All signs are that this Friday is going to be a big day for online retail. Shoppers are always looking to snag great deals. They'll be searching online, following Tweets and getting recommendations from friends about where to buy. But they'll all come with at least one question in common: Why should I buy from you?

That is the trap, because in 8 seconds or less they'll look at your page and decide if they trust you, if you are relevant to matching their needs and if you will offer the type of buying experience they are looking for- and they'll compare you to every other site they buy from and all your competitors.

In today's Twitter-like, short attention span world, you have 140 characters or less to tell me the value of doing business with you. What makes you different from your competitor? This is like writing your Unique Value Proposition or Unique Campaign Proposition, but you are limited to the number of characters, as if you were going to post it on Twitter. If you do a good job of this you could lower your bounce rates by putting this on every landing page.

The other concern is that many of these purchases are gift related. Online, the gift exchange/return process looms ominously in shoppers' minds. What if shoppers want to return or exchange orders? What do gift receivers do? How about gift givers? Where do they go? How fast will they get a refund? Return-shipping costs, shipping hassles, price-matching concerns, and other questions hover like conversion-rate-gremlins, threatening to devour your sales. Online retailers must resolve these questions, manage expectations, and inject confidence into their visitors, or their "buy now" buttons will look like black holes threatening to suck shoppers' cash into the ether. What kind of special "gift buying messages" will you inject in your landing pages that reinforces why they should buy from you this holiday season?