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I created a Retail and Ecommerce topic hub at IBM’s Many Eyes project for others that might be interested in adding thier own retail data and visualizations.   Stop by and join in on the fun!

Yesterday I completed my national civic duty to the economy and to the retail industry by finishing up my shopping for the holidays and spending twice the amount I budgeted.  It started at 4am on black Friday and finished up yesterday at Circuit City for a few last minute stocking stuffers. 

My wife was able to score a Wii for the kids on the first try at EB Games by waiting in line before they opened yesterday.  Getting there a couple hours early, she was still third in line.  I received txt messages every 20 minutes with updates on how it was going.  When she completed payment and I received the call, she sounded like she picked 5 numbers in the Florida lottery.  It really makes me wonder if they would have sold as many Wii’s if they were available in every store. 

Well, I’ve done my part.  Let’s hope that UPS and Fedex do theirs in getting the last online orders delivered by Monday. 

 Now I’ve got to go grocery shopping for Christmas Eve dinner.  <sigh>

I’m not sure I can think of a worse story to come out at Christmas time for a retailer.  Right in the middle of the peak of the holiday shopping season, a store manager at Dillards in Texas decided to eject a disabled Marine Iraq war veteran out of the store because he had a service dog with him to help keep his balance. 

 What was that manager thinking?  It’s been in the news and all over the blogosphere.  I did some searching to see how many blog posts were out there, but unfortunately couldn’t get an accurate number due to spam in the Google blog index.  From a cursory glance, it was quite a bit.  Obviously these posts also generated quite a few comments.  A post at the Consumerist had 114 comments and 602 Diggs since posting their message and has been viewed more than 18,000 times in less than 3 days. 

 Word of mouth marketing is working over time on this one. 

I haven’t been writing much over the past couple weeks because I’ve been focused on developing a new mashup app that will track the top 500+ ecommerce sites on the web.    Trying to keep up with what the top companies are doing is always a difficult and time consuming task so I decided to pull information together in one place.   I’ve written a few spiders as well as some mashup code with Compete, ZoomInfo, and Google API’s to build a dossier on each of the best sites. 

Please check out The Top Ecommerce Sites and let me know what you think. 

Currently I’m tracking on each site:

• Snapshots of the home page
• Google Page Rank
• Backlinks from major search engines
• Traffic via Compete
• Company data from ZoomInfo
• Types of technology used and sizes (i.e. html, images, flash, javascript)
• User submitted comments and reviews
• 1-5 Star ratings submitted by users
• References in the Blogosphere
• Google News

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I just created a Google Custom Search Engine for searching the top retail ecommerce sites on the net.  Hopefully this will be useful in finding that special gift with the holidays coming up.  I added it to the navigation bar up top. 

Personally, I’m having fun looking at the search results that google is providing.  It’s interesting to look at the various ecommerce sites and their SEO optimization as it is clearly coming into play here.  When you take out the millions of other pages google would have included in the mix, you can start to compare multiple retailers and how they’ve been optimized for organic search.

I’ll have the top ~ 500  ecommerce retail websites in the search engine by Tuesday or so.  I’m currently up to 128 for testing purposes.  The top 500+ ecommerce sites in the US are currently in the search engine which should give a wide array of stores to search.   Over time I’ll add & subtract from the overall list to improve the searching.

I have another search engine in the works for retail industry research.  It should be done in the next week or so. 

If you try it out, please send me an email or leave a comment on how well it works for you.  I’m still trying to tweak it. 

I’ve been sick this past week so I haven’t been up to posting much, but I did find these two articles that are definitely worth sharing. 

 Werner Vogel’s(CTO of Amazon.com) attached an architecture paper on his blog All Things Distributed.  The paper covers the architecture in place for Amazon’s distributed storage system. 

If storage system architecture for extremely scalable ecommerce sites is not your thing, I saw that Harvard Business Review conducted an interview with Jeff Bezo’s(CEO of Amazon.com).   The interview focuses on strategy and how it’s formulated at Amazon.  The graphic on page 2 showing the product line expansion, feature inclusion and sales revenue is great review of the company looking back. 

Both are definitely worth the read. 

After a hiatus, I’m back to blogging and collecting resources related to the retail industry.  Unfortunately, I lost all of my previous posts so I’m starting from scratch.  I’ll use this site to share thoughts and ideas as well as collect alternative ideas, news, useful links, and experiment with some of the latest trends in web based marketing. 

I’ve decided to use WordPress to manage my postings, however I plan on experimenting with mediawiki and other tools to build out this site. 

Please comment on things I share here and feel free to contact me with the links provided in the sidebar to discuss strategies and happenings in the industry.