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Everyone talks about building an online community that drives "viral" marketing -- but how exactly do you accomplish that? ...

Legend has it that the inventor of chess was so wise that when the king asked him to name his reward, he replied that he only wanted one grain of wheat for the first square, two grains for the second, four grains for the third, eight grains for the fourth and so on up to the sixty-four squares on the board. The king readily agreed, thinking it a ridiculously low reward for such an amazing invention, but then was later advised by his treasurer that he owed the inventor more grain than could be produced by the kingdom in 10,000 years!...

As I watch the world economy spiraling downward, I thank my lucky stars that I happen to work in one of the few industries that is expected to grow despite the downturn. Nonetheless, online retailers are going to face slower growth than we were all predicting even a few weeks ago, and the industry is being forced to completely reevaluate budgets and priorities. Suddenly the five big initiatives you had planned for 2009 are going to get cut down to two or three, and you'll be forced to make some hard and lasting choices about where to invest...

We've all done it. The holiday season was crazy, the busiest ever. We missed feature lockdown by a mile, cramming in every last bit just as things began to seriously ramp up. The servers went down on Black Friday. A database crash prevented us from processing returns for four agonizing days. Somehow we managed to survive, adding more chewing gum and baling wire to an e-commerce system than has been stuck to the underside of a third grade desk.

The Red Queen in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass lives in a very curious world where, as she explains to Alice, "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place." I think that sentence sums up the world of e-commerce with uncanny accuracy: No matter how hard we work to knock items off the priority list, there are always new ones popping right up to take their place.

Online shopping is the fastest growing multibillion-dollar business in the world. Yet, the customer experience of online shopping is much the same as it was upon creation, more than a decade ago -- essentially an online catalog ...

Imagine strolling through the front door of your favorite department store, but instead of finding yourself amid a comforting cacophony of display counters, merchandise, and bustling people, you're instead all alone in a strangely geometric room featuring a series of doors labeled "Women," "Men," "Kids," "Casual Wear," "Formal Wear," and "Cosmetics."