E-commerce, Retail | featured news

Amazon.com, apart from being a major online retailer of books, DVDs, music, games, apparel, and other merchandise, also has a small business of providing cloud and other Web services. It offers Web services like cloud computing and cloud storage service offerings, in which it competes with bigger players like Google, Microsoft and Salesforce.com. Amazon also owns and operates websites such as Audible.com, IMDB.com, and Shelfari.com.

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.

Shoppers who skipped the crowds on Black Friday gave online merchants a 16 percent spike in revenue, according to data released Saturday....

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.

Rumor of this buyout has been zipping over the web all weekend, but Amazon has finally confirmed: It's acquired Quidsi, the parent company of online retail sites Diapers.com, Soap.com, and BeautyBar.com. The deal is remarkably similar to the one it did last year with Zappos, purveyors of footwear to the Internet-minded.

Services like Groupon and TheFind.com are using social media and other online tools to lure ever more customers.

Downloading content is becoming increasingly big business for the online retailer, which already has download offerings for its Kindle eBook, MP3 music and movies.

Google has just rolled out "Google Shopper," a new mobile application for Android devices that offers a variety of different ways to search for products.

The numbers are in. And they look good.