Which brand are the stars of social media? A new media measurement service, Famecount, has surprising results, calculated through a formula based on numbers of Facebook fans, Twitter followers and You Tube subscribers.

Internet shopping sales from mobile phones will more than double by 2013 as UK consumers get used to paying for goods on their handsets, according to Ovum and Verdict Research. However, for now, the true role of mobile is to drive growth by enhancing the overall shopping experience

Online is doing well at Laura Ashley, where e-commerce sales so far in its financial year have topped 70% growth. An interim management statement released today said full-year trading would be in line with expectations.

Helping customers use its website is behind improvements at Jessops.com. Customers can now find products faster, while plans for the future include instant chant and Paypal.

Yodel is the new brand of the Home Delivery Network. The carrier, now the second-largest UK carrier after the Royal Mail, thanks to its acquisition of DHL’s UK parcels business, promises to be a “truly customer-focused business”.

Want to keep customers happy? The answer, suggests new research, is to help them to buy by giving them the ability to order out-of-stock goods in-store.

Thirty per cent of all UK advertising budgets are spent online, according to new IAB figures. That gives the UK internet industry the highest share of national ad spend of any market in Europe.

New Look’s e-commerce operation has become the UK’s third-biggest online fashion retailer, taking 1.3m orders in its latest financial year. The company says it expects a challenging year ahead thanks to economic uncertainty, but that it is confident in its own “fundamental value”.

Despite the media hype, iPad – which launched in the UK and Europe last Friday – is failing to set consumers and retailers alight with desire, being seen by consumers as not good enough to replace either the iPhone or the laptop and being viewed by many retailers as just another device to develop apps of limited appeal for

Newspaper and magazine publishers are set to look at becoming online and mobile shops as they start to sell goods as well as news to make up for declining advertising revenues, offering both a threat and an opportunity to retailers

Mobile location-based services are set to boom and retailers will be one of the key sectors to benefit, as they allow more targeted marketing, relationship building, interaction with consumers, as well as providing a tool to assess marketing conversion rates, says Berg Insight

Augmented reality + visual search + location information = powerful mobile shopping experience. US AR company Metaio teams up with visual search engine Kooaba to produce a visual search service that could offer retailers the ultimate find and buy service

Tesco improves store finder app to include barcode scanning and better shopping list management: so now customers can scan a barcode, see if the item is in stock in their local stores and add to a new shopping list. Oh, and the company’s club card app gets its 500,000 download

As part of its move to become the de facto e-commerce retailer in the UK, Argos has, of course, launched an iPhone app that will form the beginning of the company’s mobile strategy

Garanti Bank, Turkey’s largest aprivate bank by asset size, and Avea, Turkey’s sole GSM 1800 mobile operator, have teamed up to provide Turkish mobile phone users with NFC-enabled SIM cards that remove the need to buy NFC-enabled handsets

PayPal’s Mobile Payments Library now lets consumers buy goods and services through Android apps, as well as Apple – opening up m-commerce still further

UK online sales of environmentally-friendly products are expected to hit £1.4bn in value by 2015, up from £607m in 2009. But at the same time the ‘green premium’ is expected to fall to 36% from 44% today.

Will England fans out in force at the FIFA World Cup 2010 in South Africa this month be sporting the Three Lions kit? According to Twenga, the answer’s in doubt, with lacklustre growth in online searches for kit and related items.

Visitors to Savile Row’s e-commerce website are now more likely to turn their interest into a sale following the installation of new rich media features. Early findings show customers who interact with them are twice as likely to buy, spending 20% more on average.

How can retailers unlock the value from their excess and returned stock? Harvey Sinclair, chief executive of Stockshifters considers the question in today’s guest comment.