Greetings Retail Brethren!

We're fast approaching the high point of the holiday shopping season. That means (to my chagrin) the interminable messaging on sales and promotions to get Americans to click furiously online and dash madly through stores where they will eagerly open their pocketbooks for the "gadget du saison." Not that I personally don't love a great deal, but as history has told us time and time again, it's not the most sustainable way to grow a business. Look for my upcoming piece called "Are Online Retailers Promoting Too Much?" for more insight into the true value and impact of these habits.

Moving forward, you'll be hearing a lot more from me. I'll be covering the eCommerce and multichannel beats, some of my favorite things to talk about. Crazy, I know, but then I've been lucky to have worked on those issues at some very beloved brands (Disney, Toys "R" Us, and Saks Fifth Avenue). Visit the Forrester Web site for a more complete bio.

Given that this holiday season seems to have attracted even more attention than normal as being particularly promotional, I thought I'd lay out some highlights of my upcoming research in one easy-to-remember acronym: SALE.

• Shopping trends: The ninth annual version of The State Of Retailing Online will be coming out in the middle of next year, and the distribution of the survey is just around the corner. Retailers should all be receiving an invitation to participate in early 2006, so please send us any feedback or thoughts on improvements we should consider -- the sooner, the better. Also, I'll write a recap of the online holiday shopping season in early January.

• Attitudes and behavior of online shoppers: Through the reams of consumer data that we capture every year in our enormous database of Consumer Technographics® surveys, in the coming weeks I'll address some of the recurring questions that clients have about key segments in the coming weeks, particularly the affluent and the young.

• Learning for and from the retail trenches: What's all the talk about Web site personalization? How should an eCommerce team be structured? How do different online marketers measure their results? These are all topics that I'll address in the coming year.

• Emerging technologies and trends: Some of you have already seen my piece Twelve Technologies That Will Transform Online Retail which will serve as a springboard for exploring many of those topics in more depth in the months to come, like blogs and RSS. I'll also be keeping an eye on developments in the industry, like local shopping features, flash shopping carts (a new option to address the perennial problem of abandoned shopping carts), and intellectual property developments. I recently published a piece on the latter topic called Amazon.com's Patent On Customer Reviews Creates Unnecessary Panic.

Research Referenced In This Issue Amazon.com's Patent On Customer Reviews Causes Unnecessary Panic (38259) Blogging: Bubble Or Big Deal? (35000) RSS 101 For Marketers (37422) Twelve Technologies That Will Transform Online Retail (38274)

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