The greatest anomaly, however, is No. 9 Google, which isn’t a retailer at all but a search engine. In fact, four of the Favorite 50 e-commerce sites are search engines, indicating that these websites are and will continue to be prominent features on the online retailing landscape. Google had the hottest IPO in recent memory when it went public three years ago, and its stock price is still in the stratosphere.

Unlike many of the victims of the great dot-com meltdown, Google is a solid business. It sells ads in two ways – on its site through keywords and across a network of some 200,000 affiliated websites – and it sells a lot of them: 2006 sales were $10.6 billion, with net income of 29 percent.

So what do consumers mean, exactly, when they say they shop at a search engine? We may be seeing the rise of what are being called “virtual malls” – home bases for shopping in a variety of retail outlets, the way traditional stores are collected in malls.

A lot of high school and college-age people – a not unimportant demographic to the retail community – “hang out” in sites like Myspace the way their parents used to hang out at the mall. It’s entirely possible that these virtual mall rats will, if they haven’t already, become comfortable bouncing back and forth between, say, Myspace and Amazon or eBay, and in telling their online buddies what cool things they’ve encountered at a particular site. If this occurs – and if retailers want to benefit from this interaction – one of their priorities is going to have to be getting noticed by the crowd.

And this doesn’t apply solely to retailers that target younger consumers. As online browsing and pre-purchase research become ever-more-important aspects of shopper behavior, retailers’ approach to the Internet will have to evolve to keep up with it.

Another interesting trend within the Favorite 50 is the presence of special-size apparel retailers, names like Lane Bryant (and sister site Woman Within), Roamans and King Size Direct. One reason these retailers thrive online is that people who are fit-challenged have issues with walking into a store and being categorized, perhaps unkindly. In the privacy of their own homes, however, they can be perfectly honest about what they need and want. The self-consciousness factor is probably a help to a retailer like Victoria’s Secret, too: there are plenty of women (and men) who are willing to buy lingerie – they just don’t want to waltz up to the counter with it in their hands.

As part of the survey, shoppers were asked how often they research products online before buying them in a store: 43.3 percent answered “regularly” and 47.3 percent answered “occasionally.” This would indicate that the vast majority of consumers do at least some online research before going to the store to complete a purchase.

The numbers were highest for 25- to 34-year-olds (50.8 percent regularly, 42.2 percent occasionally), but even 27 percent of the 65-and-over age group regularly undertake online research.

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