Amazon.com

Amazon is working on a solution that could revolutionize digital gift buying. The online retailer has quietly patented a way for people to return gifts before they receive them, and the patent documents even mention poor Aunt Mildred.

In a survey of 9,200 shoppers, Zappos.com took top honors in the sixth annual NRF Foundation/American Express Customers’ Choice survey, conducted by BIGresearch. The results were announced at the Annual Retail Industry Luncheon during the National Retail Federation’s BIG Show in New York City.

For online retailers, a positive service experience relates to a consumer’s ability to quickly find a suitable product; the accurate portrayal of goods in terms of features, colors and sizes; a speedy website; and how quickly questions about a product are answered. Let’s look at how L.L.Bean, Amazon.com and Nordstrom have optimized their customers’ web-based service experiences.

A third of users visiting online retailers over the holidays also accessed e-commerce sites via mobile devices, according to research conducted by ForeSee Results. From Nov. 29, 2010 to Dec. 15, 2010, the company polled almost 10,000 users who visited one of the top 40 U.S. e-commerce sites during the two weeks prior. It found 33 percent of U.S. respondents visited an online retailer from their mobile device in that time, compared with 24 percent in 2009.

With the traditional video game industry in decline, the world's largest video game retailer GameStop figured it would have a lot to lose. Rather than become a dinosaur in a fading industry, however, the Grapevine, Texas-based cross-channel retailer took a series of steps to adjust its business model to remain relevant in an evolving and dynamic marketplace. Chief among those steps was a shift to providing consumers with more digital content.

Amazon has received a patent for a process that would allow people to return gifts more easily — essentially, before they're even received. The patent would allow users to indicate that they wanted to convert all gifts from a certain friend or relative — the Washington Post dubs her "poor Aunt Mildred" in its description of the patent — before they are sent.

In these still-not-entirely-unrecessionary times it’s important to find a way to escape the commodity-style pricing wars and strengthen the marketing backbone of your company.

Keynote Competitive Research announced the results of its Q4 2010 study of retail electronics websites, with Amazon.com taking first place for best overall customer experience. In the Technical Quality rankings, Buy.com took first for reliability while TigerDirect.com ranked first for responsiveness.

Amazon has launched a new feature in the U.S. that brings content from Wikipedia pages to its own servers in a new project that appears to be called Shopping Enabled Wikipedia Pages.