Internet Retailer Releases 2008 Top 500 Guide

If you're looking to see who's the king of the e-commerce mountain, look no further that this year's Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide. The guide gives you a comprehensive look at the top 500 e-tailers (based on overall web sales).

This year Apple made a huge splash, pushing SonyStyle out of the top 10. Collectively, the top 10 retailers represent over $45B...now let's just say those companies probably know a thing or two about the way an ecommerce site should be designed and the features it should offer.

I find this information extremely useful not just for competitive research, but for finding overall trends when it comes to design and usability. Recently I completed an in-depth study of some website analytics, hoping to better understand the buying behavior on our company's websites. What I learned about the actual behavior was very enlightening, but I really wanted to help move our capabilities forward in a much stronger fashion.

Using the same sites as a benchmark, I started looking at how certain retailers designed their own product pages. Perhaps I could find something in the way they had gone about similar challenges (presenting a mix of product data with user generated content like reviews. ways to incorporate multimedia into showing your products, tabbed browsing, global navigation...the list goes on).

It was very helpful to step away from what our direct competitors were doing and instead see what these top 10 companies have done to create the expected web experience in customers' minds.

This year's top 10 list (in order):

Amazon.com Inc. ($14.8 B)
Staples Inc. ($5.6 B)
Office Depot Inc. ($4.9B)
Dell Inc. ($4.2 B)
HP Home & Home Office Store ($3.4 B)
OfficeMax Inc. ($3.2 B)
Apple Inc. ($2.7 B
Sears Holding Corp. ($2.6 B)
CDW ($2.4 B)
NewEgg ($1.9 B)

Source: 2008 Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide

What this means for other businesses:

Like it or not, we all live in a post-Amazon age, and if anyone has trained us on what the expect when you're buying online, it's these guys. Sometimes it helps to step back and look at what Amazon is doing, as well as some of the other bigger names like Staples, Office Depot, Dell, and HP Home and Home Office.

You might be surprised, or you might be inspired. But a single word of warning; remember that these sites do what they do because it makes the best business sense for them. Some features may seem counter-intuitive, but you can rest assured if you're seeing them on these sites, they've been tested and re-worked over time to make the biggest bottom line impact. So just remember this warning before taking a surgical knife to your site and trying to mimic exactly what Amazon does!