What is the most important areas to have in depth know when considering effective online commerce ?
Is it seo, user interface, purchase psychology, payment solutions, vendor specifics, business processes, performance, demand/supply chain and so on

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Its said earlier (http://www.hrahk.se/post/2009/10/18/Levels-a-matter-of-experience-or-good-education.aspx), learn to level with them and learn how they work.

If you know their processes you will be able to give them good service and raise sales to them since they feel more secure in using you as a supplier.

So:
1. Learn how your customers work, learn their processes from the inside out
2. Build an ecommerce solution that fits their particular needs and that make them more effective in their daily work
3. Find new customers and goto 1.

It sounds simple, and it is actually this simple but its a bit more work of course than just writing it in a blog post.
It needs to be done as well.

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To lower returns (it will never stop occurring though) when selling clothes online its important to think of a couple of things for B2C sites:

• Inform about qualities both in a technical text (80%cotton et.c) and a commercial text (wonderful soft dress et.c) 
  The better you describe your product the bigger possibility for your sold garment to be kept by the customer instead of him returning it just because you say "Its a dress" and the customer returns it because "Its a dress, but you never said that it would feel like a second skin"
• Sizing, give the user clear instructions how to measure himself for clothes to fit and clear size matrix and the span in cm/inch that each size is in and preferably using translation matrixes with localized size system.
  This way you give the user the possibility to measure and find a size that should fit. This demands that the entire supply chain is of good quality so what you promise is promised to you as well.
• Washing instructions, display those both in text and with standardized images for the customer so he knows whats expected of him. 
• Images, images, images. Detail (special things like pockets or how the fabric looks in close), environment (people wearing the garments), sketch (so the visitor knows where stitches is made)
• Delivery time display, try to calculate this as exact as you possibly can and keep the promise or send out new information early on if there is changes so the customer always knows what is happening with their order and dont return just because of a lazy supplier that did not inform.

Its a bit easier for B2B (uniform/profile corporate clothing) sites since they often use contracts where details is already agreed and in these cases they often have professional purchasers ordering and measuring and in there case its more important to be able to have an effective ordering process with good information tools like track and trace, status updates and statistics.

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