Wal-Mart

Amazon.com has raised its free shipping minimum order to $35. The change came after a decade of free shipping to U.S. addresses on a minimum order of $25 on Amazon's site. It took effect Tuesday, just ahead of the holiday shopping season, according to Amazon Spokeswoman Julie Law. Amazon now finds itself in the mid-range of major retailers that offer free shipping on online orders. Wal-Mart and Target offer free shipping on many purchases of over $50, while Best Buy's minimum order is $25. Earlier this year, Amazon warned that its shipping costs were going to increase during the holiday season.

Quartz reported that Wal-Mart has taken a step to be more like Amazon.com with its announcement of the opening of two warehouses dedicated solely to shipping web orders in the U.S. "Wal-Mart has been angling to compete in the e-commerce world for over a decade but has failed to catch up with Amazon. In 2012,…

When it comes to website load times, user expectations are constantly escalating. In 1999, the optimal load time was eight seconds. By 2010, 57 percent of online shoppers stated they would abandon a web page after waiting just three seconds for it to load. While internet users may have high expectations, these expectations aren't being met by most sites.

Wal-Mart won dismissal of class-action claims in a regional gender discrimination lawsuit filed by women who were formerly part of a nationwide lawsuit against the world's largest retailer. U.S. District Judge Robert N. Scola in Miami yesterday said governing law in the appellate circuit in which his court is located prohibits the filing of a second class action if the time to do so expired while the prior case was pending. The lawsuit was filed last year on

Staples and RadioShack have removed Amazon.com's temporary storage lockers from their brick-and-mortar stores, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. The stores added the lockers last year but have decided that housing a competitor's storage units wasn't a good idea. The lockers allowed Amazon customers to have their purchases delivered to a secure location that they could visit at their convenience. The units are meant to give Amazon an opportunity to compete with brands like Best Buy and Wal-Mart, which offer in-store pick up for their online customers. 

Wal-Mart has fired an employee of a western New York store after he posted derogatory comments about Muslim customers on Facebook. The firing follows a request of Wal-Mart by the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations to discipline the assistant manager of the store in Hamburg, a suburb of Buffalo. Along with a picture of Muslim women in traditional dress, the manager's expletive-filled posting read: "Halloween came early this year. ... Do they really have to ... dress like that."

The warehouse is the last step in preparing a package before it lands in the hands of a customer. It's responsible for the last impression of the customer's overall buying experience. While this means it should be a key place to differentiate your brand's messaging, not many retailers recognize that order fulfillment represents an opportunity to capitalize on brand awareness. The fulfillment opportunity is responsible for the last impression of the customer's overall buying experience.

Using Stores.org's list of top U.S. retailers, Econsultancy has compiled a graph showing the top U.S. retail brands on social media. "No surprise to see Wal-Mart far out in front, with worldwide revenue of $467,896,000 in 2012, more than four times as much as nearest competitor Costco ($97,062,000). Some of this comes from regional brands…

In advance of next Thursday's Retail Marketing Virtual Conference & Expo, I took the opportunity to interview one of the show's speakers, Richard Sexton, the founder and president of Carolina Rustica, an omnichannel retailer of high-end furniture and lighting. (Richard is also a member of Retail Online Integration's Editorial Advisory Board.) Richard will be hosting the "Showrooming: Your Secret Weapon for In-Store Sales" session. Here's a sneak peek into some of the issues that Richard will be addressing during the half-hour session:

Could this guy be the Zuckerberg of retail? Business Insider's retail correspondent, Ashley Lutz, sat down with Zach Blatt, creator of Right Bid Retail, to discuss his new business and the injustices of online pricing. The pricing suite shows retail companies how much their competitors are selling products for online. Blatt, a 2011 Dartmouth grad,…