Retailers can now offer their customers another payment option, with the launch of Checkout by Amazon. Amazon says the service makes it ‘extraordinarily simple’ for its customers to pay elsewhere.

Domino’s Pizza customers are increasingly choosing to log on to order their takeaways – with almost 40% of deliveries now being ordered online. The company says its online sales have risen by almost 63% in the first 13 weeks of its financial year.

Online showed itself a serious part of the UK’s advertising market in 2010 as it took £1 in every £4 spent. Its share of the market grew from 23% in 2009 to 25% in 2010, a study from the Internet Advertising Bureau and PwC found.

eBay says its move to buy GSI Commerce will help it take the lead in global commerce. The company will pay $2.4bn for the online and marketing services business in a deal expected to close later this year.

US consumer electronics firm Best Buy has confirmed five new store openings for the year ahead. The multichannel retailer will open in Bristol and Hayes next month, with further sites set to launch later in the year.

Breville has adopted Reevoo technology as it looks to help consumers make decisions about which product to buy – and where to buy it.

The IMRG, trade body of the UK’s ecommerce industry, has spelt out its opposition to amendments to the Consumer Rights Directive currently going through the European Parliament. It says measures that will mean retailers must pay the return postage of goods, and that they must sell into all 27 EU countries, are unfair and could be bad for business.

An upgrade to M&S TV is expected to help the online video channel continue boosting sales and customer engagement on the wider ecommerce site. The online video channel is produced and managed by Adjust Your Set.

With M&S announcing that its domestic and overseas expansion plans rest firmly on a multi-channel foundation, most other retailers admit they need to do more to fully embrace multichannel retailing but are increasingly ready to engage mobile footfall and loyalty strategies to make this happen

Ukash, which lets you turn cash into digital online credit, has launched its first iPhone app to offer consumers the chance to load, send and spend cash online as the popularity and functionality of m-commerce continues to grow

n 2010 smartphone purchases increased by more than 70 per cent and research shows that consumer confidence in the mobile web is growing quickly. M-commerce is a burgeoning but largely untapped market and those who make headway into it now will be the big winners when it really takes off

Pureplay and multichannel retailers will be watching to see how a Budget pledge to end a Channel Island tax loophole plays out. Lobbyists have cautiously welcomed George Osborne’s move to curb the VAT avoidance scheme from November, but say they will be monitoring events.

Online and multichannel proved key to retailer Next, which announced its full-year results today. Chief executive Lord Wolfson said it was working towards a ‘different’ future in which UK retailers could no longer assume non-stop growth in like-for-like sales but must explore new avenues in search of growth.

Just 7% of the UK’s ecommerce retailers use abandoned basket emails to target ‘nearly–customers’ but this could prove one of the most effective tools to boost their turnover, says Matthew Kelleher, commercial director of RedEye. He offers advice on how best to use them.

Nine per cent of UK retail sales took place online in February, according to official ONS figures. But the wider picture showed a 0.8% fall in UK transactions that the BRC says represents a more realistic picture of ‘how things are’.

Lack of product details and information is stopping nearly 40% of mobile shoppers from purchasing things through apps, finds a study by Stibo Systems, an independent data management company

Debenhams has added to its stable of m-retail offerings – namely an m-website and an iOS app – with new Android and Nokia phone versions, making the retailer the first on the high street to offer apps for the three key smartphones

Wynsors World of Shoes has teamed up with One iota, a recently launched social and mobile commerce company, to roll out a fully transactional and optimised mobile and Facebook ‘shops’

BMW dealer Calterdon Limited, in Inverness, Scotland, has ‘gone-live’ with an autonomous web-based SMS solution from Text Messaging Centre (TMC) to instantly communicate with its customers – significantly cutting costly telephone bills

The growing demand for Android devices will see the number of apps downloaded on the platform outstrip those on Apple by two to one in the coming months, finds a study by independent apps store GetJar