E-Commerce Times talked with Joe Chung, CEO of Allurent, and writes about his top 5 must-have features for online retail in 2009.  Here’s a summary of Joe Chung’s top 5 (and an excerpt of his thoughts on #3):

1. Interactive Merchandising - non-technical business managers need to be able to easily add, change, and remove merchandising features your website.
2. Advanced Shopping Tools - e.g. ‘pageless checkout’ tools

Rich Media / Video
Improving your shoppers’ ability to more fully visualize and understand products through rich media is another critical focus area in the coming months and years. As with traditional catalogs, online shopping suffers from a fundamental disadvantage compared to physical stores: Our shoppers cannot actually touch, wear or use merchandise before purchasing. However, unlike print catalogs, we can do so much more than provide simple pictures.

Video has proved to be particularly effective by demonstrating how others experience products, enabling shoppers to imagine themselves in similar situations. Williams-Sonoma.com uses videos of expert chefs to demonstrate how cooking tools can be used to make some mouthwatering dishes. MartinAndOsa.com cleverly uses very short video segments, lasting just a second or two, to give its shop-by-outfit experience pleasing and eye-catching motion that gives a surprisingly deeper and more interesting perspective on its clothing compared to static images. Competitively speaking, the sites that incorporate engaging rich media will have a natural advantage over text-and-image only sites, which will look increasingly outdated as time goes on.

3. Advanced Search and Guided Navigation - new ways to let consumers find what they’re looking for
4. Social Commerce - facilitate conversations and interactions between your shoppers

Filed under: effective online video