It’s hard to believe that with the release of our next Ecommerce Quarterly (EQ) later this month, one year will have passed since we developed the concept for this analysis of online consumer shopping behavior.

During this time, the EQ has become one of our most well-received content resources, attracting the attention of writers at Forbes, CNN, Fast Company, Mashable, and others who reference our data and analysis. In fact, if you’re heading to New York for the upcoming National Retail Federation’s Big Show, I invite you to go listen to super-smart Sucharita Mulpuru, vice president, principal analyst at Forrester Research, who will use some exclusive research from the next EQ release during her session.

That next release, EQ4 2012, will focus on the 2012 holiday shopping season. Many of the common benchmark reports found in prior releases will be expanded to cover the entire holiday season, which kicked off the week of Thanksgiving and extended all the way through Christmas. While a lot of other seasonal ecommerce research ends on Cyber Monday, the EQ4 will take a big-picture approach and examine how online shopping behavior changed after the busiest online shopping day of the year.

Another highlight of EQ4 will be the inclusion of our first-ever guest commentary. Through some fantastic social media chatter last year, we’ve also connected with a few opinionated people in the ecommerce space who we’ve asked to contribute to future releases. And if you’re interested in getting involved in the EQ—or any other thought leadership we publish—I invite you to reach out to me or any other member of our team.

As you can imagine, we crunch tons of data for the EQ, and it’s growing exponentially. But when creating each release, we respect, first and foremost, the privacy of our clients, and never mention brand names responsible for the more than 100 million online shopping sessions behind each release.

Lastly, I sometimes get asked why the EQ doesn’t have my name on it. It’s an easy question to answer: The EQ is the result of a masterful group effort. As I mentioned earlier, Monetate has received some great media attention for the EQ thanks to our media relations team, which does incredible work to get our data and analysis in front of writers, bloggers, and analysts.

And then there’s one more person who I need to publicly acknowledge for the success of this project. The EQ would not be possible without the incredible work of Jeff Patti, one of Monetate’s talented backend developers, who turns the massive amount of data we gather into the information we analyze and present. He then leverages his deep understanding of Monetate’s massive data set to connect engineering with marketing and our content publishing efforts.

Jeff also amazes us with his Rubik’s Cube prowess. While he tells me that his skills are “rather mediocre in the speed cubing community,” they still shock the crap out of this mere mortal. Take a look at this video.

If you haven’t read it already, you can download the latest release of the Ecommerce Quarterly (EQ) here or bookmark the page to download EQ4 later this month.