Online sellers faced major challenges in the holiday selling period: a recession, fewer shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas, severe winter weather that delayed deliveries, and glitches, including an outage of the USPS online postage tools.

ComScore reported online sales from November 1 through December 23 reached $25.5 billion - down 3 percent compared to the corresponding shopping days in 2007. It was the first time ComScore had seen negative growth rates for the holiday season since it began tracking ecommerce in 2001. Historically the winter months are good for ecommerce sales. But as the ComScore numbers show, these are tough times in retail, and the months ahead will likely remain challenging for all retailers.

The past year saw major changes for eBay sellers, and in today's issue, I take a look at how the year played out. One of the most significant trends of 2008 for small sellers was the rise of multi-channel selling. We saw evidence of this when we launched a merchant directory for sellers to advertise all of the venues on which they sell. Browse through the listings at EveryPlaceISell.com and you'll discover many merchants who got their start on eBay and who are now selling on their own websites and storefronts as well as niche sites and fixed-price marketplaces.

We recently conducted a survey to learn more about multi-channel selling behavior to better understand how EveryPlaceISell.com can serve both sellers and shoppers. We discovered that 76 percent of respondents had different pricing strategies on the different venues on which they sell. This will be significant for shoppers who are looking for ways to save money in these tough times. The full survey results will be published this week in the AuctionBytes Newsflash newsletter.

We also launched a new newsletter last year to help small sellers as they expanded beyond auction sites. EcommerceBytes Insider provides articles about successful online and multi-channel selling - directly from the companies that work with online merchants. The experts share their firsthand observations of what works and doesn't work for the sellers they work with every day. The newsletter is published via email twice a month, and I urge you to sign up at no charge to receive informative articles about online selling.

In 2009, I expect to see growth in multi-channel selling and an increase in regulation and taxation of merchants and marketplaces - stick with AuctionBytes to keep track of the changes and learn about new solutions that can help your online sales.

Thanks for reading, and thanks to our advertisers who make this publication possible!