What is the best footer for your online store?

The more I work on ecommerce websites for clients and myself the more I see different ways of organizing the elements in the different sections of the websites. The 3 main sections are: the header, the page content and the footer.

I will make an article on all 3 but I would like to start this series with the footer. I have a good idea of what a header should have as elements but I am not that sure about the footer. Most of the times I think it is kept to a minimal just because we know for a fact that most visitors don't get to the footer but what about those that do see the footer? Why are they there? What are they looking for and hoping to find in the footer? I will try to answer those questions in this article and give you tips on the best way to design your footer (store owners, you can do some of these changes yourself or you can ask your website designer to do them for you).