine optimization principles to gain high rankings.

The study went on to show that of the well-optimized web sites, 89% were found on the first three pages of the search engine results for their respective keyword queries, and 52% appeared on the first page.

By contrast, only 4% of the non-optimized pages did as well. The implication is pretty clear.

The Department of Commerce has estimated total e-commerce sales in 2005 at $86.3 billion, an increase of 25% over 2004. That compares with total retail sales increasing just 7% over 2004. e-commerce sales constitute 2.3% of total sales, and are estimated to  reach $139 billion annually by 2008.

The Role of Search in Consumer Buying” is a new study by comScore, commissioned by Google. They examined the search behavior of 83 million Americans who conducted over 552 million searches within 11 product categories using one or more of the 24 top search engines. Some interesting results:

• 25% purchased an item directly related to their search query
• 37% completed their purchase online
• 63% completed their purchase in an off-line retail store

Moral of the story: local retail stores can no longer afford to ignore the impact of the Internet. No matter how local your establishment, and no matter how narrow your market, customers are looking for you and your products online. If they can’t find you in the search engines, which of your competitors do they find? It’s easy for you to test out.