Online sales growth slowed to 10.4% in May as consumers became wary of spending. Retail spending across the UK fell by 2.3% on a like-for-like basis.

HMV says digital online sales will be a key focus for the future as it looks to reshape its business following the sale of Waterstone’s. The company today announced a renegotiation of its bank debt.

Online retailer eBay is to buy open source platform developer Magento in a move that it says will help it and its community of developers to ‘drive global commerce innovation’.

Football teams which sell their kits through Kitbag scored triumphs on the field this season, helping the company become the only part of home shopping-to-education supplies company Findel to increase its profits during the latest financial year. The company said Kitbag’s multichannel contracts were particularly beneficial for it – and explained why.

House of Fraser has appointed search marketing company Greenlight and social media agency We Are Social as it looks to double its online sales from £50m in 2010.

Customisation is currently proving a winner for a number of brands, from the Kaiser Chiefs to print-on-demand clothing company Spreadshirt. For both the approach relies in part on the social buzz that can be generated not only around the product but around the way different individuals have customised it.

Not enough European shoppers are using the internet to shops across borders, the European Commission has said. Cross-border shopping is just one area where ‘insufficient progress’ is being made towards the European vision of a digital single market.

Poor online customer experience is costing UK companies the equivalent of £14bn a year, a new study carried out for Tealeaf by Econsultancy has found. The study, Reducing Customer Struggle, found companies were falling short on both multichannel and online services.

Kookai’s new look website, launched first in the UK, is to be rolled out across Europe. Magento Commerce specialist Session Digital is behind the revamp of the site for the French label founded in Paris in 1983.

As more Brits cancel their weekend shopping trips thanks to the rising price of petrol, Bill Mooney, sales director – DataSolutions, at GB Group, considers how retailers can benefit by getting to know their customers online instead.

Online fashion retailer ASOS claimed a place as one of the top five ‘most visited fashion retail websites on the planet’ as it reported a 58% jump in sales and a 41% rise in pre-tax profits before exceptional items. But its share price dipped as it also reported a 23% fall in bottom-line pre-tax profits.

Customers are now finding it easier and cheaper to return unwanted goods that were bought online, a new report from Snow Valley has found. Researchers have noted a ‘dramatic change’ in the number of retailers who will now refund the original delivery store, with some even doing that in store.

The need to offer mobile services to shoppers is spurring a massive investment in new e-commerce platforms and an increased interest in fully fledged multichannel retailing that will revolutionise retail in the next two years. So says Mark Adams, sales and marketing director of PortalTech on the eve of the publication of the company’s second annual e-commerce research that M-retailing has gained exclusive access to

Mobile shopping could deliver a £4.5bn boost to Britain’s economy by 2016 and a further £13bn by 2021, according to new research by online marketplace eBay. The research reveals that m-commerce is on the verge of a potential four-fold increase over the next five years as consumers become more comfortable with shopping on their handsets

Overall consumer satisfaction with mobile sites has seen an unexpected drop for the first time in eight months, as consumers find the gulf between what they want to do on mobile and what retailers are offering them widen, suggest figures from eDigitalResearch

Almost 80% of US smartphone and tablet users are now comfortable making mobile purchases, with many even making big ticket buys of more than $1000 on such devices, according to the latest Mobile Audience Insight Report from location-based company JiWire

he majority of UK consumers will be using their mobile phone to manage their bank accounts and pay bills – which in turn will prompt them to make more purchases on mobile – within the next three years, according to new research into mobile banking and the changing nature of consumer trends by the Future Foundation think-tank, commissioned by Monitise

Early Learning Centre (ELC), the UK’s leading toy retailer, has launched a new mobile commerce website to target the smartphone-wielding ‘browser-buyer’ market that offers a complete product portfolio and full integration into ELC’s main e-commerce website and back office systems

Domino’s Pizza has, if you’ll pardon the pun, topped sales of £10 million through its iPhone app and its mobile optimized website. To capitalize on the huge mobile demand, the company is now rolling out an Android app as well

Market Insight has recently completed the first wave of MTrack, a series of studies examining mobile behaviour in the UK. Here founder and CEO Darren Mark Noyce looks at what consumers think about mobile retail – and finds some unexpected views