ReadWriteWeb

Last week Sears and Kmart became the latest retailers to sell Christmas trees online and deliver them to your doorstep, at least if you live in the lower 48 states of the USA. And while it is great that a company that formerly sold houses via mail order has entered this market, you might get a better deal if you shop elsewhere, both for live and fake trees. Of course, you might be somewhat nostalgic that yet another holiday ritual has been relegated to the digital universe. But while you do your shopping you can see some important user experience lessons to be learned for your own ecommerce site here.

In April, social media startup Kosmix was acquired for $300 million by retailing giant Walmart. Kosmix had built a Semantic Web platform called the Social Genome, which organized social media data. The platform powered 3 products: TweetBeat, a real-time social media filter for live events; Kosmix.com, a topic-based search engine; and RightHealth, a health search portal. The URLs for TweetBeat and Kosmix now re-direct to a new site called @WalmartLabs.

The tagline of @WalmartLabs is "Social + Mobile + Retail" and it's an indicator of where Walmart wants to go with the technology it acquired. Walmart wants to tap into social data - for example from Twitter - and entice mobile phone toting customers to its stores. Walmart also wants to beef up its online operations, traditionally a laggard compared to Amazon.com.

North Carolina has asked online retailer Amazon.com to turn over the names and addresses of every customer who has made a purchase on the site since 2003 and what they bought. The N.C. Department of Revenue is making the request in an attempt to audit Amazon's compliance with state sales and tax laws, according to a Reuters report.

Amazon says revealing this data violates customer privacy and has filed a lawsuit to prevent having to turn over the records, which hold the transaction details on 50 million purchases over a 7-year time frame.

Shopping is horror. The prices. The lines. The hordes of clamoring consumers. The thought of holiday shopping is, in itself, enough to make us wish for simpler days when putting coal in someone's sock was a legitimate option.

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.

Social networking sites are quickly becoming one of the most important places where retailers can meet potential customers and interact with their current customer base. According to a new report from eMarketer, social network users are a lucrative target demographic because they are more likely to make online purchases than any other group. About three-quarters of all the retailers in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide maintain a presence on at least one social network. Facebook, YouTube and MySpace are the most popular social networking sites for online retailers.

Sometimes, all you need is a MySpace profile and a dream. And a shopping cart.

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.

In a RWW Live podcast from last December, we discussed 'shopping 2.0'. In this analysis of the show, we explore how e-commerce has evolved over the past few years - what web technologies our expert guests are currently using, and the trends they've picked up on.

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).

Over the last year, eBay has been trying to slowly move users away from its auctions and more towards purchases of fixed-priced items. Last week, however, eBay announced that it plans to return to its roots and that the company wants to put more emphasis on its auctions business again. Judging from the latest data from Compete, eBay's former strategy was clearly not working and was actually driving users away from eBay and toward other fixed-price retailers like Amazon and Walmart.

In this week's episode of RWW Live, to be broadcast live at 3.30pm PST Tuesday (6.30pm EST), ReadWriteWeb talks to a group of leaders in the online shopping market. We have executives from Retrevo, ModCloth, Baynote, ThisNext and Cartfly on the call, and we'll be discussing what's next in online shopping in this timely holiday podcast.

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.