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It seems like every week we hear about another brick and mortar store that decides to try its luck on the internet. And we're thrilled. For the few billion people that don't live in New York, LA or a few other major cities, it's an opportunity to get designers that they simply don't have easy access to. For small retailers it's yet another way to solidify and expand their business, to turn inventory quicker and to possibly get some press attention from non-local outlets.

But about 1/3 of the time, we look at a new online shopping site for an existing store and just shake our heads. Somewhere, someone along the way gave the shop owners bad advice and they're stuck with a (no doubt expensive) website that won't help their business or their customers.

So, as visitors of thousands of e-commerce sites and shoppers at over a hundred, we've decided to write this whirlwind guide to the rough and tumble, live on razor's edge world of e-commerce. Here goes nothing.

Traveling about North America, we noticed more than one independently owned brick-and-mortar store doing brisk business online. Our observation has been that if you have truly unique products to sell (and not the same "hot" brand of jeans on sale 500 other places online), you can slice yourself a nice piece of the online pie. But retailers are funny. Some will jump online from day one, some will be dragged in after years of requests, some will just ignore the whole online thing as a particularly stubborn fad. But what we've found interesting is retailers from different cities deal rather differently with online shopping. Let's start with some statistics.

We took the number of brick-and-mortar stores in our top cities and calculated the percentage of these stores that are online. The results are a little skewed in some places but they're fairly representative. Take a look:

• Austin: 7/28 = 25%
• Boston: 12/33 = 36.36%
• Los Angeles: 33/129 = 25.58%
• New York: 68/179 = 37.99%
• San Francisco: 43/104 = 41.35%
• Seattle: 28/87 = 32.18%
• Toronto: 10/63 = 15.87%
• Washington: 14/41 = 34.15%

San Francisco has the highest percentage which isn't surprising but actually this result is the most suspect. Our data is skewed by the 7 Rasputin locations in the area. As a whole San Francisco retailers, especially the clothing stores, are somewhat behind in jumping online. Especially considering the 8 million tech companies in the area.

Next is New York. Not surprisingly, we've found New York's small retailers to be the most saavy retailers around. It seems like every store in New York has PR representation. When we've approached stores to do some kind of article or interview, New York retailers have consistently been the most receptive and welcoming. And not surpisingly New York retailers have realized the value of online shopping and have jumped in.

And now we move to Canada, or Toronto to be exact. It seems like Canada is thinking "Online Shopping? More American trickery!" or something like that. A big city like Toronto and only 15.87% have online shopping. Worse yet, the stores that do have websites are often shoddy and haven't been touched in years. Come on Toronto retailers, if Magic Pony can do it, so can you.

We'll be updating these here statistics as we add more stores and cities to the list, but here's a quick tidbit. The most impressive online retailing of any city in North America is actually not New York, but Chicago. It seems like any cool store we run into from Chicago has a thriving online operation. We'll be talking about a few of these stores in the days and weeks to come.