The annual State of Retailing Online (SORO) Profitability, Economy & Multichannel Report has officially launched. For the final report in the SORO ’09 series, Forrester Research and Shop.org surveyed retailers about their overall results for the full year 2008, their views on the economy and how their business has fared this year, key performance indicators, and organizational structure. Since it is such rapidly evolving part of the overall online retail landscape, we also delved into social media and how retailers are adopting and measuring these marketing and customer dialogue (“communication” sounds too one-way for social media) vehicles.

A couple of highlights:

While many retailers would probably like to put behind them the past year as quickly as possible, fully 87% of the online retailers we surveyed noted that their eCommerce business in 2008 was, in fact, profitable – and for over half it was actually more profitable than in 2007. When we probed how retailers accomplished this feat, over half credited putting a strong focus on preserving margin. While increased promotions also played a role, retailers played up the “value” message on their Web sites, worked hard to grow market share, and targeted profitable transactions and/or customers, among other measures.

Site conversion rates actually increased for almost half of retailers surveyed; while there is still work to do for everyone when it comes to shopping cart abandonment, returns on average are still respectable. And while over half of these retailers believe the economy should improve somewhat in the next year, they’re largely sticking with or even slightly lowering their outlook for their business for the next year.

True multichannel operations are increasingly a reality, not just a goal, for many retailers. Whether sharing product or branding imagery across channels, tapping email to promote in-store events and specials, or using marketing messages to distinctly promote multiple channels, we see those old channel silos slowly starting to crumble in earnest. And it’s not just a breakthrough on the marketing side of the house – executives in numerous functions are increasingly responsible and rewarded for driving results across multiple channels.

Finally, social media – retailers are, it appears, a pioneering bunch (and, we found, not because senior management is pressuring them on this point). If a retailer isn’t already on Facebook or tweeting, it’s likely on the drawing board for either the remainder of this year or certainly next. Two-thirds of retailers surveyed noted that the ROI from social marketing initiatives may be as yet unclear, but almost as many agreed that the reason they are pursuing them is because “it is a great time to experiment and learn more about what they can do.”

Shop.org Members can download the full report now. Be sure also to check out Ellen Davis’ blog from the Annual Summit about Sucharita Mulpuru’s keynote presentation that referenced some of these SORO findings along with much more.