Shop.org information:

• Shop.org’s February webinar on the 2010 Digital Year in Review featuring comScore Executive Chairman and Founder Gian Fulgoni is still available for member playback. Not a member? Read the recap.
• The results of Shop.org’s post-holiday survey are in, and our Head of Research, Fiona Swerdlow, has compiled three trends to help you plan for Holiday 2011.
• Always a favorite, the Shop.org Job Board was an especially hot item for the month of February. See who’s hiring right now.
• During the month of February, Shop.org hosted sold-out networking dinners in Palm Springs and Los Angeles. Upcoming stops for March include Seattle, San Francisco, Dallas and Austin. View the full Spring schedule.
• There were four new white paper submissions to the Shop.org library last month. Topics include: a case study on going global, a look at long-term mobile strategy and two papers on consumer behavior. Visit the white paper library.

Top retail news stories from Shop.org SmartBrief:

• The psychology behind the success of daily-deal sites
• Will Facebook emerge as a key e-commerce player?
• Study: E-commerce sales will hit $279 billion in 2015
• More merchants test in-store iPads to boost sales
• Groupon defends controversial Super Bowl spots

Our favorite member tweet from February:

• @Forrester: Forbes runs down the digital marketing to do’s for the CMO, courtesy of @cjstutzman http://forr.com/eBR3lv

Want more industry news and resources from last month? Check out NRF’s What’s Hot for February 2011.

And, earlier this week, Amazon provided their own insight into the holiday season. Their Q4 guidance is for between 6% and 23% revenue growth. That’s quite a big range, but expected given the volatility of our economy.  I would expect that the range for most retailers’ projections are equally wide.

So what can retailers do to push their sales to the high range of their forecasts besides hoping for fewer headlines about the Dow plummeting and layoffs?  This won’t be a popular suggestion, but my recommendation is to offer free shipping (of course, not everyone agrees with me on this). The rough economy is pushing people to shop online looking for savings. If the savings are cancelled out by shipping costs, customers will be disappointed. Maybe they’ll go to a store, which isn’t bad if you have stores, but maybe they’ll decide not to buy at all.

Of course there are many other tactics and strategies retailers can employ. To hear a dozen plus of these ideas, Shop.org members should carve out an hour and fifteen minutes on November 12 to plug into the “14+ Specific Things You Can Do To Make More Money Next Week (and Improve Your Holiday Sales) webinar.  This Webinar will also feature an economic overview presented by comScore’s Gian Fulgoni. 

If you can’t wait until November 12, feel free to download (members only) the “24+ Specific Things You Can Do To Make More Money Next Week,” presentation from the Annual Summit.

Shop.org Members should also check out the Holiday section of the Shop.org Web site, which includes a great overview of recommendations for holiday 2008.  Written by Fiona Swerdlow, Shop.org’s head of research, the 2008 Holiday Planning and Strategy Guide is chock full of data points and recommendatoins based on the learnings from last year’s holiday study.