E-commerce Insights: The Online Retail 2.0 Ideas Tour

The first stop is del.icio.us, the social tagging site. (Go to del.icio.us/catalogsuccess, and you’ll find a list of all links in this article indicated in print with underlines.) Del.icio.us allows users to organize the Web via tags, a so-called folksonomy.

To see power of tagging in retail, visit Etsy.com, a handmade goods site. Try searches like “knit hat,” “funny gift” or “squid.” You’ll get highly relevant results because of the user-contributed tags. Relying on the wisdom of crowds, customers may do a better job of organizing your products than your merchants. Tagging lets them do just that.