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In a post-earnings conference call with investors last week, Overstock.com founder and CEO Patrick Byrne addressed the recent closure of the online auction marketplace, saying Overstock's mantra is the savings engine, and that there was no way to make auctions come cheaper for the consumer. Despite the fact that Byrne said Overstock Auctions had sent many new customers to the main site where they shopped - he estimated it was on the order of $250 million over the years - the company closed the auction site in mid-July. Overstock.com reported revenue was up 2% in the second quarter year-over-year

Google has bought The Dealmap, expanding further into a potentially lucrative daily-deals market now dominated by the likes of Groupon and LivingSocial. Terms of the acquisition weren't disclosed.

It's not surprising that tech-savvy consumers are likely to spend more time on social networking sites compared to other consumer demographics. This is a big reason why Incipio, a cross-channel retailer of mobile device accessories, decided to bring its online store to its customers rather than vice versa. Incipio launched a Facebook store in January with the help of on-demand e-commerce solution provider ShopVisible.

There are lots of reasons shoppers research purchases online and then buy at a brick-and-mortar store. What’s important for retailers to recognize, however, is that having an online presence is becoming more and more important to overall sales.

American Express and vente-privee.com have hired an advertising executive from Google to lead their joint venture in luxury online private sales. Mike Steib, who most recently worked as Google's director of video advertising for the Americas, was named CEO of the joint venture.

After a running start, Google+'s growth may be slowing down a bit. A report from Experian Hitwise found both traffic and users' average time on the social network fell last week in the U.S.

One second is how long Google’s +1 plug-in drags down page load time, and that’s not “just” a second when research shows that 10 percent of site traffic is lost for every extra second a site takes to load. Facebook’s ubiquitous "Like" plug-in stalls page load time by approximately .2 seconds. This means featuring both plug-ins on a page adds c. 1.2 seconds to its load time. That translates to more than a 10 percent loss in visitors, and by extension, in conversion.

Across the country state legislatures are considering — or in some cases have already enacted — laws that attempt to collect sales tax from online purchases made from out-of-state retailers by state residents. In large part the efforts are being driven by big-box retailers that are looking to harm competitors. Many of these large retailers are spending serious time and money lobbying lawmakers nationwide to consider these proposals despite their historical failure to generate new revenue.

Google plans to accelerate the launch of its corporate account test program on Google+ after thousands of businesses signed up to test their luck on the quickly growing social networking service.

Google+ may surpass 10 million users just two weeks after its launch. The numbers don't come from Google, but from Paul Allen, the Ancestry.com founder who posted on Google+ the results of a "surname-based analysis" which "shows that the number of Google+ users worldwide reached 7.3 million yesterday (July 10) — up from 1.7 million users on July 4th. That is a 350 percent increase in six days."