Best Buy

In the final stretch of the holiday season, big retailers are battling for the attention of the social shopper. This year, social engagement for the retail industry increased an average 96%, trending slightly lower than the average 110% growth for all U.S. brands. However, not all platforms are created equal when it comes to the social shopper: Facebook has declined by 25% across all retail brands, Twitter has spiked by 291%, and Instagram has grown by 190%.

Dynamic pricing is a topic that's been getting a lot of attention lately. It's come a long way since it publicly debuted in the airline industry in the 1980s. Now we're used to seeing it across many different industries. From Uber to Amazon.com, many businesses are putting their own spin on dynamic pricing. But what is it exactly? To put it simply, it's a flexible pricing strategy in which businesses alter their pricing based on a number of factors, both internal and external.

The electronics chain was referencing popular podcast "Serial," which investigates the murder of a 17-year-old named Hae Min Lee. According to Adweek, the high school student was strangled in a Best Buy parking lot in Maryland, after which the killer is said to have made a phone call from a payphone there. In little over an hour, the chain received hundreds of comments for the post, some of which criticized the brand. Others commented that people were overreacting to the gaffe.

The future of commerce is here, and it's omnichannel retail. Cyber Monday was the single biggest online shopping day ever. Mobile led the way, with a 27.6 percent increase in sales from last year. However, while mobile sales are on the rise, shoppers are still spending the bulk of their holiday budgets in physical retail stores. If you concentrate on one channel alone, you're going to lose out on potential customers. The best thing you can do is to take advantage of mobile, e-commerce, and brick-and-mortar retail this year. Here are four tactics for using an omnichannel approach to increase conversions among holiday shoppers:

Not so fast, Amazon.com. Best Buy has raised the stakes in the online shopping wars by offering an eye-popping holiday promotion: free two-day delivery on thousands of items on its website. The deal, which went live over the weekend, is an aggressive move by the electronics retailer to win over holiday shoppers who are especially concerned about shipping speed when making online purchases in the home stretch before Christmas. Best Buy hasn't yet announced an end date for the holiday delivery offer.

Best Buy said on Thursday it will sell its struggling China business, Five Star, to domestic real estate firm Zhejiang Jiayuan Group in order to focus on its North American operations. The world's largest consumer electronics chain didn't disclose financial terms of the sale of the 184-store network, announced in a statement. Best Buy has struggled to fend off Chinese rivals in a crowded market, as other U.S. firms have complained that operating in the country has become more of a challenge.

Best Buy's website suffered sporadic technical issues throughout the Thanksgiving weekend, creating an extended outage during one of the year's busiest shopping periods. After a litany of shopper complaints engulfed the retailer's Facebook and Twitter feeds late Friday afternoon, the company initially attributed the blackout to heavy traffic. However, consumers were still complaining about the lack of service early Saturday, suggesting the problem could be more serious.

Black Friday weekend is the year's biggest promotional event for most major U.S. retailers, and yet there are prominent holdouts ignoring it - or at least being discreet about their specials. Tiffany & Co., Dollar Tree and T.J. Maxx are among the chains that aren't promoting Black Friday on their websites. That's a sharp contrast with the supersized fonts advertising sales at Wal-Mart, Macy's and Best Buy.

A Black Friday sale at a big-box retailer is a dance that needs a master choreographer. As shoppers glide through aisles, lunge after merchandise and dart urgently in and out of line, there's an art to keeping them moving and happy. At the Best Buy in Alexandria, Va., that job belongs to Rob Delissio. And this year the store's general manager has left no detail to chance. 

Brick-and-mortar retailers have become the first U.S. business group to be disappointed by Republicans since their midterm election gains, as party leaders indicated that a bill to end tax-free internet shopping was doomed. Retailers such as Wal-Mart, Target and Best Buy have long railed against a perceived loophole that they say gives e-commerce rivals an unfair advantage by enabling many online shoppers to avoid sales tax. But on Monday, a spokesman for John Boehner, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, said a bill to tax online shopping wouldn't move forward in the final weeks of the current Congress.