Amazon.com

With the traditional video game industry in decline, the world's largest video game retailer GameStop figured it would have a lot to lose. Rather than become a dinosaur in a fading industry, however, the Grapevine, Texas-based cross-channel retailer took a series of steps to adjust its business model to remain relevant in an evolving and dynamic marketplace. Chief among those steps was a shift to providing consumers with more digital content.

Amazon has received a patent for a process that would allow people to return gifts more easily — essentially, before they're even received. The patent would allow users to indicate that they wanted to convert all gifts from a certain friend or relative — the Washington Post dubs her "poor Aunt Mildred" in its description of the patent — before they are sent.

In these still-not-entirely-unrecessionary times it’s important to find a way to escape the commodity-style pricing wars and strengthen the marketing backbone of your company.

Keynote Competitive Research announced the results of its Q4 2010 study of retail electronics websites, with Amazon.com taking first place for best overall customer experience. In the Technical Quality rankings, Buy.com took first for reliability while TigerDirect.com ranked first for responsiveness.

Amazon has launched a new feature in the U.S. that brings content from Wikipedia pages to its own servers in a new project that appears to be called Shopping Enabled Wikipedia Pages.

"Mobile" is so early 2010. The end of the year has already brought two investments — and possibly a third — by major tech companies in the latest hot e-commerce topic: local shopping.

Website monitoring startup WatchMouse is now watching the top 100 retail websites for availability around the holiday shopping season. The startup tested retail sites including Apple, Amazon, Best Buy, Borders, Overstock, Wal-Mart and Zappos for availability and performance during the month leading up to and including Thanksgiving Day, November 25 and Black Friday, November 26.

ChannelAdvisor announced that its customers achieved record-breaking sales for Thanksgiving, Black Friday and throughout the holiday weekend, led by Amazon.

Price Check by Amazon lets users simply speak the name of any product when they are shopping to receive instant prices for that item on Amazon.com. Customers can also use the app to scan a barcode, snap a picture or type a product name to return product matches and pricing from Amazon.com and its other online merchants.

By number of shoppers and sales, packaged-goods e-commerce remains decidedly tiny. But Amazon's acquisition of Diapers.com, Soap.com and the newer BeautyBar.com for a reported $545 million in cash and debt has given the space some big-money validation.