But, whether we like it or not, we can't Grinch out; so we'd better start thinking about the gift-giving season now and get it over with. And since your friends at ReadWriteWeb are huge geeks, we thought we'd amuse you with a few Internet-enabled oddities that might actually make your obligatory retail purgatory a little more bearable.

If there's anything worse than shopping for a loved one's gift, it's shopping for a loved one whose preferences, tastes and needs are a complete mystery. Don't worry: it doesn't mean you're insensitive. You've just got your mind on other things.

The solution: For quick, decisive, and possible all-online gift-buying, coerce every potential gift recipient into signing up at Wishzilla. The creators of this site have kept the clear-cut, actionable sensibility of the gift registry while maintaining the element of surprise. Here's how it works: users log in with Facebook (or create an account) and then start bookmarking their gift wishlist all over the Web. Once the list is done, it's locked. Signed, sealed and sent to Santa. What items have been purchased and by whom remain a secret until the wrapping paper gets torn away.

Everyone wins, and no one is left feeling awkward about that good-intentioned but ill-advised sweater.

2 & 3) Customized Clothing for Him, Her, Hym, Etc.

We've recently been exposed to the wonderful world of e-spoke apparel. We actually just made up the term e-spoke as a portmanteau of electronic and bespoke; basically, there are a few sites out there that allow for high-quality and entirely customizable wearable goods; in fact, some of them are very forward-thinking, technologically.

For the dress shirt-wearer in your life, we have ShirtsMyWay, a site that lets the user completely customize their ideal of collared and cuffed perfection. Our Twitter research has shown that some folks find the site a little spendy; but seriously, a beautiful dress shirt designed to your exact specifications and measurements is worth the extra cost - which, we might add, is significantly less than most other customized apparel experiences.

And for your feminine side, we have Shoes of Prey. The URL alone takes no prisoners, and neither will your fierce creations. Heels on these completely customizable beasts only elevate the wearer a modest 3.5 inches at their highest, but the ability to branch beyond the dyed-satin-bridesmaid-shoe paradigm of shoe customization is more than enough incentive to check out this site.

4) Storenvy

If Craiglist, eBay and Etsy had some kind of inter-website relations and made a Web baby, it would be Storenvy. In a prettily designed community setting, users can set up buyer and seller accounts. The site is a series of independent online retailers and shoppers who browser across all of those stores at once, interacting with each other by watching what notes and ratings they leave on products and stores throughout the site. Check out the social features in action here, or just set up an account and start having fun.

Better yet, get your friends to set up accounts and thus remove some of the guesswork from gifting.

5) Regretsy, the Gag Gift You Can't Resist & Will Never Live Down

Rubber chickens, whoopie cushions, every sadistic and horrifyingly cheap Secret Santa atrocity - none of it can match the horrors found on Regretsy. We actually feel pity for the people who buy or receive the Etsy-fueled inventory from this site. If you ever wondered what kinds of jewelry can be made from animal feces or exactly who makes embroidered toilet paper, you have found your Web-enabled holy grail. If not, well, you're in for a good laugh and at least a few ideas for passive-aggressive office gift exchanges. Forced, semi-professional merriment will never be the same.

So there you have it, folks! You never have to leave your three-monitor array of addictive Internet connectivity to satisfy the whims of the potential gift recipients in your life. Just use these tools and a little personal judgment, and all your holiday shopping-related worries can be laid to rest.

We just hope we have a similarly good list when it comes to last-minute shopping; god knows we plan to procrastinate as long as possible, helpful tools notwithstanding.

According to eMarkter's report, 56.8% of online retailers maintain a Facebook presence, 41.4% are on YouTube and 28.6% use MySpace. Twitter comes in at #4, as only 20.4% of all online merchants actively maintain a Twitter account. As eMarkteter points out, Twitter is a 'hotbed for experimentation,' where companies can promote deals and interact directly with their customers.

