Technology, Retailer | featured news

Discover makes headway in bringing eBay's online-payments service to physical retailers, but First Data, one of the country's largest merchant processors, has opted not to support the service.

The days of tax-free online shopping could finally be numbered. The Senate is planning to vote on a bill as soon as Monday that would give states the authority to collect sales taxes on all Internet purchases, handing local governments as much as $11 billion per year in added revenue that they are legally owed — but that hasn’t been paid to them for years.

Samsung Electronics is giving Apple a run for its money by setting up mini-stores inside 1,400 Best Buy stores in the U.S... The Samsung mini-stores, which will open inside Best Buy locations by the end of June, will showcase smartphones, tablet computers, cameras, laptops and TVs, and will provide customer support similar to the “Genius Bar” at Apple stores, the New York Times reported.

The Seattle-based Web retailer said the 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD with 4G wireless capability will start at $399, down from $499. Amazon reduced the price of the Wi-Fi only version by $30 to $269.

Best Buy's decision to make its price-match guarantee permanent seems an intelligent move. A decision, though, that should've been made quite before now.

2012 was a good year for Amazon. Not only has the company announced that the Kindle Fire HD was the #1 best-selling, most gifted, and most wished for product on Amazon, but for the eighth consecutive year, the company ranks #1 in customer satisfaction during the holiday shopping season...

Amazon.com Inc remained the best website for shopping online while JC Penney Co Inc suffered the largest drop in customer satisfaction of any major online retailer this holiday season, according to a survey released on Thursday.

Cyber Monday online sales beat forecasts by nearly half a billion dollars. ComScore on Monday predicted that Cyber Monday would generate $1.5 billion in online sales, but according to Adobe, the shopping day ended up raking in $1.98 billion, which was a 17% increase compared to last year.

Black Friday is a distant memory. Small Business Saturday is long gone. Now, it's Cyber Monday's turn. Cyber Monday, coined in 2005 by a shopping trade group that noticed a spike in online sales on the Monday after Thanksgiving when people returned to their work computers, is the next in a line of days that stores are counting on to jumpstart the holiday shopping season.

Michael Rubin is lucky. And he’s also damned good. Lucky, because eBay approached him last year with a $2.4 billion offer to buy his moneylosing GSI Commerce–which provides Web design, customer service and shipping to big-brand retailers–a 51% premium over the share price. Damned, because Rubin has always played so loose and fast that he’s nearly brought on his own ruin–and stoked the wrath of shareholders. Good, because he has an uncanny eye for undervalued assets and a lifelong talent for turning them into gold.