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U.S. holiday sales rose 4 percent from a year earlier, marking the biggest increase since 2011, after a longer shopping season and heavy discounts encouraged consumers to spend, according to the National Retail Federation (NRF). Holiday spending growth had been forecast to rise a slightly higher 4.1 percent in the period, which spans November and December. Still, the increase was well above the previous year's 3.1 percent gain and the 10-year average of 2.9 percent, according to the NRF.

Etsy, the online seller of handmade crafts and vintage goods, is planning to go public as soon as this quarter with plans to raise $300 million, sources told Bloomberg News. If the Brooklyn-based site rakes in that amount of cash, it would be the biggest New York tech IPO since 1999. The last time a New York-based tech company garnered that kind of a valuation was the dot-com boom when high valuations benefited listings from TD Waterhouse Group and Barnesandnoble.com, the e-commerce spinoff of the bookstore chain.

Amazon.com is known for having low prices. However, a study conducted by a startup called Boomerang Commerce reveals that Amazon's pricing strategy is much more nuanced than simply undercutting the competition. Boomerang, founded by Amazon veteran Guru Hariharan, makes software that tracks prices on shopping sites that compete with its clients, then recommends price changes dynamically. Those changes are based on rules its clients set about which products to match prices on and which to boost higher or drop lower than a competitor's to boost profits or sales, respectively.

Japanese fast-fashion giant Uniqlo is coming under fire for what critics say are harsh and dangerous working conditions at the Chinese factories that make its rainbow-colored array of low-cost skinny jeans and cashmere sweaters. Undercover researchers from the Hong Kong-based Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (SACOM) found that workers at two Uniqlo suppliers in southern China were being underpaid, overworked and subject to unsafe conditions, including sewage-covered floors, poor ventilation and sweltering temperatures.

Online clothing retailer ModCloth has brought over an executive from Urban Outfitters to take over as CEO. On Jan. 19, Modcloth Co-Founder and CEO Eric Koger will hand the reins over to Matthew Kaness, who most recently served as chief strategy officer at Urban Outfitters. Eric and Susan Gregg Koger started ModCloth, a women's clothing retailer that focuses on quirky, vintage-inspired styles, in 2002 while they were students at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. 

Sophia Amoruso will always be the #GirlBoss. But she's giving up the official boss title at Nasty Gal. Amoruso, founder of the Los Angeles-based online fashion retailer and author of a best-selling advice book titled "#GirlBoss," is stepping down as CEO of the company that she nurtured from a side project on eBay nine years ago into an e-commerce powerhouse, she told her staff yesterday. Sheree Waterson, who has been Nasty Gal's president, has been named as the new CEO and is also joining the company's board alongside Amoruso and Index Ventures partner Danny Rimer. 

Overstock.com demonstrated a surprisingly high level of commitment to digital currencies Friday with the news that it's planning to offer its employees the option of being paid in bitcoin. The discount online retailer made the announcement in a release about a new bitcoin ATM that it has installed at its corporate headquarters in Salt Lake City. "Moving cryptocurrencies out of the realm of geeks and into the realm of the rest of us requires making changes at all levels of the financial ecosystem," Chief Executive Patrick Byrne said in the release. 

Body Central is going out of business and will close all its stores, according to an attorney for the women's clothing retailer. As of Jan. 6, the Jacksonville, Fla.-based company had 265 stores in 28 states. Gardner Davis, an attorney for the company, said it had about 2,500 employees, who were notified of the closures Friday. Davis said the company had sought to reorganize its business, but "simply couldn't raise the capital."

The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) announced Thursday it's making a public push against Saks Fifth Avenue after the retailer argued in court that transgender employees are not covered from discrimination under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. HRC is suspending Saks' largely positive score from its Corporate Equality Index, a ranking of companies' LGBT-related policies. The move comes less than two weeks after Saks & Co. told a court that a discrimination lawsuit filed by a transgender former employee should be dismissed because "transsexuals are not a protected class under Title VII" of the historic civil rights law.

Some 20 state attorneys general have joined the federal antitrust investigation of competing bids by Dollar General Corp and Dollar Tree Inc to buy Family Dollar Stores Inc, a development that potentially complicates the companies' efforts to win U.S. approval for a deal. The attorneys general concern focuses on the likelihood that the loss of one of the chains would lead to higher prices for discount store customers, many of whom are poor, said two sources who spoke privately because they weren't authorized to speak to reporters.