With online due to account for more than 70% of sales this year, the catalogue retailer says it now has excess capacity in its contact centres and plans to close three with the loss of 1,500 jobs.

Most shoppers who find a product is out of stock on the high street go straight to a price comparison service to find it online — not to the website of the store they visited.

On average, 4.6% of orders are rejected due to suspicion of fraud, according to CyberSource’s Sixth Annual UK Online Fraud Report, and 1.6% of orders accepted turn out to be fraudulent.

The Argos website has been updated with a new logo and a subtle makeover as the retailer reports it has received 1.28 billion visits since it first became transactional in 2000.

The company’s international operations, comprising the UK, Germany, Japan, France and China, hit $4.56bn in the fourth quarter of 2009, up by nearly a half on the year before.

Asda.co.uk could overtake Tesco.com within six months if consumer trends continue, according to a bold prediction by MyVoucherCodes.

The Tesco Wine Finder lets iPhone users simply snap an image of the label on a bottle to get detailed information about the wine, review it and make a purchase.

Amongst those that don’t currently use their mobile to access the internet , however, tracking in-store offers, coupons and vouchers was the most popular potential benefit — beaten only by being able to get real time travel updates.

Orange Shots enables SMS and MMS marketing messages to be sent to a tightly targeted group of Orange customers who have opted in to receive the service.

The first German online trade congference “Deutscher Online-Handelskongress 2010″ will open its doors on 24. Februaray 2010 at the Dorint Pallas Hotel in Wiesbaden.

‘Captivating the customer’, ‘Making it pay’ and ‘Making cross-channel work’ will be the three main themes at this year’s Internet Retailing conference and exhibition on Tuesday 12 October and we’ve now begun the search for the very best speakers to present at this year’s event…

UK consumers plan to spend 23% more online in the run up to next Christmas, according to Logan Tod’s Annual Online Shopping Index, and customer experience is becoming increasingly important as the over 45s increase their online spending.

The recent bad weather saw 27% of UK shoppers buy an item online that they had previously planned to buy in store — but many simply didn’t go ahead with their planned purchases at all.

The fashion etailer scored highest in a comparison of 137 online retailers conducted for Snow Valley’s 2010 Online Retail Delivery Report, followed by Ebuyer, PC World, and Amazon.

Only local authority and financial services websites ranked below retail and ecommerce sites in difficulty of use in a consumer survey conducted by user experience specialist Webcredible.

One in five UK consumers who use small business websites regularly struggle with domain names that are convoluted or difficult to recall, according to a new survey.

EuroCIS 2010 is Europe’s leading trade fair & conference for IT and security in retail.

Acton Capital Partners takes a stake in mytheresa.com, a leading, international high-end fashion online store based in Munich.

According to market research by Compete, shipping costs are a nuisance for most online shoppers. 93% of interviewees said they would buy more online if there shipping were free of charge.

According to market researchers Fittkau & Maas, online shopping clubs have become a rapidly growing online channel despite the fact that their members are acting behind closed doors, as it were. The shopping clubs are …