For the majority of companies, however, Facebook is the most lucrative place to meet current and potential customers. Facebook's platforms give retailers ranging from 1-800-Flowers to Papa John's Pizza the ability to create e-commerce applications and provide users with services right on Facebook.

According to an earlier eMarkter report, almost 99% of all US Online Retailers plan to have a Facebook fan site within the next year (up from 86% today), and 85% plan to use Twitter within the next 12 months.

Consumers Want Online Retailers to be on Social Networks

This trend, of course, isn't new, but it's also clear that online retailers will have to continue to follow their customers to where they are - and today, that means social networks like Twitter and Facebook. We also know that consumers want to interact with brands and online retailers through social networks, so any company that isn't using these tools is bound to miss out on potential sales.

These customers are also highly likely to spread the word about a product - good or bad - on these social networks, so smart retailers will not just have a presence on these networks, but also use them to reach out directly to their customers.

For casual Internet users who are all over the social web but don't have the knowledge, resources, or desire to set up and market full online storefronts, there's PutACart, which democratizes the long tail of e-commerce, allowing users to peddle their wares from a plethora of the most popular social destinations online.

Here's what the carts look like on Facebook, MySpace, and WordPress, respectively:

Since this is for casual social-web users, Paypal is the only payment method for both buyers and sellers. And if a user makes changes to certain parts of his product list or account, he'll also need to update the embed codes on his social sites.

Mostly, though, it's a great idea with a kind of bad interface. Here's a look at my web-based store. Unfortunately, I can't customize the look and feel of this page, and I have no options for customizing my social web shopping cards other than toggling between thumbnail and extended product views. I have no control over how it looks, and social web users are very big on customizable GUIs. Especially for something that will be the commercial side of their personal brand, users need to be able to choose images, colors, typefaces, and layouts. They should probably also have some level of access to style the page/widget as they like. On this site, I didn't even have the option to crop my thumbnail, which came out distorted because the creators didn't give me any dimensions, either.

Also, the message sent out after a Paypal purchase is confirmed should without question be customizable. I, Jolie O'Dell, would never write something like, "We can't tell how much cooler you are for having bought something from us. Your friends will be jealous. Thank you!" And I'm sure a great many other vendors wouldn't, either. If you're sending out a message on my behalf to people in my social graph, it's imperative that I have control of what the message says.

Customization issues aside, it's a fantastic service for social web peeps who want to throw a few marketable products into the digital universe without committing to an online store, and we look forward to seeing what the PutACart team does in the future.

Also, this is a test store, so please don't try to buy anything I've posted! Do you really think I'd sell out all my tech scene bros for $0.99? That's my retirement plan.

We had 4 expert guests on the podcast: Baynote (collective intelligence platform for online shopping), ModCloth (online retailer of vintage clothing), Retrevo (vertical search for electronics), and Cartfly (social commerce store network).

Implicit Social Recommendations

RWW Live host Sean Ammirati asked the guests whether e-commerce has changed much over the past few years. Kurt Collins, VP of Business Development of Cartfly, replied that there is now a lot of implicit social recommendations across social networks and blogs. Jack Jia, founder and CEO of Baynote, noted that "99% of the crowds" are silent and so the implicit recommendation data that Kurt referred to is very valuable. It's crucial, said Jack, to tap into the interests, likes and dislikes of that invisible crowd. He added that that it may not be 'friend' data either, as we currently tend to think of it in social networks.

Eric Koger, CEO of niche clothing retailer ModCloth, said that they pay close attention to what their customers do across social sites - e.g. in their case their users activities in Flickr, StyleHive and social networks.

Expert-Driven or Crowdsourcing?

Where there was some disagreement among the guests was on the value of crowdsourced recommendations and reviews. Jack Jia, founder and CEO of Baynote, said that traditional e-commerce and commerce in general has been expert-driven, but now the crowds are driving decision-making in retail. Andrew Eisner, Director of Community and Content, Retrevo, took issue with this - saying that user reviews are key, pointing to the expert reviews at Retrevo. It's worth noting here that Andrew also used to work in the content arena, at PC World.

