Holiday Shopping Season, Amazon | featured news

Revenue at Barnes & Noble stores fell 10.9% during the holidays, as sales of Nook devices slipped, a sign that the retailer is falling behind in the tablet battle with Amazon, Apple and Google.

Amazon launched its Black Friday deals store, joining its rivals who are looking to get an early start on attracting holiday shoppers.

With the rumblings from Amazon about the early success of its new Kindle Fire over the holiday season, the company’s disappointing fourth quarter results came as a surprise. More surprising was Amazon’s silence regarding total Kindle Fire sales for the quarter. During the earnings call, Amazon’s executive team deferred questions about the device to the press release, which simply regurgitated sales data from December.

The Kindle Fire tablet may be the hottest selling gadget this holiday, pressuring Amazon.com Inc's profit margins but giving the world's largest Internet retailer potentially millions of new high-spending customers.

Amazon's Kindle Fire is a Catch-22 for retailers: The $199 tablet computer could both help Christmas traffic and hurt future sales.

Amazon’s souped-up color version of its Kindle e-reader hopes to undercut the iPad in price and steal away a couple of million in unit sales by Christmas.

Amazon.com Inc said sales of its Kindle e-reader were strong over the holiday season amid competition from devices such as Apple Inc's iPad, a computer tablet that also has e-reader capabilities.

Experian Hitwise just released its Cyber Monday stats, with Amazon reportedly topping the list as the most visited retail website yesterday, seeing a 44% increase in visits compared to 2008. Amazon received 15.53% of the visits among the top 500 online retail sites.

Hitwise reports that among the top 500 retail websites, the percentage of U.S.

Amazon.com Inc., the world’s largest online retailer, topped sales and profit estimates yesterday after its biggest holiday season ever, outpacing EBay Inc. and its e-commerce rivals.