Think about the last major purchase you made. How did you make the decision? Consumer Reports or reading reviews online? Trusting a company’s advertising or asking your network for recommendations?

The way people shop for products has changed. According to Mike Volpe (@mvolpe) of Hubspot, it’s because the way consumers communicate has changed. People spend more time on social media than email. There are 200 million people on the “Do Not Call” list in the U.S., and 86% of people use a DVR to skip over advertisements.

Volpe says the era of paying for advertising to drive sales is out, and the era of using inbound marketing to engage and attract sales is in. While today’s consumers are ushering in a new era of shopping, retailers must take notice of what Scott Welty (@scottweltyjda) of JDA Software calls Generation C: In a recent article, “Making the Sale When the Path to Purchase Leads to Your Door,” Welty explains that retail trends are driven not only by today’s volatile economy, but by the growing influence of tech-savvy consumers known as Gen C, with the “C” standing for “connected, content-centric, communicating, computerized, community-oriented and always clicking.”

Once again this year, the ol’ Javits Center in New York hosted retail folk from across the country. It seemed as if every vendor was hawking technology solutions to help retailers track product life cycle from factory to sale.

This is a wonderful efficiency goal. Booth after booth showed space-age integration of serialized data from RFID tags, embedded into product tags, containing business information from back end systems. Track a sweater from factory to showroom to purchase and possibly customer return. Allow retailer micro-visibility into order status and inventory.

But some of the vendors are missing the full story. It was as if they ended the story mid-pitch. The industry still is selling First Generation Retail, when the new frontier is Retail 2.0.

Using the new Near Field Communication NFC-enabled phones that are entering the market this year, the shopper can be as active as the  merchandising clerk. Using the phone as a personal reader, shoppers can navigate products, allowing stores to clientele and close the cross-channel disconnect that is evading most store executives.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday ― best known for glittering price offers and festively wrapped deals — attract gift-minded customers like a wreath to a front door. But these purchasers aren’t one-and-done shoppers: They’re cost-comparing and buying 24/7/365, clicking into their mobile phone apps and searching out the best deals wherever those deals happen to be. What’s more, these apps let shoppers save this price information for future reference.

What are shoppers finding with their new sleuthing technology? Between November 20^th and December 24^th, 2011, Gazaro analyzed a sample basket of 40 products in multiple categories that were expected to draw well on Black Friday/Cyber Monday and through the holiday season. Comparing the data to other months in 2011, Gazaro found that in68% of the cases, prices were actually lower in the months preceding Black Friday. 

This past year, for the first time ever, I did all of my holiday shopping online.  I didn’t set foot inside the mall or buy any gifts at crowded stores.  And, while I might have been shopping in solitude, I certainly wasn’t alone.  comScore reported a 15.3% increase in online shopping between Nov. 1 and Dec. 26 as customers spent $37 billion on e-Commerce sites, which is a new record for those of you who are keeping track.  Cyber Monday alone brought in $1.25 billion ― the heaviest online shopping day in history ― and Green Monday wasn’t far behind, with $1.1 billion.  All in all, there were 10 shopping days this past holiday season that surpassed the $1 billion mark in online sales.