Apple Computer

Carmine Gallo, author of "The Apple Experience," explains the secrets behind Apple's retail success.

Apple Inc. and publishers Penguin and Macmillan have decided to fight U.S. government charges that they conspired to fix the prices of e-books, even as three other publishers agreed to a settlement aimed at lowering prices for consumers. The Justice Department accused Apple of colluding with five publishers as the Silicon Valley giant was launching its iPad in early 2010 and was seeking to break up Amazon's low-cost dominance in the digital book market.

Sephora gave itself a digital makeover yesterday, as the global beauty chain launched iPads and iPods in its stores and integrated its website with the popular social networking platform Pinterest. The makeup chain looked to Apple's super successful retail stores as its model, said Julie Bornstein, senior vice president of Sephora Digital. All 305 Sephora makeup stores are equipped with iPod touches that provide a mobile point-of-sale option for customers, helping to mitigate the sometimes long lines that form in its stores.

If at first you don't succeed … Coming off an unsuccessful attempt to sell an Android smartphone back in 2010, Google is planning to launch an online store similar to Amazon.com and Apple to sell co-branded tablet devices, according to The Wall Street Journal. Google's move comes as Apple has gotten a boost from its new iPad and Amazon has made a splash with its Kindle Fire tablet. Apple dominates market share of the category with Android devices a distant second. 

Apple has quietly added a Catalogs category to the iTunes preview section in its App Store. Because deployment seems incomplete, the purpose of the new category is a bit of a mystery. However, AppleInsider theorizes that since the company is expected to unveil an iPad that features a Retina Display, it's getting ready to offer high-resolution, interactive catalogs be delivered to the iPad via the App Store.

An article in The Wall Street Journal suggests Apple should be paying less for space it occupies in malls around the country. Here's the argument: Mall anchors, usually department stores, often pay very little for space, and sometimes pay nothing at all as facility operators want them as a draw. Apple produces equal or better numbers in terms of traffic and sales dollars compared to current anchors. Apple is paying thousands of dollars more for its small spaces than department stores are for locations up to 20 times the size.

Apple fans queued overnight by the hundreds outside stores in the United States, Europe and Japan to snap up the latest iPhone, setting a new benchmark in the fast-growing smartphone market. It sold a record 600,000 in pre-orders in a single day last week, and BGC analyst Colin Gillis expects Apple to set a record for being the first company to sell a million smartphones in a single day.

Shopatron announced today, based on initial analysis, that sales conversion rates on the Apple iPad are much higher than rates on other mobile devices. The results are based on an analysis of conversion rates across dozens of branded stores on the Shopatron platform. Initial analysis of data, collected since early March, indicates that average conversion rates for nonoptimized stores on mobile devices, including iPhone, Android, and iPod devices, average 0.37 percent. The iPad, however, performed much better, with an average conversion rate up to 2.04 percent. For some stores, the iPad conversion rate was as much as double the conversion rate from personal computers.

Apple is believed to be in the final stages of preparing a new retail application for the iPhone. Functioning as a mobile version of the Apple retail store, the offering in question will enable users to view products, place orders, schedule genius bar appointments in-store, and experience many of the same virtues native to an on-site visit at a brick-and-mortar location.

Your e-catalog is set for international release. You’re using the local currencies, culturally relevant copy, the best international character set in the business, and the native language right down to the intricacies of dialect that can change in a matter of a few blocks. What could stand in your way? Payment. If you are only offering payment by check or credit card, you’ll significantly bottleneck response rates. Research carried out by Forrester Research points out that 85 percent of all Internet users do not buy products online because they are unwilling to use their credit cards for Web purchases. A study conducted