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New companies are gaining ground on retail giants like Amazon, Walmart and Best Buy, according to Stores Magazines Favorite 50 Online Retailers survey. Conducted by BIGresearch, the survey found Macys, Forever 21, Aeropostale and Nordstrom each gained ground with online shoppers this year. Amazon.com, Walmart.com, eBay.com, BestBuy.com and JCPenney.com maintained the top five spots. Macys.com joined the top 10 for the first time, in part because of its new exclusive private labels. Tween and teen apparel retailers Forever21.com and Aeropostale.com both significantly improved their position from last year's ranking, performing above expectations. Nordstrom.com and GameStop.com both made the list

In June, BIGresearch reported that 89.9 percent of Americans with jobs don't expect to see a pay increase in 2012. As a result, people plan to continue their belt-tightening habits: 58.9 percent plan to spend less on clothing, 53.1 percent plan to comparison shop and 50 percent plan to stay on a strict budget. So, how can you grow your holiday sales while consumers are reducing their spending habits?

Adding +1 buttons to your product pages makes it easy for your customers to recommend the products they love on your site with a single click. And thanks to recent improvements to the +1 button, they can take the conversation even further by sharing your products right away on Google+.

Sephora is enhancing the shopping experience and broadening its mobile reach with a new Google Catalogs application for tablet devices. Google Catalogs is a free app that lets users browse catalogs from Macy’s, Brooks Brothers, Pottery Barn and others via the iPad. Users can also interact with videos and additional content for a rich user experience.

Facebook and Twitter both broke records last month with the highest number of visitors seen by both sites, according to data released by comScore. For the month, Facebook was the fourth most visited website in the U.S., behind Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

Googe has created Google Catalogs, a free app for tablet devices that enables you to browse all of your favorite catalogs and interact with new layers of rich-media content. The Google Catalogs app features digital versions of catalogs across many popular categories, including fashion and apparel, beauty, jewelry, home, kids and gifts.

Advertisers often wonder whether search ads cannibalize their organic traffic. In other words, if search ads were paused, would clicks on organic results increase? Would they make up for the loss in paid traffic? Google statisticians recently ran over 400 studies on paused accounts to answer this question.

Despite leaving the company five weeks ago, Shoebuy.com founder and former President and CEO Scott Savitz led a session at this week's eTail conference in Boston where he detailed the steps the online footwear retailer took to grow into one of the most successful online brands, averaging more than 8 million visitors to the site monthly and realizing gross margins in excess of 43 percent for those visitors.

This video presents key findings from The Mobile Movement: Understanding Smartphone Consumers, a study from Google and conducted by Ipsos OTX, an independent market research firm. The findings come from research conducted at the end of 2010 among 5,013 U.S. adult smartphone users. Google commissioned this research with the objectives to better understand how smartphones are used in consumers' daily lives and how smartphones have influenced the ways consumers search, shop and respond to mobile advertising.

Think back to the last time you were in the market for a new printer, camera or sofa. If you used a search engine like Google or Bing, chances are you were served up a mess of things from videos to news results to images. That mess probably included ads that were pretty far off the mark.