Innovative use of social media, including the ‘Tweetwalk’ launch of a fashion collection on Twitter, is helping luxury brand Burberry connect with its customers, driving them online to research the brand before buying in store …

Most modern shoppers like to see before they buy, visiting shops to see many items for themselves, even if they then buy online, says a new study from GI Insight. That’s less important when it comes to standard items such as DVDs and lightbulbs, the study found.

A partnership between Capablue and PayPal, covered recently on Internet Retailing, means it’s now possible to pay for TV content over internet-connected television sets. We asked Capablue’s founder and managing director Tom Cape to tell us how retail transactions might happen in the future through the television set.

What do changes to the LCVR mean for retailers? We sum up the main changes in brief.

Majestic Wine today said that 9% of its UK sales were online. It said it had improved its website functionality to reflect growing customer demand for interactivity.

Shoppers will use multichannel shopping to make sure they get the most for their money this Christmas, says IMRG, which predicts that they will spend more than £7bn online, almost half of that in the first two weeks of December.

Hovis bread has a new website, where the focus is on social media as well as the heritage of the Premier Foods-owned bakery brand.

John Lewis today heralded the start of the Christmas shopping season with the multichannel launch of its Christmas shopping advert, together with news of robust rises in online sales. At the same time, Marin Software said that last year’s most profitable day for retailers was November 28 – and warned traders to be ready for it.

Furniture brand MFI is set to trade again for the first time in three years, promising a new way to shop for ‘stylish, high quality furniture’. Its website is expected to go live at the end of November.

In the wake of this week’s announcement that Best Buy UK’s 11 Big Box stores are to close, Patrick O’Brien, principal retail analyst at Verdict Research, considers why the decision had to be made in a changing UK retail market.

eBay is lobbying the UK government to take mobile more seriously as an industry that can help haul the UK out of economic gloom. Delivering a Mobile Manifesto to the government today, the online auction house – and leading mobile retailer – is calling for the government to help the industry and policy makers grow the already downturn bucking mobile industry

Department store John Lewis is working in partnership with O2 as part of the network operator’s London-based trial of superfast next generation 4G mobile broadband services. The move comes just days after eBay lobbied government to look at using m-commerce services to help claw its way out of recession in a manifesto presented to downing street

Click & Collect is now a central service in modern retail strategy. Sophie Albizua, co-founder and director of eNova, traces its evolution – and takes a look at where it can go from here. Will Click & Collect work for food, for example?

Vente-Privee has launched a US site, in partnership with American Express. The site went live with an opening sale featuring Paul & Joe Sister, described by Vente-Privee as known for its ‘contemporary Parisian chic’. Will it be what the US market wants?

More than a quarter of the UK shoppers’ Christmas spending will take place online this year, says a new study from Kelkoo. Of that, 12% will be via mobile. But, warns Rackspace, retailers will have just seconds to grab consumers’ attention. It has advice on how to avoid websites freezing and losing potential sales.

Both Sainsbury’s and Dairy Crest reported strong growth for their online grocery sales in the first half of their financial years. Sainsbury’s also said its Click and Collect service was set to be available in 900 stores by the end of the financial year.

A quarter of consumers have used their smartphone to access websites whilst out shopping as retailers begin to offer free wifi to in-store customers, according to the latest eCustomerServiceIndex (eCSI) results from eDigitalResearch and IMRG

Customer experience on mobile websites is getting better month by month, but still falls behind that on standard ‘fixed’ websites, according to the latest monthly Mobile Benchmark from customer experience analysis company ForeSee.

A five year forecasting study commissioned by PayPal – which pretty much pioneered mobile payments back in the day – anticipates an explosion in UK mobile retail, predicting that the market will grow an average of 42% each year and be worth £2.5 billion by 2016

Starbucks Mobile Pay, the company’s pay-by-mobile application and in-store scanner system, which was rolled out across the US in January, has processed more than 20 million mobile payment transactions, the company revealed during its earnings call this week