Whether you are selling direct to consumers or are a dealer selling wholesale merchandise you probably have a website to help increase your sales. That is a great thing, however many websites break some important rules that will actually alienate shoppers. Below I have listed some of the top do's and don'ts for your online marketing.

1. Don't include a visible “skip intro" button on your fancy Flash homepage. Instead, please make me watch a four-minute, carefully crafted animation that it took your design team months to execute before I can see the rest of your site.

2. Don't include a “view all" option for the 100 or so items in a product category. Instead, make me scroll through them at the rate of 8 per page.

3. When there's an option to choose “view larger size" for a product, make sure the product image opens in a separate window, with no actual zoom option. That will impress me and make me more likely to buy the product.

4. Ensure that your product categories are unclear. That will enhance my navigational experience by making me really have to focus to find what I need on your site. For instance, instead of linking to “toys" make your category link something really adorable like “It's Activity Time!"

5. Better yet, don't have any product categories at all. This will streamline things.

6. Tantalize me by showing me items that aren't actually available and will probably never be available again.

7. Drop ship your products and ensure that they take at least a month to actually show up. Fail to notify me that this will be the case.

8. Be sure that nobody actually answers your customer service phone number during the hours posted on your site. This is especially crucial for major retailers who want to impress me with their top-notch service.

9. Use a variety of terms for similar products so that they have to be searched for separately-after all, you don't want me to buy a storage bin when I'm looking for a storage box.

10. Fail to include product measurements, or include product measurements that are obviously inaccurate.

11. Charge $13 for standard shipping on a $19 product that weighs 12 ounces.

12. Keep most of your items “out of stock" so that when I decide to make a purchase, I can't.

Use these twelve tips to drive customers to your competition and reduce the amount of business you get from your website. They never fail to help you fail!