Just barely past the midway point in February, and here in the Northeast US, it’s already been a long, cold winter. Despite posting decent sales figures, stores’ foot traffic has been immeasurably impacted by a seemingly continuous chain of weather-related punches. Snow, freezing rain, biting cold, and the resulting freeze/melt/freeze conditions have lead to dangerous driving and treacherous walking. All in all, it’s enough to make shoppers stay home.

So while I’ve promised my partners that I will step out into the world of Boston’s stores next week for a man on the street report to put some context around the impact the weather has really had on shoppers and store here, this week, like most of my neighbors, I must confess that I did every bit of shopping that I could online. As such, it’s a perfect time to check in on the results of our very recently released report on the state of eCommerce.

Firstly, it goes without that saying weather or no, customers love to shop online. And for most retailers, eCommerce has been the bright, shining star of their channel offerings for the past few years. But the rapid uptick in customer online activity has not been free of challenges for the retail enterprise. This year, we had 85 retailers from a very nice mix of product segments, sizes and channel structures tell us about what pains them most: namely, understanding consumer behavior.

As economic uncertainty falls, behavioral uncertainty grows. Retailers are less concerned about getting consumers to engage with them, replacing that top business challenge with trying to keep up with consumers as their online behavior shifts, thanks to social networks and more — it’s not about getting more out of consumers, it’s about understanding what the engagement that retailers are already getting really means.

Every year RSR evaluates the options that we present to retailers in our surveys. For the past two years, Providing more ways for consumers to connect with each other through our brand has been at the bottom of the list. We almost dropped it from the options this year. However, the percent of retailers identifying with this business challenge nearly quadrupled from 2009 to 2010, from 8% to 29%. This result is directly tied to the top business challenge — keeping up with evolving consumer behavior.

The number of ways that consumers can connect both with brands and with each other has exploded. At first, retailers were laser-focused only on getting and keeping consumers engaged with their brand. They didn’t want to get involved in the conversation between consumers. This is changing. Apparel and fashion retailers in particular are waking up to an important new business challenge: how to serve as a facilitator of social interactions around their brand. For fashion, the early stages of this challenge have emerged as, “How do I help my customer reach her friends quickly so that they can tell her to buy this shirt? “ But that is just the tip of the social iceberg. Ultimately it reflects a move away from retailer as expert to retailer as facilitator for consumers to reach the experts they deem important, whether family, friends, or just other people who bought this product.

The full report contains in-depth analysis of these challenges, the opportunities that the best performers perceive coming out of them, and just as importantly, which technologies hold the most interest to help them achieve their goals in the coming months. We invite everyone to read the report.