E-Commerce

Helped by stores open at least a year, leading off-price retailer TJX reported a 6 percent gain in December sales, pushing the company to raise its full-year guidance.

The landscape for small- to medium-sized e-commerce merchants is constantly changing. To adapt, merchants must be quite nimble and able to alter their strategies at a moment's notice. Below are some tips for small- to medium-sized merchants to help identify new customers and keep them coming back:

comScore reported that retail e-commerce spending for the entire November – December 2010 holiday season reached $32.6 billion, marking a 12 percent increase vs. last year and an all-time record for the season.

Buy.com has launched its new wine store, and is the only online mass merchandiser in the U.S. to offer a comprehensive wine shop that includes hundreds of competitively priced wines from all regions and varietals.

A fast-growing Utah County business became a YouTube sensation with a product that doesn't immediately strike you as sensational. In fact, the inventor couldn't sell it for years.

Limelight Networks surveyed more than 1,600 shoppers recently to find out what they feel the most important customer service features are. The survey provided an in-depth look into what types of customers demand the most online customer service, what customer service features drive brand loyalty and what makes customers more likely to use online self-help rather than calling customer service.

Google unveiled its newest search enhancement, Google Instant Previews (GIP), in November. Denoted by a small magnifying glass to the right of a search listing, GIP allows searchers to look at a mini version (also called a snippet) of a specific web page before they commit to clicking on it. Is this a game changer? Not exactly, but it certainly does make things interesting.

Despite the fact that most online retailers today understand that video increases the stickiness of their websites, improves their search engine rankings and helps close more deals, only a small number employ the best practices necessary to take full advantage of video's search engine optimization promise. 

Preholiday data from CFI Group indicates that 2010 marked the sixth straight year of internet retail sales growth in the United States. CFI Group uses the methodology of the American Customer Satisfaction Index to help retailers improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. It recently conducted a major survey of holiday shoppers, finding that 27 percent of consumers planned to spend 50 percent or more of their holiday shopping budgets online.

The top retail websites broke a traffic record in November with 179.5 million unique visitors, according to comScore's monthly Media Metrix report on top U.S. web properties. Amazon took the top spot in the retail category with 83.9 million unique visitors in November (up 4 percent from October).