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Online retailers seeking to maximize their market share need to embrace every tool in their marketing kit to win the day. Naturally, many retailers prefer to rely on a "paid media" strategy because accounting for spend, income, net profit and return on investment is easy, thus justifying financial allocations. But savvy retailers will not ignore "unpaid" media efforts, including search engine optimization and social media campaigns. 

People wearing Google's glasses are transported to a strange new world in which the internet is always in their line of sight. But for people looking at the people wearing those glasses, the view is even stranger — someone wearing a computer processor, a battery and a tiny screen on their face. In a sign of how acute the challenge is for Google, the company is negotiating with Warby Parker, an e-commerce startup that sells trendy eyeglasses, to help it design more fashionable frames, according to two people briefed on the negotiations who weren't authorized to speak publicly.

Google's recent purchase of Channel Intelligence underscores its unstated goal of gobbling up every industry. This particular move is a not so subtle signal to the marketplace that Google intends to become the dominant player in global e-commerce, which in the U.S. alone is a $186 billion industry. Yes, for Google this isn't just about owning the entire retail ad marketplace. It intends to eat up all of retail, starting with e-commerce.  

A report from CPC Strategy says Google Shopping was on average 32.77 percent more cost effective for merchants during last year's third and fourth quarters than Amazon Product Ads. The 2012 Ecommerce Industry Report analyzed the sales data of over 200 online retailers with ad-buying power of over $2.4 million, analyzing over 6 million clicks and $14.6 million in revenue. The study compared the effectiveness of Google Shopping against rival shopping engine Amazon Product Ads.

If holiday 2012 was any sign of the aggressively evolving retail landscape, we can expect 2013 to hold the same promise. Industry experts gathered at the National Retail Federation's Annual Big Show in New York City to discuss just this. The four-day conference featured 27,600 attendees from across the globe, each bringing a fresh perspective on their industry's outlook. Today we'll take a look at the top emerging themes for 2013 from the NRF conference. Below each, you'll also see some of the ways Google is getting involved to assist you in driving these initiatives in the months to come.

Google is poised to win the "mobile wallet war," according to a survey of attendees at the National Retail Federation's annual conference in New York. The survey was conducted by ACI Worldwide, an international provider of payment systems. Over half (52 percent) of respondents said they believe Google would come out on top when it comes to mobile payment systems. An additional 25 percent believe PayPal will come out on top, while nearly one in five respondents (19 percent) believes a new market entrant could gain traction in this emerging segment.

With so much consumer activity moving online, retailers must be strategic in the ways in which they market products to internet shoppers. A significant part of those strategies will center on comparison shopping engines (CSEs) such as Google Shopping, PriceGrabber, Shopzilla and others. However, marketers are still struggling to make informed, profitable decisions about which CSEs are worthy of their budgets. Too many retailers look first at the cost per click (CPC) and never dig deeper to determine actual CSE value. In reality, it's the revenue-per-click (RPC) data that should influence retailers’ CSE investment decisions. Marketers that know how much revenue each click generates can then determine the return on investment by considering the CPC.

Corporate marketing departments have added a social component to their marketing strategies, a necessary step in reaching this vast online audience. Smart companies have dedicated time, money and staff to building and maintaining reputable social networking platforms that engage with customers with the click of a mouse. Today's infographic takes us through the top 250 internet retailers on social media. These companies have excelled, creating highly engaging Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+ and Pinterest pages, allowing their customers to interact with their brand without stepping foot in a storefront.

During the first big wave of data warehousing in the 1990s, companies were sometimes described as being "data rich and information poor," a reference to the lack of business insights that still prevailed even after large amount of data had been collected and centralized. With the explosion of communications channels in recent years, that phrase has new currency, as many retailers have been struggling to integrate all these new data sources — and to make use of them to drive business results.

I guess we're just not as advanced as we think we are. Or, the more things change, the more they stay the same. In last month's Christmas shopping season, paper catalogs influenced more holiday shopping than Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and mobile advertising platforms. And that's not just for brick-and-mortar stores, that's for online shopping too. Flyers and catalogs influenced 22 percent of online purchases and just slightly less, 21 percent, of offline purchases, according to a 1,000-participant study by Baynote, a customer experience solutions company.