Denver’s Unleaded Group, specializing in design and development of shopping cart technology websites, is leading the internet sales boom developing ecommerce websites for Front Range businesses

DENVER, CO – Ecommerce – retail sales of goods and services online – continues to experience double-digit percentage growth in the 2011 holiday season, far outpacing traditional brick-and-mortar retail sales in growth. Moreover, even traditional physical-location retailers are relying on their websites to bolster sales and “pre-shopping” research, further extending the reach of ecommerce into the fabric of American society.

Unleaded Group of Denver (www.UnleadedSoftware.com),a premier website design and development firm which specializes in building ecommerce shopping-cart technology websites that facilitate online sales, reports an ever-increasing interest in its technology services from both internet-only as well as traditional retailers wanting to tap the vast power in web sales.

“Ecommerce is revolutionizing retailer sales in America, and we are proud to be one of the country’s leading website developers helping this movement,” says Jarod Clark, President of Unleaded Group. “We started developing websites in 1996 including sites for some of the city’s premier retailers like Europtics, for example. Sites at that time were informational only; not transactional. Today ecommerce is growing at a fever-pitch on the web, and on such mobile devices as iphones and smart phones, ipads and notebooks, and in social media environments like Facebook. There seems to be new ecommerce developments nearly every day.”

And no wonder, what with the kind of money that online sales now represent. According to comScore, the nation’s top internet data tracking service, internet retail sales in the 2011 holiday shopping season from the first of November through Dec. 18 are up more than 15% from 2010 numbers, with $30.9 billion in sales posted this year through mid-December.

Over the past decade, Internet sales increases have been in the 12% to 15% range year after year, comScore reports. Traditional brick-and-mortar retail sales still top the online figures, but with estimated sales this year up only some 7% this year over 2010 numbers and with a 10-year average of just 2.5% increases per annum in traditional stores, it won’t be long before ecommerce takes over as the American consumers buying platform of choice.

The 2011 holiday online sales data collected by comScore contained many surprising numbers. The big day for online sales Cyber Monday on Nov. 28, saw $1.25 billion in online sales, a 22% increase over 2010’s Cyber Monday sales. In fact, the most recent work week  -- Dec. 12-16 --  saw four individual days surpass $1 billion in spending, led by Green Monday (Monday, December 12) with $1.13 billion and Free Shipping Day (Friday, December 16) with $1.07 billion. For the week ending Dec. 16, online sales topped $6.3 billion, up 15% from the corresponding week in 2010.

What has made this all possible is an ecommerce technology called shopping cart technology. In general terms, it is the equivalent of the shopping cart that people push around in a brick-and-mortar store: it is a computer program that “holds” the items selected and then leads to “checkout” where the sales transaction is consummated.

The Unleaded Group is expertly attuned to ecommerce with its specialization in building shopping cart technology websites using either Magento, one of the world’s leading open-source platforms, and BigCommerce, a leading provider of shopping cart software for small and mid-sized retailers. Unleaded Group maintains high-level solution partnerships with both software development companies. In addition, Unleaded Group also focuses on developing websites using the leading Content Management System (CMS) in the world, ExpressionEngine, which integrates well with the shopping cart technology and facilitates such essentials as marketing, news, blogging, customer feedback, product and peer review, search engine optimization and social media interfaces with ease. Unleaded is also a senior development partner with ExpressionEngine, a content management platform that allows website owners to continually change the content on their own, not having to engage the services of a web development company to make updates and changes to their website..

The Denver development company has built scores of online shopping websites large and small, including such award-winning platforms for retailers in metro Denver like Tool King, Glo Professional, Marczyk Fine Foods and Firefly Furnishings, to name a few.

Among the most recent developments was a new shopping site for the Denver-area retailer Boulder Running Company, which has four brick-and-mortar locations in Boulder, Littleton, Greenwood Village and Colorado Springs. Jason Halberstadt, the firm’s Director of Ecommerce, reports that since the new online store developed by Unleaded Group on the Magento Platform went online in May, internet sales and inquiries are “up quite a bit” from its previous experience.

Also developed by Unleaded are online shopping sites for Denver’s Trout’s Fly Fishing, the West’s premier fly fishing gear and resource shop, and a new site for California-based Bares Bones Workwear, where the online shop has extended the reach of the iconic workwear outlet far beyond its four retail outlets in the Golden state.

While direct online sales are obviously important and growing exponentially, the internet’s reach into traditional commerce cannot be discounted.  Traditional brick-and-mortar retail sales are predicted to exceed $400 billion for the Christmas season 2011, a healthy number, however, according to a study by Shopper Sciences, 42 percent of shoppers will conduct significant “pre-shopping” time on the Internet researching products before they actually buy – and this includes purchases made online or in traditional retail shops and stores.

What that clearly means is that nearly half of the people who walk into a store to buy already know more about the product – details, prices, comparisons, competitors – than just about any clerk they will encounter. To put a finer point on this, Shopper Sciences study shows that with shoppers who have already identified a brand, 85 percent of them have conducted pre-shopping activities online. All indications are that these percentages tend to be even higher in younger demographics, so if the product and service targets Gen X, Millennials, Gen Y and Echo Boomers, the Internet becomes even a greater factor.

Then there’s the issue of influence. “Pre-shopping” research, according to all reports, includes more than just product and price information, but rather a complete run through peer-group commentary, customer feedback, and increasingly through recommendations – either negative or positive – in one’s Facebook/Twitter, et al, friends circles. These so-called “influencers” represent ever-widening concentric circles of friends and their friends, etc., they snare a high number of people who weren’t even doing research on that product but will consider it given the recommendation from such trusted sources, and they’ll pass it all on to even more people.

And then there’s the influence of mobile technology. Consumers with iphones and notebooks have access to thousands of “apps” – special computer programs that facilitate all forms of commercial activities – and therefor even people who happen to wander into a store can immediately tap the resources of the web for price comparisons and peer reviews, and to find another retailer nearby with a better deal.

“Everyone these days needs a compelling website,” says Clark of Unleaded Group. “The web is now the language of our commercial society. We have been building shopping websites for over 15 years and we are experts at ecommerce, but even we are surprised at how fast everything is changing.”

Unleaded Group, with 25 web design, development, SEO and marketing professionals, is headquartered in Denver’s historic Ballpark neighborhood adjacent to Coors Field, home of the Colorado Rockies. The firm designs and develops websites for a broad array of businesses and organizations, and handles both web and traditional marketing and advertising as well. For more information visit www.unleadedgroup.com or contact Clark at jarod@unleadedgroup.com or call 855UNLEADED.