Let’s be honest: there really should be more innovation here. Besides some popular positive examples like ABOUT YOU (http://www.aboutyou.de) or Amazon the vast majority of online shops look more or less identical like yesterday, last week, last month: boring product lists wherever you look, static CMS pages where the only dynamic thing is the annoying newsletter box that pops up.
From my consulting experience in the last years I’ve learned, that in most cases shop design relaunches are only done every few years. Due to costs or low priority the online shop is not seen as a continuous optimization process but rather a one-time investment.

But why? This does not have to be like this
Todays customers expect a highly personalized shopping experience as the eStrategy Magazine visualizes in its current article (http://www.estrategy-magazin.de/erlebnisse-im-online-handel-in-zukunft-unabdingbar.html). This is even more important in the case of the mobile representation of the shop, as I stated in one of my last blog articles (http://www.recolize.com/en/blog/2014/01/23/reduce-large-product-lists-mobile-shops-presenting-relevant-products-customers/).
Therefore every page in your online shop has to be totally dynamic considering product lists, content linking, commenting, interacting with the customer and so on. Offer recommended content, i.e. items, articles, help texts, tips, that provide valuable content to your visitors and make them feel that you care and think about them.
The use of professional recommendation algorithms enable merchants to provide product recommendations that go far beyond any human being in an offline store could provide. Therefore a bunch of influences like customer similarities, buyer’s history, Facebook friends or the current location could be taken into account.

One may ask why is it essential to provide a personalized shopping experience.
A good example is the Facebook news feed: Why do so many people login to that service every day? Because they get (more or less) relevant content for them and this enables interactiveness.

So please do something to awake the interest of your customers with every visit of your website. Make them feel the need to regularly check it for new offers, recommended items and interesting content.