E-Commerce

Is Groupon.com ready to survive its first holiday shopping season as a major e-tailer? The fast-growing site, which sells discounted deals, faced a double-trouble traffic spike when mentioned on "The Oprah Winfrey Show."

A few years ago, Thanksgiving was not even considered a shopping day, as most stores are closed. But this year, retailers are driving customers to the web with more specials than ever — door busters without the door — creating an online jump-start to the traditional Black Friday rush.

By number of shoppers and sales, packaged-goods e-commerce remains decidedly tiny. But Amazon's acquisition of Diapers.com, Soap.com and the newer BeautyBar.com for a reported $545 million in cash and debt has given the space some big-money validation.

Any time a visitor comes to your website, the one thing you want them to do is raise their hand and identify themselves. Them doing so enables you to continue communicating with them until they're ready to buy (or buy again).

In a deliberate collision between nerds and fashion mavens, Google has created a new e-commerce site that significantly improves how fashion is presented and sold online. The site, Boutiques.com, which is expected to go up this morning, may also change how people shop for clothes.

Shopping for video games this holiday season just got a whole lot easier and faster with the launch of GameStop’s new PickUp@Store service. This new program is free to use and allows customers to pick out the games they want online, place a hold on the game and pick it up as soon as that same day.

Google has announced the launch of local availability results in Google Product Search on desktop. Search for a product and click on the “nearby stores” label, and you can easily find a list of stores to call to check availability, and in many cases, information about whether the product is in stock nearby.

In the face of difficult market conditions, including a sluggish lift in consumer spend, retailers are under pressure to streamline their e-commerce site's navigational ease of use and relevancy of products offered.

Market researcher comScore reports that e-commerce retail sales grew 9 percent to $32.13 billion last quarter, led by books and magazine purchases.