You know how bloggers have a blogroll on one of their sidebars, giving you a little insight into what bloggers deem to have a voice of authority?  Well, I have been keeping an eye on some of the blogs that my favorite bloggers recommend, and decided to share my thoughts on the posts from these voices of authority I found most interesting this week. Things that made me go “hmmm…”

The Weekly Report:  Ecommerce Blog(s) Roll

1.      Father’s Day Online Shoppers Ready to Buy

Father’s Day is just around the corner, and there is no need to break out the Magic 8 Ball to understand how consumers will be spending their money, thanks to the recent findings shared on the Shop.Org Blog.  This article includes findings from research conducted by BGresearch for NRF/ Shop.Org, which offers interesting tidbits on how consumers are looking to spend their money online to show Dad how much they love him.

2.      Magento Performance in the Cloud

Interested in blogs of a more technical nature as you ponder questions around various ecommerce platforms?  The recent findings from a performance test conducted with open source ecommerce platform Magento in the Amazon EC2 cloud environment is available from our own Optaros Ecommerce Blog.  In this post the bloggers have detailed the optimum cloud environment and the performance findings for both the Magento Home Page and Cart. Feel free to comment and ask questions about this test.

3.      Shop Together: Bring Your Friends with You when You Shop Online…

Michael Sidney Levy has a visually fun blog to visit, and this blog post offers a good review of the social shopping application ShopTogether.  I appreciate how Micheal uses screenshots to demonstrate the use of ShopTogether on the site of US junior clothing retailer Charlotte Russe.  A practical and insightful post.

4.      Quick Take on UK Online Retail from a US Perspective

On the Forrester blogs we are given access to their analysts, and in this particular post to trends gleaned from recent conversations with online retailers in the UK.  I specifically find the trend of other retailers in the UK to want to follow the “Boden” model revealing, as this trendy UK retailer (I must admit, I love shopping on Boden) has pulled 30 percent of their revenue from US markets as of 2008.  Let’s see how other retailers follow the Boden lead.

That’s it for this week! Send me your favorite blog posts on ecommerce trends, social shopping and technology on Twitter @vnoreen – perhaps you’ll see them here next week. Also, I highly encourage you to subscribe to your favorite blogs  by email or RSS, and follow the authors on Twitter to make sure you don’t miss out on any part of the ecommerce conversation.

Keep shopping online,

Noreen