From October 2007

By their nature, rankings are based on numbers. Usually you count money, as with STORES’ Top 100 (total sales volume) and Hot 100 (year-over-year sales growth) retailers lists.

Ranking e-commerce sites by total online sales would have been something of a research headache: most multi-channel operators don’t break their sales out by channel.

And the Internet – in retailing as in so many other areas – is a different animal. It has changed consumer behavior in ways that are only now becoming clear, and some of those changes are not reflected in straight online sales volume figures.

The Favorite 50 online retailers, then, is a list of e-commerce websites as ranked by the consumers who use them. Worthington, Ohio-based BIGresearch asked two open-ended, write-in questions about online shopping to a universe of 7,675 consumers:

What website do you shop at most often for apparel items (clothing, shoes, accessories, etc.)?

What website do you shop at most often for non-apparel items (electronics, home decor, etc.)?

No merchants’ names were listed or suggested; respondents came up with the answers on their own.

There was a good deal of overlap, as can be seen from the chart: 18 of the Top 50 retailers – including nine of the top 10 – were given in response to both the apparel and non-apparel questions. The final list was assembled by ranking online retailers in order of total mentions.