Life In Internet

The State of Retailing Online, Shop.org’s annual retailer study, is officially underway for 2010. We’re excited about this year’s study as we think it has the potential to be our best yet. On the cusp of a new decade, our partner, Forrester Research, and we decided to focus this year’s survey on topics that are top of mind for retailers right now such as social media and mobile, without forgetting about fundamentals such as online marketing and multichannel management.

Why do we believe the 2010 SORO study has the potential to be the best yet? On the one hand, this is a survey that focuses on key areas that retailers increasingly see developing from experiment to core functionality, so developing benchmarks for those is an important Shop.org initiative. Secondly, to make this research truly relevant to you, we want to report the aggregated results at a fairly granular segmentation level, especially by category / sector. To achieve this goal, we’re challenging retailers to participate this year as never before. We need a minimum of 10 (preferably more!) retailers in each category to participate so we can break out segmented results and benchmarks. So, if you ever thought your participation was optional, no more!

If you haven’t received your survey participation email this week, please let me know ASAP. The deadline to participate is end of day Wednesday, March 31. Look for results published over the coming months, including the May 5 Shop.org Webinar that is part of Shop.org’s Marketing Month series of events.

Thank you so much for participating in SORO 2010!