Technology, Retailer | featured news

Apple reportedly will shut its U.S. retail stores for a few hours on Wednesday to allow its employees to participate in a staff celebration of the life of co-founder Steve Jobs.

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

After months of speculation, it's here: Amazon's tablet, the $199 Kindle Fire, was unveiled Wednesday. Smaller and cheaper than Apple's dominant iPad, the Kindle Fire has a 7-inch display and runs on a heavily customized version of Google's (GOOG, Fortune 500) Android operating system. The tablet offers Wi-Fi connectivity, but no 3G or other cellular connection. It also lacks a camera and microphone, two features found in most rival tablets.

RadioShack will begin selling Barnes & Noble Nook e-readers next month. The retailer already carries iPads and Kindles.

Best Buy's profit fell 30% as same-store sales continued to slide. The electronics retailer also revised its full-year earnings view.

Wal-Mart is starting to turn heads in the tech world — and that might have important implications for the way we think about the future of the shopping experience. Once known for a soulless retail store experience and a hyper-efficient supply chain that delivered “everyday low prices,” Wal-Mart has been fusing innovations from the mobile and social-networking worlds to create the foundation for a radically new type of hyper-personalized shopping experience.

Amazon.com is testing a major redesign of its website, an overhaul that could refashion the way people shop on the world's largest online retailer.

Amazon.com Inc has proposed a hiring spree of 7,000 jobs in California if state leaders put a recently enacted online sales tax on hold for two years.

Wal-Mart revamped its e-commerce management on Friday, placing the heads of stores in developed countries in charge of their online businesses and announcing the departure of two top U.S. Internet executives.

A online Sears ad that mistakenly advertised the 16-gigabyte, Wi-Fi-only iPad 2 for $69 — and got shoppers' hopes up and orders placed — was retracted by the retail giant, which blamed a third-party seller of Apple's popular tablet for an advertising typo. That model iPad 2 is normally sold for $744.99 by the third-party seller, GSM On Sale.