Holiday Shopping Season, Online Retailer | featured news

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

Holiday online retail spending for the 47 days of the shopping season through December 17 totaled $27.46 billion, according to new data from ComScore, up 12% from the comparable period a year ago. Sales in the latest week were $5.15 billion, up 14% from the comparable week last year.

U.S. online retail sales through the first 40 days of the 2010 holiday shopping season are up 12% from a year ago, according to a Sunday update from ComScore.

Online retailers experienced a sales surge Monday, capping off a holiday shopping week in which more Americans than ever decided to skip the mall. Early estimates indicated overall sales gains of between 15% and 21% for "Cyber Monday," compared to a year earlier.

After brisk online sales on Thanksgiving and through the weekend, retailers plan stepped-up Web-only promotions today — known as Cyber Monday — for the expected flood of shoppers back at work or their home computers after the holiday.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is going for the jugular in the holiday retailing war, announcing Thursday that it will offer free shipping on nearly 60,000 online items _ with no minimum purchase requirement.

The numbers are in. And they look good.

We heard strong reports for online traffic Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but today, comScore added definitive spending numbers that indicate tha

Experian Hitwise just released its Cyber Monday stats, with Amazon reportedly topping the list as the most visited retail website yesterday, seeing a 44% increase in visits compared to 2008. Amazon received 15.53% of the visits among the top 500 online retail sites.

Hitwise reports that among the top 500 retail websites, the percentage of U.S.