We'd be interested in our reader's opinion on this issue. Clearly consumer reviews in aggregate represent very valuable data for big online retailers especially - e.g. Amazon has virtually built its entire business off the back of crowdsourced user reviews and recommendations. What's more, this type of data is highly trusted by consumers - one of the factoids perhaps lost in the commotion about Forrester's report on trust in corporate blogs, is that consumer product ratings and reviews are the second most trusted data online, behind only email from someone you know:

Yet we can also see Andrew's point of view, that there is a big place for expert reviews when it comes to consumer products online. For example, I'm more likely to read and take notice of a review of Bose headphones by a CNET reviewer who specializes in music electronics, than a review written by "lolcatzndogz67". What do you think? Perhaps in aggregate, crowdsourced data is key; but when it comes to decision-making on certain types of products, we still want to read expert reviews before we buy.

How Can Existing E-commerce Vendors Tap Into the Social Web More?

A RWW commenter called Mark commented on the original RWW Live post that he has just relaunched a social/e-commerce website. He used to have an eBay site, but now he wants to tap into the social web more. Here is what Mark wrote:

"In our previous site launch, we spent months building a database of products, opened the doors of the site, and it was just too much product, and not enough interaction with our customer base.

In our relaunch, we decided to go social first, e-commerce second. Working on our customer relationships first. The site is a transition from our successful eBay business to a more controllable blog/e-commerce solution."

I put that dilemma to our guests, starting with Kurt Collins - whose service Cartfly addresses exactly that need. Kurt said that the socialization of e-commerce can come in different forms - e.g. embedding a store in a user's social network profile. That won't replace "end destination e-commerce", but Kurt said it will "augment sales tremendously" at the edge of the network. It's all about bringing the product to the customers, rather than the other way round.

Eric from ModCloth said that their business started by using a series of open source shopping systems. He says that they still currently use an "archaic" e-commerce platform, but that blogging and direct engagement on external networks are their current tools for reaching out to ModCloth customers.

Favorite Online Shipping Web Apps

Finally, a bit of a tradition we've started on RWW Live is to ask our guests at the end of the show to name one web app in their field of expertise (other than their own) which has caught their eye. So I put this question to our 4 guests: which online shopping app do they recommend to the listeners and readers of ReadWriteWeb?

Andrew said "vertical gadget sites", but he also said that Amazon "does everything right in the world of shopping" - particularly because it recommends products he didn't know he wanted.

Eric mentioned Revolve Clothing, and what they're doing with the "category view" - allows you to see a lot more at a higher level.

Jack mentioned that he buys books from Amazon and other specialist sites, but he still goes to Google for products that he needs to do research on.

Kurt said that ThinkGeek ('stuff for smart masses') is one of his favorite sites and that Zappos is a site that many of his female friends use. He also mentioned that he buys a lot of things from iTunes.

One of my favorite sites at the moment is a new social wish list called Boxedup.com, which I mentioned in our roundup of 10 wish list websites. However, I have to admit that I've since renewed my interest in Amazon Wish Lists - their universal wish list feature pretty much does all I need.

Sean also said that Amazon is his favorite, due to related recommendations. But he had a shout-out for Glue, the browser add-on made by AdaptiveBlue.

Tell us your current favorite online shopping app or site in the comments!

You can listen to the entire RWW Live podcast on shopping 2.0 here:

Download MP3

Image credit: Fosforix

These problems were only compounded during the last year, as eBay also lost a lot of its casual sellers to Craigslist (which saw its traffic rise 40% over the past year).

As Compete's Matt Pace rightly points out, eBay's strategy of emphasizing fixed-price transactions only muddled the waters and blurred eBay's distinction from other online retailers, including eBay's own shopping.com. Also, users clearly prefer to buy from a trusted source like Amazon, and the average order value on eBay has remained stable at around $28 for the last year.

