Fans of local boutiques can soon make their retail purchases in their underwear.

With shoppers turning increasingly to the web for their purchases, some downtown Iowa City stores are developing websites to complement their physical locations.

The owners of Dulcinéa, Catherine’s, and Cheap and Chic will soon join the cyber stores.

“A website is always your second-best store,” said Catherine Champion, the owner of Catherine’s and Cheap and Chic.

Which is why she is tailoring both of her stores’ websites specifically to suit each clientele. Cheap and Chic, 105 S. Dubuque St., will focus on such popular trends as layered pearls and blazers — much like the actual store — Champion said. Catherine’s, 7 S. Dubuque St., will highlight the store’s “best of” items.

Catherine’s does a large portion of out-of-town business, making it important that the site offers shipping options for her online shoppers, she said.

With the new sites, she can provide a platform from which customers can choose their own items without coming into the store.

“It’s like a box customer,” Champion said.

Nationwide, owners have started a movement onto the web. Online retail sales increased 2.2 percent from the first quarter of 2009 to the second, according to the most recent data available from the U.S. Census Bureau.

“There has been a slow steady stream of people trying to get online,” said Jeff Lowe, the owner of ClickStart Intermedia Inc., noting he saw a peak in web-design business three years ago.

The key to a successful website takes more than just the page, Lowe said. It’s the helpful content and real information that helps enhance a store’s credibility on the web.

For this reason Dulcinéa owner Sandy Navalesi has decided her online store will be more than just a web address.

Her new website will be a separate business in itself, she said, which is why she plans to find a niche for the site much like that of Dulcinéa, 2 S. Dubuque St.

“I don’t want it to be too much and too busy,” she said.

She plans on keeping the online selection smaller and personalized for individual buyers.

Taking the economy into consideration, Navalesi also plans to offer free shipping like the popular online shopping site Zappos.

“I think [free-shipping] is a motivator,” she said.

For Iowa City stores targeting the UI student population, a website could benefit the businesses’ customers, who scatter throughout the country after graduation four or five years later.

“The only person that counts is your customer,” UI entrepreneurial department lecturer Joseph George said.

And some Iowa City shoppers are happy about being able to shop online.

UI freshman Stefanie Pinkney and her mother, Debbie Pinkney, agreed that a store’s website is essential when making retail purchases.

“I go to the website first because price is really important to me,” Stefanie Pinkney said.

High cost usually dissuades her from going into a store and being disappointed by expensive items.

But the English and pre-med major said she is definitely one to send an online wish list back home to her mother in Peoria, Ill.

And Debbie Pinkney actually prefers making purchases for her daughter online.

“That way I can choose, and she doesn’t know what she’s getting,” she said.