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The year’s most popular discount shopping event, referring to the Friday after Thanksgiving, is arriving ahead of Halloween this year, with some promotions beginning this week and others throughout November.

Part two of this series examines what impact social media will have on retail going forward. In particular, opportunities to bridge online and offline customer experiences in order to seamlessly integrate multiple touchpoints and selling channels are identified.

By using targeted merchandising, online retailers can dramatically increase the likelihood of increasing sales, all while pleasing their customers with products that have been preselected just for them.

Two key trends have dominated the retail sector this year: the robust growth of online shopping and the shift to cash payments from credit.

The two may seem in opposition as online shoppers often use credit to pay for their purchases, but more often online retailers are trying to woo the cash-only customer by providing alternative payment methods.

This Halloween is the third in a row for which marketers and retailers are playing up discounts, deals and bargains rather than goblins, ghosts and vampires.

Traffic is like oxygen for a website: it can't "live" if it doesn't get it, no matter how cool its features and graphics are. The simple truth is that you need visitors to get sales. Want to increase your sales by 20 percent this holiday season? You need 20 percent more web traffic to do so.

For nearly two years, Amazon has been trying to get manufacturers to adopt “frustration-free packaging” that gets rid of plastic cases and air-bubble wrap — major irritants for consumers and one of Amazon’s biggest sources of customer complaints.

Among uneven retail numbers this year exists a bright spot that has been growing for years, and is leading companies to overhaul their traditional business models: the online retail market.