Holiday Shopping Season, Shopping | featured news

Toy maker Hasbro says its fourth-quarter revenue failed to meet expectations because of weaker-than-expected demand over the holidays.

Amazon.com Inc remained the best website for shopping online while JC Penney Co Inc suffered the largest drop in customer satisfaction of any major online retailer this holiday season, according to a survey released on Thursday.

Stocks are closing lower after a weak holiday shopping report sent shares of major retailers lower. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 24 points to close at 13,114 Wednesday. It was the third straight loss for the Dow.

Anyone left on your Christmas list just aching for a 65-inch Samsung 3D flat-screen television? Just your luck. The Vatican's duty-free department store has one on sale for €2,899 ($3,840) — a nifty savings over the €3,799 ($5,032) it costs at Italy's main electronics chain Euronics.

Facebook isn't just for goofy pictures and silly chatter. Shoppers' actions online help dictate what's in stores this holiday season.

Sales on the day after Thanksgiving fell from those a year earlier, after stores started their “doorbuster” promotions early in the week and opened for business on Thursday evening.

If you make holiday shopping convenient, Americans will come in droves. It's estimated that U.S. shoppers hit stores and websites at record numbers over the Thanksgiving weekend, according to a survey released by the National Retail Federation on Sunday. They were attracted by retailers' efforts to make shopping easier, including opening stores on Thanksgiving evening, updating mobile shopping applications for smartphones and tablets, and expanding shipping and layaway options.

The Black Friday shopping weekend apparently took a tragic turn early Sunday morning when an alleged shoplifter died while being apprehended by employees outside a Lithonia Walmart.

Black Friday retail sales online this year topped $1 billion for the first time ever as more consumers used the Internet do their early holiday shopping, comScore Inc said on Sunday.

Black Friday is a distant memory. Small Business Saturday is long gone. Now, it's Cyber Monday's turn. Cyber Monday, coined in 2005 by a shopping trade group that noticed a spike in online sales on the Monday after Thanksgiving when people returned to their work computers, is the next in a line of days that stores are counting on to jumpstart the holiday shopping season.