E-Commerce

Apple is preparing to take a serious run at the Japanese e-book market. The company is negotiating deals with a handful of Japanese publishers to supply a local version of its iBookstore with their e-book catalogs. Sources with knowledge of the situation tell AllThingsD that Kodansha, Shogakukan and Kadokawa are among the publishing houses to whom Apple is talking. Conversations are said to be going well, and the company expects to have agreements hammered out soon.

Google's new bid-based Product Listing Ads (PLAs) are designed to be a richer advertising experience that increase clickthrough rates by including additional product information (e.g., product image, price and merchant name) without requiring additional keywords or text to be added by retailers.

 With the new Google Shopping, online merchants will also benefit from the ability to manage their feed advertising as well as the increased control over which products and categories to focus their ads on.

For about a decade, the debate over retailing methods has been a heated one. On one hand, e-commerce has dominated, with the so-called "internet age" providing shoppers convenience, 24-hour service and typically the lowest prices. These advantages will almost always trump a physical storefront. But recently consumers have responded to back-to-basic techniques such as personalization and knowledgeable in-store customer service. So what happened when one retailer married both old brick-and-mortar techniques with the new virtual and online channels? Click-and-bricks retailing.

Some lucky sellers received an invitation from eBay to list on the site for free as part of a post-Christmas selling promotion. The promotion is for invited sellers only and is not transferable. Those who received the invitation can list up to 5,000 listings in the Fixed Price format and pay no Insertion Fees during the promotion period - 3, 5, 7, 10, and 30-day listing durations are included as part of the promotion. Good 'Til Cancelled duration listings are excluded, however.

After years of criticizing physical stores as relics, even e-commerce zealots are acknowledging there is something to a bricks-and-mortar location. EBay and Etsy are testing temporary stores, while Piperlime, the Gap Inc. unit that was online-only for six years, opened a SoHo store this fall. Bonobos plans to keep opening stores, and Warby Parker, the eyeglass brand, will soon open a physical location. The companies say they are catering to customers who want to see what they are buying in person, and who see shopping as a social event. 

Customers want more merchandise appeal and variety from most retailers, according to the annual Holiday E-Retail Satisfaction Index released today by customer experience analytics firm ForeSee. Internet-retail giant Amazon remains at the head of the class, according to the 8th annual report, which is based on more than 24,000 customer surveys collected during the prime holiday shopping season between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

If you've visited Google Shopping recently, you might confuse the search giant for a retailer. Despite the visual cues, said Sameer Samat, Google Shopping's vice president of product management, in an interview with AllThingsD, the company has no aspirations to open a store. "We aren't planning on being a retailer," he said. "We don't view being a retailer right now as the right decision."

On average, the retail industry loses over $18 billion annually due to downtime — over four times more than any other business sector. With online holiday sales expected to reach a record $96 billion this year, your potential risk of losses from downtime is magnified during the holiday season. The following five steps will help you maximize revenue and productivity while creating a loyal base of happy customers this holiday season:

Staples plans to triple the size of its e-commerce and IT staff by 2014, and has unveiled a new Velocity Lab at Kendall Square in Cambridge, Mass., to kick off its accelerated online growth initiative. The Velocity Lab is part of...

There's been a powerful shift in consumer behavior over the past few years, and there's no single thing that's changing how people shop and spend. Instead, it's a combination of things, all conspiring to move customer dollars from the big-box stores and neighborhood retail to the web. Here's my sense of why the changes are now hardwired, and likely to increase rapidly over the next few selling seasons.