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It’s time once again to reminisce about the days of Christmas Past when shopping entailed a trip downtown to visit the Five and Dimes and your local department stores. From the heyday of downtowns we transitioned first to the era of suburban malls, enclosed meccas of commerce featuring anchor stores, hot pretzels, cheap boutiques and endless parking lots. That vignette too has morphed into Christmas Past as once great malls have become wastelands of obsolescence. By and large they now sit empty awaiting a rebirth. Somewhere along the line the wizards of marketing decided that people really wanted to be...

In an interview given roughly twenty years ago when Amazon was largely a peddler of books, CDs, and DVDs, founder Jeff Bezos observed to a reporter that his nascent company would never replace the shopping center experience. Bezos plainly saw how shopping centers and malls gave people a happy feeling of community, of a physical place to go, and he knew Amazon couldn’t recreate it. Bezos’s acknowledgement of Amazon’s limits proved a window into the company’s future. Amid rising pessimism about the future of bricks & mortar retail, Bezos is an optimist. He is investing many billions in the physical...

Amazon and Walmart on Thursday kicked off a two-year government pilot program allowing low-income shoppers on government food assistance in New York to shop and pay for their groceries online for the first time. ShopRite will join the two retailers on the program early next week, said the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. The USDA has long required customers using electronic benefits transfer, or EBT, pay for their purchases at the actual time and place of sale. So the move marks the first time SNAP customers can pay for their groceries online....

Starting this week, companies are now required to charge you if you live in California. If you order something online from merchants with a brick-and-mortar store in California like Target or Kohls, consumers pay California sales tax. But buying something online from stores that don’t have an actual store in California, until now, didn’t charge a sales tax. California has now closed that loophole. The state law changed on April 1. Now, it doesn’t matter if an out-of-state company has a real store in California or not, online transactions

Most people think you can usually find a better deal when you shop online. But the price you see can be different than what other people see. The type of computer you use, your online search history, even your zip code have all been used by online retailers to determine what price you pay. In a study conducted by researchers at Northeastern University in Boston, nine out of 16 online retailers and travel websites tested showed different prices or difference results for the same searches. “I always assumed all the prices would always be the same,” said Liz Owens. Owens,...

If you regularly drive north from Chicago to Milwaukee on I-94, as I do, you have watched Amazon’s Kenosha distribution center grow by leaps and bounds. The parking lot is full, day and night, as it is in online retailers’ similar facilities all over the country nowadays. They may be on the outskirts of a metro like the Kenosha one, or in the heart of town, like Amazon’s 26 urban fulfillment centers in Houston, New York, San Francisco, Miami and Atlanta, often saving a blighted neighborhood by new construction and new jobs that no other business could justify bringing there....

Black Friday retail sales online this year topped $1 billion for the first time ever as more consumers used the Internet do their early holiday shopping, comScore Inc said on Sunday. Online sales jumped 26 percent on Black Friday to $1.04 billion from sales of $816 million on the corresponding day last year, according to comScore data. … E-commerce accounts for less than 10 percent of consumer spending in the United States. However, it is growing much faster than bricks-and-mortar retail as shoppers are lured by low prices, convenience, faster shipping and wide selection. …

1 out of every 6 Americans will participate in some form of online shopping today:Cyber Monday.Black Friday is the day when we stand pressed together in the dark waiting for doors to open at our favorite retail outlet. We race the aisles and grab and elbow our way to shopping nirvana.Today, Cyber Monday, is the day we do it from the comfort of our own home via the internet.

Online spending down as holiday season nears Recession puts brakes on fast-paced growth of e-commerce By Ylan Q. Mui Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, October 24, 2009 Online retail's runaway growth has hit a wall as consumers have cut back on the discretionary spending that drives the industry's sales. According to research firm comScore, e-commerce sales have been steadily declining this year, with spending not including travel dropping 2 percent in the third quarter. That has set the stage for a tough holiday season, which can account for as much as half of annual sales. "It's not pretty at all...

If a little-known but influential alliance of state politicians, large retailers, and tax collectors have their way, the days of tax-free Internet shopping may be nearly over. A bill expected to be introduced in the U.S. Congress as early as Monday would rewrite the ground rules for mail order and Internet sales by eliminating what its supporters view as a "loophole" that, in many cases, allows Americans to shop over the Internet without paying sales taxes. Currently, Americans who shop over the Internet from out-of-state vendors aren't always required to pay sales taxes at the time of purchase. Californians buying...

NEW YORK (AP) - There's one silver lining to the New York City transit strike that has shut down buses and subways, while crippling many businesses. Online retailing - which has enjoyed robust sales this holiday season - is getting a further boost in the season's final days, as New York area shoppers turn to the Internet for last-minute buying. And there are at least a handful of merchants including jcrew.com and ice.com that are only too willing to help out by serving up free shipping aimed at New York area residents that guarantee arrival before Dec. 25. For New...

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By Gene J. Koprowski Published 12/15/2004 9:08 AM CHICAGO, Dec. 15 (UPI) -- Online shopping this holiday season might be most competitive among small, local retailers rather than big brands such as Target.com and Sears.com, experts told UPI's The Web. New technologies that give local online shops a big presence in search engines such as Google, Overture and others are driving the development. "Online shopping for the holidays is blowing the heck out of brick-and-mortar stores; it is the place to be," Marsha Collier, a Los Angeles e-commerce guru and author of "e-Bay Business for Dummies" (Fourth Edition, 2004, Wiley)...