ReadWriteWeb

For those of us who have grown accustomed to purchasing things from our laptops, tablets and smartphones, the experience of walking into a physical store and standing in line can get tiresome. It's hard to top the immediacy and convenience of online and mobile shopping. Yet, there are still plenty of items that are best purchased in person.

Apple hopes to bridge the gap between these digital and physical worlds. The company just released an update to its Apple Store app for iOS. Using the application, customers can not only purchase Apple products like they can on the Apple website, but they can now opt to pick them up in person at one of the company's many retail locations.

At yesterday's PayPal Innovate conference in San Francisco, EBay and Facebook announced a partnership to integrate Open Graph into EBay's commerce platforms X.commerce, Magnto and GSI. Merchants already have the ability to set-up shop on Facebook and sell directly to people who Like their pages, but that feature - like many other social commerce ideas on Facebook - never did take off. Facebook's EBay integration might be the tipping point for social commerce - not only will merchants be able to integrate new "want" and "own" buttons, but advertisers will soon be able to target users based on their Open Graph activity.

In a blog post earlier today, Google announced the launch of Google Commerce Search for Mobile, citing research that search queries from mobile phones are on the up and up. Google Commerce launched only two years ago, just in time for the 2009 holiday season.

If you are looking for a textbook example of how not to design your website shopping experience, take a look at what has happened recently with Target.com. They left their partnership with Amazon earlier this summer and started using a bevy of consultants and VARs to create their own ecommerce site. It has been one mess, to say the least.

We aren't just talking about broken links, or pages that are slow to load, or problems with search, although there are plenty of all of these issues to go around. It is the totality of the screw-up that has gotten attention. The latest recounting of woe can be found here in AdAge.

Google announced this morning that it has begun tests of a new service, Google Trusted Stores. The program will monitor and verify that an online store's performance, trustworthiness and customer satisfaction all meet certain standards. The company will even offer free insurance for up to $1000 in online purchases from stores deemed Trusted by Google.

People have long said that it's in Google's best interest to support performance improvements to the Web, because the better surfing works, the more ads users will see. So too, though, does Google have an interest in improving the reliability of the purchasing experiences that users have when they click through any ads online. The more people trust online stores, the more they will click on online ads. That makes me think that this experimental new service could prove very big for Google and for the rest of the Internet.

Last Friday, Amazon took on the U.S. Post Office and opened a real world locker box service as a delivery portal for the stuff people buy on Amazon.com.

The lockers, which come in several sizes, are located on a wall in a 7-11 convenience store in Seattle surrounding an ATM-like device that allows a customer to key in a PIN and pick up their Amazon package.

Google just put a futuristic spin on shopping catalogs. The company launched an iPad app today that takes traditional catalogs for things like apparel, jewelry, beauty and home goods and adds a layer of rich interactivity, including letting you purchase items on each vendor's website.

Google Catalogs features the most recent catalogs from retailers like Eddie Bauer, Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie and Crate & Barrel, but every item in each photo is adorned with a small tag icon which, when tapped, reveals details about that product.

Few topics have garnered as much hype among tech enthusiasts this year as mobile payments. And while the prospect of waving our phones to pay for everything from subway rides to groceries is exciting to some, do we have any reason to believe consumers are on board with the idea?

Banks, credit card companies, mobile carriers and tech companies big and small are all clamoring to position themselves to benefit in a cashless, mobile future, but some recent reports suggest that consumers are going to need a little more time.

Everyone, especially Wall Street, is standing up to salute social commerce. Look at the IPO pipeline - LinkedIn, Groupon, Zynga, Living Social. But despite all this attention, the definition of social commerce is fuzzy at best. How do we know if these companies will win, if we can't even agree on what it is?

When defining something social, it's helpful to characterize it by the conversations that make up the experience. I've observed three elemental commerce-related conversations currently taking place: shopping, marketing and trading.

There is no shortage of hype around social media, especially for the space's most dominant player, that 500 million user-strong behemoth called Facebook. For businesses of all shapes and sizes, the need to jump on the social Web bandwagon is pretty much a given at this point. Indeed, more than 70% of small businesses use Facebook, according to a recent Merchant Circle survey.

While the perceived urgency of getting on board is clear, what's less obvious to businesses is whether or not social pays off. Of course, the question of what social media ROI even means varies across different types of businesses, all of whom have different goals in mind for their social marketing strategies.