Anyone who has started an e-commerce venture knows the difficulties of "getting it right." From appealing design, effective layout and navigation, quality of images and products to standing above the marketing prowess of the vast online competition — it's enough to make many people throw up their hands in frustration.

So where is a frustrated e-entrepreneur to turn? Well, one of the best places to start is one of the most popular forums in the Small Business Computing network of sites: the "Rate My Site" forum. Since being launched in July 2005, hundreds of would-be Web entrepreneurs and established, but struggling, e-commerce site owners have turned to our community for advice on building a better Web site or online storefront. The advice that's been given is priceless — and always honest.

While we here at ECommerce-Guide have conducted two panel reviews of two e-commerce sites in 2005, the variety of sites profiled in our forum appears to be endless. Recent posts include an owner of a copywriting business called StrayGoat to a company that sells baby learning videos.

Of course, it's our readers who provide the valuable insight that's helping to grow this particular forum. One of the more popular posts recently featured — surprise — lingerie, just like our last panel critique. User "Elegant" runs ElegantUnderwear.com. She asked for an open review of her site, and many users responded.

One of the more useful posts hiding in that thread was one by one of our regulars, "TipPro." He suggested using a little "trick" coding which would both create shorter product URLs for e-commerce site as well as fool search engine spiders into thinking there was more content on the site than there really is. This, in effect, would boost a particular site's organic search engine rankings.

Yet another lingerie site, alittlelingeriecompany.com, sought the forum's help because of sluggish online sales. While the company is seeing success in its brick and mortar operation, the electronic side isn't as fruitful.

Perhaps the greatest amount of information and advice came from poster "InfoSourcing." Here's what he had to say:

Consider this: what is the difference between your website and Victoria Secret? Both sell Lingerie products and attract female audiences. Your website needs a glamour touch, it is missing a great look and feel of the products, if your retail store is doing good coz you are attracting local crowd, ask them if they would be interested shopping online and what really pulls them to retail.

'Sex sells' just like that, if your products have a dazzling images it will be more appealing to shoppers. Every shopper looks for 3P's - Product, Price and Performance of the site, if any one of them is slow or not good, then chances of conversion ration would be less.

To improve your online sales, try following:
1. Change look and feel, make the white background light pink color (girl color).
2. Add a splash image of a beautiful image you get such images from stock images for $100.
3. Add a background color to top header and side navigation.
4. Add some special categories like Features Items, Special events, Great Lingerie deals, etc.
5. Show original price and discounted price so the shopper feels he is getting a good deal.
6. Images, real good images, I know you are dependant on your manufacturer images see if you can get from stock images if possible, this will be the killer for your sales coz all that attracts is the image coz hardly there is any large piece of cloth.
7. Customer testimonials for specific products not just on home page like customer reviews.
8. Add "Related items" section for each product to do some cross selling in product details page and view cart pages.
9. Run some specials like 'Free shipping on orders above $50.'

Try to achieve 4 out of these 9 points that should help your conversion ratio to improve.

There was no word on whether or not the site's owner took his advice, but one usually has to pay to get such advice.

Finally, "John," who owns www.midwesttent.com, sought the advice of our "Rate My Site" forum and actually put most of the suggestions into practice.

Poster "kevey" suggested altering the navigation of the site as to not confuse visitors. He also suggested John begin using CSS and removing frames to reduce page sizes and loading time dramatically.

Our own e-commerce expert James Maguire also made an appearance to help improve midwesttents.com.

Looks like you're on your way. Just a few things (to consider): 1) It's a mistake to place your contact information in the very middle of your home page. Contact info should be readily available, but the real estate in the middle of your home page is for product display. First romance them, (and) then tell them how to contact you.

2) The home page list three items that are "sold out." So you're advertising inventory that you don't have. Instead, present items that you DO have.

3) The search tool that's in the bottom left side of the home page should be at the top middle - above the fold - so people won't miss it.

4) For the title of your home page, you have "OS Commerce." Instead, you should title your home page with your business name, to help you get good search engine ranking. (At this point you're just advertising a software company.)

You never know who might be lurking in our forums. You can get the advice of an e-commerce or marketing expert or even gain a few new customers. So, if you are feeling frustrated with the progress of your online store, you now have the perfect venue in which to seek help.

Devin Comiskey is the Managing Editor of ECommerce-Guide.com.