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Discount retailer Dollar Tree said Tuesday it expects to be able to complete its purchase of competitor Family Dollar in May, and said it will have to sell about 340 Family Dollar locations to close the deal. Dollar Tree said the Federal Trade Commission is almost finished reviewing the $8.5 billion acquisition and has identified 340 stores that it wants the company to sell in order to preserve competition for consumers. Dollar Tree said all or almost all of those stores will be Family Dollar locations. 

The U.S. Justice Department's Antitrust division lauded the result of its e-commerce investigation into price fixing on Amazon Marketplace. The agency alleges that online seller David Topkins and other co-conspirators fixed pricing on certain posters sold through the Marketplace from September 2013 through January 2014. Topkins, along with Jonathan Garriss and Adam Hersh, was a principal of Gotham City Online and employee of Art.com at that time. Topkins and Garriss were also co-founders of an eBay seller association called PESA. The three business partners sold Gotham City Online's poster business (Poster Revolution) to Art.com in 2012.

This Friday, Apple will debut its much-hyped Apple Watch, allowing prospective buyers a chance to try on a variety of sizes, straps and settings and place a pre-order before the gadget officially hits the market on April 24. Apple's head of retail Angela Ahrendts has been working alongside design chief Jony Ive to remodel the tech giant's retail stores so they look like the sort of place one might happily part with tens of thousands of dollars on a rose-gold-encased wearable.

Michael Kors has built one of the most successful luxury juggernauts in fashion history with a DNA that's rooted in a glamorous jet set lifestyle. Founded in 1981, the brand grew swiftly following an investment from apparel moguls Silas Chou and Lawrence Stroll in 2004. The initial public offering of stock in Michael Kors, in December 2011, was one of the largest and most successful fashion IPOs ever, valuing the brand at $3.8 billion and raising about $1 billion to fund the company's global expansion.

Upscale footwear brand Stuart Weitzman has launched its first Instagram-based advertising campaign. The online campaign features Cinemagraphs, which animates a portion of a photo so that it looks like a video. It was done in collaboration with Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg of Ann Street Studio. The campaign features four Cinemagraphs spotlighting key spring styles, with one of the Cinemagraphs flickering founder and designer Stuart Weitzman's image in a television set. To emphasize its omnichannel approach and strategy, Stuart Weitzman created the campaign around its proprietary hashtag #inourshoes. 

The "party" may be back on in the IPO world. There wasn't much to celebrate about the first three months of 2015 in the IPO market. It was the worst quarter for bringing companies public in more than three years, according to Renaissance Capital. What better company to change that vibe than Party City? North America's largest party goods retailer by revenue filed paperwork Monday to list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "PRTY." 

Wal-Mart has a message for its vendors: keep those trade funds and put them toward the cost of goods. Wal-Mart wants even lower prices from suppliers to put more distance between itself and competitors, many of whom depend on vendor dollars. While it's not unusual for a retailer to pressure manufacturers for lower prices, the move by Wal-Mart, first reported by The City Wire's Kim Souza in February and again last week by The Wall Street Journal, is significant because of increasing competition from a wide range of rivals, including Aldi, Costco, Dollar General and Kroger.

Jessica Simpson's fashion line hauls in about $1 billion in annual sales, an aberration in a retail landscape littered with dead celebrity brands. David Hasselhoff's Malibu Dave, Mandy Moore's Mblem, Heidi Montag's Heidiwood … the list of defunct fashion labels of the famous is endless. Yet Simpson's line has not only survived, it's grown over the past decade into a true lifestyle empire. How did she accomplish such a feat? According to the pop star, Simpson just knows what women want. 

Trayon Christian, 20, says he was hassled at Barneys because of his skin color. But the high-end clothing store says it did nothing wrong in calling the cops. Barneys did nothing wrong by allegedly calling the cops on a customer who claims he was just "shopping while black," new court papers argue. The high-end men's clothing store says in documents filed in Manhattan Federal Court that a shopper's suit should be dismissed because his civil rights weren't violated when he was detained by police after buying a $349 belt in 2013.

eBay sellers have been moving more of their business to Amazon.com for a long time, as EcommerceBytes reader surveys bear out, so it was with interest we read Bloomberg's report that seemed to state it was a recent trend. "Amazon's pool of merchants climbed to more than 2 million in 2014, while the number of sellers on eBay has remained flat at about 25 million in the past two years," the news outlet reported. However, Amazon has put its count of active sellers at "over 2 million" since at least as far back as 2011.