Holiday Shopping Season, Retail | featured news

More people headed to stores and websites over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, and average spending per person rose 9.1 percent as bargain-hunting shoppers scooped up discounts on everything from gadgets to hoodies, a National Retail Federation survey on Sunday showed.

With the intensity of Black Friday shopping starting to fade, store chains know they are under pressure to keep the sales momentum going as they enter the next phase of a competitive holiday shopping season.

When IBM projected that 15% of Black Friday online sales this year would transact via mobile, a lot of analysts and bloggers, not to mention unprepared retailers, scoffed. To many, it seemed too huge of a jump — after all, as recently as 2009 less than 1% of online sales came from mobile.

Millions of Americans jammed stores Friday, supporting analysts' prediction that Black Friday sales would be better than last year's despite the down economy.

It's no secret that technology has changed in-store shopping behavior. Whether it be through mobile phones, barcode scanning, or price comparison shopping sites; consumers are more prepared than ever in the store aisle.

It looks like we’re headed into another not-so-jolly holiday shopping season. According to the latest Consumer Reports Holiday Shopping Poll out today, only a third of those surveyed expect to be happier this holiday season than last.

Retailers are so desperate this holiday season that they're willing to lose money to get you to spend yours....

Amazon's Kindle Fire is a Catch-22 for retailers: The $199 tablet computer could both help Christmas traffic and hurt future sales.

It looks like retailers will have to work extra hard to keep this holiday season from turning into a bah humbug. A new forecast indicates that sales will likely not be as high as last year and that shoppers won't be hitting the stores as much.