It’s been a busy week for fast-growing online retailer The Hut Group. The fast-moving online retailer has unveiled two new e-commerce sites and new investment ahead of a stockmarket flotation.

Online sales continued their exponential rise this week despite a dip in high street sales. The figures come from the latest BDO High Street Sales Tracker.

Multichannel Retailing will be the subject of Internet Retailing’s first one-day JUMP START conference, to be held in London on May 5. But places for the free event are limited and retailers should book now.

Paid clicks and cost-per-click is rising at Google along with its revenue, first-quarter figures show. Could this be a sign that online advertising is on the way up?

When it comes to getting shoppers’ attention, in-store multimedia can be used to significant effect, new research from The Co-operative has found. The findings will be of interest to multichannel retailers looking for new ways to raise their instore game.

New multichannel retail services and a “world-class” customer engagement programme will be key to supermarket Asda’s strategy to become one of the top two grocers in the UK in the next five years, it has told investors.

Some 32 million UK adults now shop online, says the Payments Council. But its The Way We Pay 2010 report says we’re using debit cards above credit cards.

Shoe and footcare retailer Scholl is to launch its first affiliate marketing campaign as it looks to reach a new and younger online audience.Shoe and footcare retailer Scholl is to launch its first affiliate marketing campaign as it looks to reach a new and younger online audience.

Social media consultants will be hard at work this afternoon working out what Twitter’s new paid-for service can offer their retail clients. Certainly the Promoted Tweet , which launches today, is one to watch.

So far, so good. The news from Deloitte is that retail administrations fell to their lowest level for four years in the first quarter of this year. But despite the fall, it seems it’s not yet time to be complacent.

It’s obvious that having the right postcode on a parcel will help it to get there quicker. But now a new study has put a figure on the cost of failing to get the address right – and it makes for interesting reading.

Discounts and promotions helped to boost online sales in March. The latest BRC-KPMG retail sales monitor published today shows internet, mail order and phone sales up by 15.9% in March, against total retail sales growth of 6.6%.

Multichannel sales at Debenhams, the UK’s second largest department store, have risen by 85.9%, the retailer reported today. New services include collect-in-store and international delivery.

The retailers are coming – Mobile Marketing Association starts US programme to get more retails and mobile companies working together US CTIA wireless event in Las Vegas reports 20% of attendees are now retail brands

More businesses are concentrating on digital marketing at the expense of marketing’s core principals, according to an industry roundtable in Manchester this week organized by UKFast. A clear endorsement of a multi-channel strategy, at least …

M-retailing from coupons, smart posters and advertising is already generating US$1.4bn globally and is set to rise. We talk to analyst Howard Wilcox at Juniper Research about his latest report and look at how the m-commerce market is set to evolve globally

So much for ‘knock-off chic’, eBay’s ambitious and capabilities have matured into an attractive destination site for branded apparel. Eschewing the bare-bones eBay “look”, the new site’s navigation, home page and clustering is a shot across the bows of fashion retailers.

China’s marketplace – the eBay equivalent run by Alibaba.com – is to make its usage statistics openly available, offering a glimpse into consumer behaviour online in China

We take our film crew down to the launch of Barratt’s Shoes’ flagship store on London’s Oxford Street and catch up with the retailer’s head of e-commerce, Ken Platt, and his technology supplier Infogain to uncover their m-commerce secrets

Marks and Spencer today announced their Q4 2009/10 – the first quarter of the calendar year, to 27 March 2010 – showing an increase of 4.8% in sales, yet a significant increase of 48% in their Direct channel. Might this be driven by the multichannel “collect in store” rollout?