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Shopping "green" is the latest big trend in retail, and online auction giant eBay didn't want to miss out on it. To attract the new breed of "green"shopper, eBay has just launched a brand-new marketplace called "World of Good." On this new site, shoppers will find environmentally friendly and fair trade goods as well as other products that will appeal to the socially conscious.

Today, eBay announced a number of changes to its fee structure, which will emphasize fixed-price sales over eBay's traditional auctions. Fixed-price sales have been growing at a faster rate than auctions for eBay, so emphasizing this business model makes a lot of sense for eBay. To do so, the company has reduced the price to list an item for a fixed price by over 70% to 35 cents and sellers can now list multiple quantities of the same item for the same price.

Commuto puts an interesting spin on trading real world goods on the Internet. Clearly, it would be extremely hard for any start-up to be successful in this space when the likes of eBay and Craigslist having pretty much become synonymous with online trading already. Commuto, however, doesn't go head to head with these giants - instead, it focuses on local trades based on bartering.

Pluribo is a Firefox plugin that displays short summaries of product reviews on Amazon.com. Pluribo scans through reviews customers on Amazon have left and automatically creates a one sentence summary that is somewhat akin to a Zagat review. While Zagat uses human editors to compile its reviews, though, Pluribo is fully automated. Right now, Pluribo only works for the electronics section of Amazon's store, but the developers are planning to expand this to the rest of Amazon's offerings soon.

Some ideas are either so good (or so easy to copy), that it's only a matter of time before they have been cloned so many time that they become cliché. Popurls was exactly such an idea - a simple web site that aggregates headlines from various Web 2.0 blogs and social media sites.

The latest Popurls clone is Smashbuys: a site that displays the top sellers in various categories at some of the major online retailers, including Amazon, Newegg, and iTunes.

Today, at the Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition in Chicago, Nic Covey, Director of Insights for Nielsen Mobile, spoke on the subject of m-commerce (commerce that takes place via the mobile device). In his presentation, he covered what retailers must do to make their sites ready for the mobile web as well as discussing some stats on who uses the mobile web, what prompts them to shop online, and what concerns they have today about the mobile shopping experience. Additionally, Covey reported that, based research done by Nielsen Mobile, nearly half (49%) of mobile data users have said they expect to participate in mobile commerce in the future. It looks like this is one trend about to take off.