Technology, Holiday Shopping | 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.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.

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

If you’ve shopped for a TV in the past couple of years, chances are you’ve heard of Vizio. After all, the company, a decade old this year, has been holding its own in the US TV market against global giants like Samsung and Sony while at the same time expanding into new products like PCs and tablets. Impressive no doubt, even more so considering the company does all this with just 400 employees. At $3 billion in annual revenue, this translates to about $7.5 million per head, a number that’s over ten times that of Sony. That’s an amazing degree of productivity, especially for a company that has in no way taken the easy path of shipping me-too boxes, but instead has been one of the most progressive in adopting new technologies for the TV market such as new interfaces and smart TV.

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.

Black Friday Shoppers Black Friday is just a few days away, and with consumer confidence creeping back to levels not seen in some time, I think consumers are ready to open their wallets again after 5 years of economic uncertainty.

Investors are sending Apple's stock below $600 for the first time in three months, after the consumer electronics behemoth reported earnings for its latest quarter that missed expectations and warned that profits in the holiday quarter would fall from last year....

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.

U.S. online sales this holiday shopping season are up 15 percent compared to last year, after what may have been the busiest week of the season, said research firm comScore on Sunday. Shoppers have spent $30.9 billion online from Nov. 1 through Dec. 16, up from $26.9 billion at the same point last year, said the Reston, Va., company, which tracks Web use. Online sales surpassed $1 billion on four days last week. Total sales for the week climbed 15 percent to $6.31 billion compared to last year.