Internet, E-commerce | featured news

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.

After watching Amazon corner the online retail market, Google is in talks with merchants to begin a delivery service that would allow users to order items online from local stores and receive them within a day. But does it make sense for Google to directly take on the online retail giant?

Online shoppers spent record amounts on the Monday after the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, making it the biggest online shopping day in history.

After years of being more hype than highlight, Cyber Monday appears on its way to its biggest outing ever. Last year, the Monday after Thanksgiving saw an estimated $1 billion spent online in the United States, making it the biggest e-sales day ever. And analysts said Monday that this year's "holiday" -- the online answer to the annual Black Friday bargain rush on stores -- is on pace to be bigger still.

Shoppers seem to be just as enthusiastic about shopping on their computers and smartphones on Cyber Monday as they were about finding deals over the weekend. Online sales on Cyber Monday, which was started in 2005 by a retail trade group to encourage Americans to shop online on the Monday after Thanksgiving, were up mid-afternoon by 15 percent from a year ago, according to data from IBM Benchmark. Meanwhile, sales from mobile devices were up 7.4 percent. The group did not give dollar amounts.

Online sales rose 24.3% this Black Friday, reflecting heavy investment by mainline retailers to get more traction on the Web.

Could the next big move from Amazon.com be a smartphone? analyst Mark Mahaney asserted in a research note this morning that the company could follow up its recent launch of the Kindle Fire tablet with a smartphone that would launch in time for the 2012 holiday season.

"Leaked" screen shots, allegedly from Amazon's internal stock monitoring system, suggest the new Kindle Fire tablet is already a hot item, racking up 250,000 reservations in five days.

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. is aiming to handle one trillion yuan ($157 billion) of transactions in 2012 on its Taobao consumer sales platforms, the company's Chairman Jack Ma said Saturday.

Lawmakers on Friday sent Gov. Jerry Brown a compromise bill that delays California's effort to force online retailers such as Amazon.com to collect the state's sales taxes while retailers lobby Congress for national rules governing online sales taxes. The state Assembly approved AB155 on a bipartisan, 59-8 vote in the final hours of this year's legislative session. The bill had passed the Senate, 36-1, hours earlier.