One good idea I spotted at the online gift store gifts.com.ua is a home page that updates dynamically. That means the products on the home page change every time you reload it.
True, the trick won’t suit every store. Mine, for example, shows new arrivals on the home page, and since there’s no other way to keep track of new products I’m an idiot, I’m an idiot, my customers drop by the site now and then to check what’s new.
I suspect a dynamic home page increases the average time visitors spend on the site, though of course I have no proof. It would be great to analyze things like this. You could try to build a set of recommendations for designing online stores on statistical data.
That takes some kind of benchmarking. Something like that has turned up in Google Analytics, and I’ll have to figure out how it works.