thanks moosa! actually i did not mention that the first thing we did was implement a 301 redirect from the root to the sub. this resulted in content in our e commerce store to immediately achieve decent rankings in the SERPS.
now I am working on getting the backlinks pointing to the root domain to point to our new subdomain.
do you think, that because of the 301 redirect, and possibly due to the use of a decent ecommerce platform, we were able to achieve rankings for keywords so quickly in the subdomain?
thanks!