Amazon.com

Wal-Mart has opened a new front in its battle with Amazon.com. The world’s largest retailer has applied for a U.S. patent for a floating warehouse that could make deliveries via drones, which would bring products from the aircraft down to customers’ homes. The blimp-style machine would fly at heights between 500 feet and 1,000 feet (as much…

President Trump renewed his attack on Amazon.com Wednesday, tweeting that the e-commerce giant is "doing great damage to tax-paying retailers" and removing jobs in cities. Trump's blistering tweet was issued hours after The Washington Post — the newspaper owned by Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos — ran an editorial with the headline, "Mr. Trump gives comfort to racists." Total…

In Total Retail's recent survey and subsequent report, The Amazon Effect: How Retailers Are Adapting Their Businesses to Better Compete With the Industry Leader, nearly 90 percent of retail executives said they “strongly" or “somewhat" agree that Amazon.com has changed consumers’ expectations for order delivery. Specifically, consumers’ expectations for delivery of their online purchases have changed…

Nearly 90 percent of respondents in a recent Total Retail and IBM survey said they “strongly" or “somewhat" agree that Amazon.com has changed consumers’ expectations for order delivery (see the chart below). The report, The Amazon Effect: How Retailers Are Adapting Their Businesses to Better Compete With the Industry Leader, analyzes the impact Amazon’s growing…

As retailers know, much of Amazon’s success can be credited to its many innovations, from supply chain to customer experience to merchandising and more. To keep pace with the e-commerce leader and its many technology innovations, retailers have started to implement new technology capabilities of their own. In the chart below, taken from Total Retail's…

Amazon.com is hosting a job fair today in an attempt to fill 50,000 warehouse positions by hiring people on the spot in some of the U.S. cities that host its largest operation hubs. The retailer announced last weekend that it would host job fairs in places like Baltimore and Buffalo, New York for full-time and part-time jobs…

Long the undisputed leader in e-commerce, Amazon.com has turned its attention to the other piece of the retail puzzle: physical stores. In the last year-and-a-half, Amazon has opened seven bookstores across the country, with plans to open six more by the end of 2017. In addition, Amazon made a big splash last month with it…

Amazon.com’s expansion plans, including its agreement to buy Whole Foods Market Inc. for $13.7 billion, are raising hackles in Washington — and Wall Street is taking notice. A U.S. lawmaker has called for hearings on the proposed deal to consider its ramifications for shoppers and workers. Hedge-fund manager Doug Kass has taken a short position on the fast-growing…

This past Tuesday was Amazon Prime Day, the online retailer’s third annual global shopping event exclusively for its Prime members. The day brought positives and negatives for Amazon, as it looked to further cement its position as the leading online retailer in the market. Let’s start with the positives: Amazon is reporting Prime Day was…

Amazon.com's third annual Prime Day sales event officially kicked off last night at 9 pm ET, and will continue for 30 hours (25 percent longer than last year). The online retailer is hopeful this will be its biggest Prime Day yet. Internet Retailer forecasts that Prime Day sales will total $2.18 billion, which would be…