Just as we did at the end of 2008, we have gone back through our entire archive for the year 2009 and picked out the articles that received the most conversation from our readers. As we approach the new year, we thought it would be fun to go back and reflect on some of the things that got people talking in the one that’s wrapping up.

PayPal has introduced a new Facebook app for sending money. The app is designed to allow uses to use PayPal to send money to anyone starting from Facebook. Users only need the person’s email address.

PayPal Director of Product Marketing Heinz Waelchli explains how it works:

We’re well into the holiday season now, in terms of having sites ready for holiday sales. That said, it’s never too late to improve your site. Your sales may depend on it. There are lot of key ingredients that go into the recipe of a successful e-commerce site: marketing, analytics, customer service, prices, competition, and the list goes on. Somewhere in there is design, and more importantly, usability.

A U.S. Senate report has revealed that retailers (a number of which you may already know and trust), have accepted as much as $792 million to share customers’ credit-card information with direct marketing companies. Could your card number have been one that was shared? Would you have known?

Google product listing ads have been spotted every now and then for a while now. The company has been testing them, but now the they have announced that US users will start seeing them more frequently on shopping related queries.

We talk a lot about social media marketing – using social networks like Facebook and Twitter to market brands and drive traffic to sites. There is no question that these can be effective tools for doing both of these things.

The following is based on research, not sexism or prejudice of any kind. Conclusions are by nature overly general, and there are many exceptions to the following “rules” of masculine and feminine behavior. Quite simply, there really are general and stark differences in the behaviors men and women, but this fact should never be used for discrimination or other types of abuse. Also, in the following, jokes and wisecracks abound. The author apologizes in advance if you don’t find him funny and reminds you they’re only jokes.

An attorney general is suing a Redmond-based e-commerce service providing company, which had faltered on its promises of bringing up Web Traffic for a number of small businesses, driving many customers to file complaints.

Attorney General Rob McKenna reportedly stated that, “When it comes to Internet search results, every small business wants to pull a high ranking. Merchants hoping to increase their online sales paid thousands of dollars to Visible.net and Captures.com but didn’t always receive the top listings and other services they were promised.”

Any dope on the street can make a mistake without exerting any effort. To really wreck an e-commerce site requires effort. Here’s how to do it.

The latest changes at eBay may encourage the opposite behavior from sellers that the online marketplace wants to encourage.

Economic, housing market, and energy cost concerns aside, consumers continue to hand out the cash at e-commerce sites.

Another round of holiday goodies arrived from Google for webamsters, this time in the form of updates to the Google Analytics service.

The importance of authoritative content on websites becomes even more critical to site publishers during the holiday season.

Despite a slow start in November, online US non-travel retail topped $7 billion for the first 18 days of the holiday season, an increase of $1 billion from the same period in 2006.

The droves of Black Friday shoppers are just warming up. Last week, traffic to websites specifically dedicated to America’s Other Holiday was up 145 percent, dominated by new visitors and young women.

If you run an e-commerce site, you want visitors to become buyers. Panelists at SES San Jose suggested making those visitors feel secure while you make your call to action.

Scarborough Research, a consumer research firm has released a report that finds that eBay is popular in the South.

E-commerce sites are heavy users of search engine marketing; with each of the top ten search engine marketers being retail or comparison-shopping sites according to comScore qSearch Market report.

In March, close to 20 billion sponsored links were offered to U.S. Internet users from the top search engines. eBay was the top search engine marketer with 802 million sponsored link exposures.

U.S. online retail is maturing quickly. One indication is that e-commerce sales growth will drop below 20 percent for the first time next year.

With maturing Internet sales, along with the possible slowdown of the U.S. economy, year over year e-commerce sales are expected to be lower. eMarketer estimates online retail sales will grow 21 percent to $131 billion this year. During the next four years, sales will increase at 17 percent compound annual growth rate.

The Internet is an informational repository with seemingly immeasurable limits, and as such anything you say in cyberspace will most likely be accessible at the click of a mouse for decades to come.

In 2006, spending online increased by twenty four percent, a sizable margin to be sure. The numbers for online retail keep climbing, but do the signs point to a plateau somewhere in the near future? Or will the growth of online spending continue to skyrocket at this fast pace?