eCommerce and

Happy Leap Day everyone!  I know some of you were getting crazy at SMX this week, but I hung out in good old Southern California and caught up on some ecommerce blogs.  I have highlighted a few for you below.

• Varien is doing a usability review of popular websites, I think the whole series is worth checking out but they included us in this post analyzing customer service landing pages, so that is the one I wanted to highlight.
• Is Google gunning for LivePerson with their new live chat service?
• The Word of Mouth Marketing Agency, or WOMMA, published an insightful article this week: For Every $1 Spent Online, the Internet Influences $3.45 Offline.
• Target doesn’t respond to blogs because blogs are “nontraditional media outlets”, read the full article here.
• iTunes beats out Best Buy and Target in the music industry, coming in second to Wal-Mart.

We may not be able to cover every ecommerce and entrepreneurship topic out there so here are some interesting selections that made it in to this week’s “Variety”.

• One of my favorite bloggers Linda Bustos of Get Elastic brought this great gizmo to our attention in one of her recent blog posts

• Congratulations to Frank Adante of the Rubicon Project for raising $21 million in funding

• If you sell on eBay make sure to register for their webinar regarding their new pricing changes that go in to effect on February 20, 2008

• For those of you who may not know how the changes eBay made will affect you check out Scot Wingo’s forum on eBay Strategies

• The February 2008 edition of Wired Magazine has an article written by Frank Rose called “The Secret Life of a Blog Post” the article is interesting, if you don’t subscribe to the magazine you can view the image at this blog