That doesn't mean that eBay's focus on "Buy-It-Now" transactions was a total failure, though. The number of these transactions grew steadily over the last year (up 20% from last year), but this was not enough to make up for the simultaneous decline in eBay's auction business. According to Compete, 1.5 million fewer users actually placed bids on eBay in February 2009 than a year ago.

You can tune into the show, and interact with us via the chat, by clicking here. You can also use the Calliflower Facebook app to tune in and participate.

• Jack Jia, founder and CEO, Baynote, a collective intelligence platform for online shopping, featuring recommendations and social search.
• Eric Koger, CEO, ModCloth, an online retailer of vintage, indie, retro and mod clothing.
• Andrew Eisner, Director of Community and Content, Retrevo, a "matchmaking service for people and electronics".
• Kurt Collins, VP of Business Development, Cartfly, a social commerce store network that enables online merchants to turn their storefronts into portable widgets and distribute them across major social networks.
  
• Mateo Gutierrez, Director of Social Marketing, ThisNext, a social shopping network "where people interact with community-validated taste makers and influencers to discover recommended products".

RWW Live is hosted as always by Sean Ammirati and ReadWriteWeb editor Richard MacManus.

Before the show starts, we're interested in what questions you have for the panelists. Please leave a comment on this post and one of the RWW crew on the call will do our best to ask your question.

We will post the audio from the show at the end, but we hope you join us LIVE on Calliflower or Facebook.

Related: 10 Wish List Websites For The Holiday Shopping Season

UPDATE: the show is now finished, here is the audio:

Download MP3

Last year, online spending was recorded at $272 million on Thanksgiving, and $531 million on Black Friday; this year holiday shopping is expected to be more challenging with one in five shoppers saying they simply have less money to spend. With that in mind, we've created a Black Friday resource list to help you navigate your way to a bargain.

According to Shopzilla's Helen Malani, shoppers are turning to the Web, not only for shopping, but for gift ideas and product research. "Whether they make those holiday purchases online or in stores, the Internet will have a tremendous influence on holiday sales this year," she said.

So if you're willing to do a bit of research on the Web, there is a strong chance you'll find some of the best deals available.

Where to find information about Black Friday online

In the lead up to Black Friday, retailers oftentimes leak special offers, and there are plenty of sites that offer up that information. Problem is, how do you know where to look? Here are four sites that you might want to bookmark. All offer RSS and e-mail subscriptions to keep you up-to-date.

Black Friday 2008

• Latest news
• Forum: Official deal announcements
• Forum: Retail store deal discussion
• Forum: Online store deal discussion
• Forum: Local Talk - Black Friday discussion by location
• Black Friday store hours

Black Friday Info

• Latest news
• List of stores
• List of products by category

Cheap Stingy Bargains

• Black Friday and Cyber Monday deal updates via e-mail
• Forum: Black Friday 2008 discussion

Note: Cheap Stingy Bargains offers coupons and coupon codes all year round
as well as Twitter updates

Black Friday at Gotta Deal

• Latest news
• Forum: Black Friday general discussion
• Forum: Store specific discussion

Comparison Shopping Search Engines

According to a recent study by Shop.org, 78 percent of retailers plan to offer free shipping at some point during the holiday season. This is great news for the budget conscious among us, but where do you find the best deals online? You start with price comparison search sites.

• Shopzilla
• Shopping.com
• PriceGrabber
• Bizrate
• Dealtime
• Google Product Search
• Brilliant Shopper

If you do decide to go and face the crowds, don't forget to plan your strategy by visiting ShopLocal to find the best deals in your area.

Finally, if you're willing to rise before dawn and wait in line in the cold there's a good chance you can find a bargain on Black Friday; if you miss out, don't worry too much, you can always find a great deal online come Cyber Monday.

If you know of any other great sites, please share them with us.