Holiday Shopping 2008 may be known as the year of the coupon, and if you're a small seller, you don't have to sit by the sidelines and watch the big retailers get all the glory. In today's issue, Julia Wilkinson shares how small sellers can capitalize on the popularity of coupons that are suddenly all the rage among shoppers.

And about those big merchants that are coming onto the eBay platform,...In today's issue, we feature an interview with the CEO of Mercent, a company that's been working with eBay to help large retailers load inventory onto the site. Eric Best is extremely candid in explaining the strategy behind his company's multi-channel advertising service and how eBay fits into the picture.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are behind us, and Christmas is a mere 2 weeks from Thursday. From all reports, it's been a tough holiday shopping season, though online sales have picked up post-Thanksgiving.

We conducted a survey of readers last month to determine how small online sellers had fared in October and how they expected overall holiday sales to play out. Given the economic news in October, perhaps it's not surprising that for most, sales were down year-over-year. You can read the full results in AuctionBytes Newsflash, and comment on the AuctionBytes Blog.

We also updated our eBay traffic report with data provided by Nielsen Online. First we looked at eBay data going back 4 years. We noticed a decline in eBay page views in 2008, so we then compared eBay's data with Amazon's traffic data. Pictures are worth a thousand words, and the charts David compiled from the Nielsen Online data portray what could be a troubling picture for eBay. The data certainly confirms how important it is for online sellers to do their own work to drive traffic to their listings, and points to the wisdom of a multi-channel selling strategy.

Today, Greg Holden features an article on a service that has been helping eBay sellers create a storefront. And our two new product launches are designed to help small sellers and couldn't be more timely. We recently published the second issue of our new newsletter, EcommerceBytes Insider, in which Kevin Richards of VenturaWebDesign.com explained how to quickly set up an effective Yahoo Store, and Alibaba.com's Kelly Sang discussed product sourcing.

We also have been hearing from sellers who've created a listing on the EveryPlaceISell.com merchant directory that it is driving traffic to their listings. It's a good investment of your time to create a centralized place where shoppers can find all of your venues. Please help support independent merchants by helping us continue to get the word out about EveryPlaceISell.com!

Thanks for reading.