The time-share trend. An aging population, coupled with increasing leisure time has given impetus to the time-share experience in which for a fraction of the cost of a second home, people can enjoy getting away to “our house in the country” without the burden of paying for the time they don’t use it. Sedona, Ariz., a tourist Mecca to begin with, has been boosted by time-share opportunities that attract a steadily revolving new stream of short-term visitors. This trend has boosted the local tourist industry, many of whose merchants found new partnership opportunities with time-share sellers as a means of enhancing the property’s value. For example, prospective time-share customers receive packets of discount tickets and passes for local stores and restaurants.

The revived dot-com trend. Venture capital dried up almost overnight about five years ago when the bottom fell out of the dot-com industry. But a new generation of Internet companies is enticing investors today, spurred on by the rising stock of success stories such as Google. If your business is Internet based, you might be positioned to take advantage of once-reticent investors who now may be willing to finance your expansion.

A pair of related trends. You might call this the fading department store trend giving way to the specialized, discount store trend. These trends signal changing consumer preferences. If you can position your products to appeal to buyers in search of specific merchandise at a low price, you will be in good shape to capture those leaving large department stores.

The online shopping trend. Traditional brick-and-mortar retailers have almost all migrated to the Internet, where online sales skyrocketed over the past Thanksgiving weekend to $737 million, a 33 percent increase over the previous year. Here are a few trending characteristics that are partly responsible for the increased popularity of online shopping that you might consider for your own Internet storefront: aggressive promotional offers, miniscule shipping charges for big ticket items and a no-questions return policy. The increasing online shopping trend ought to offset the costs of such promotions, if recent campaigns by Best Buy, Target Stores and Amazon are any indication.