Items tagged with online shopping
The holidays bring enough stress as it is, such as dealing with the in-laws, fighting through crowds and bumper-to-bumper traffic, and even what to wear. For some, Best Buy is piling even more on by letting an untold number of customers know the electronics chain will not be fulfilling their orders, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. The alerts come just a few days before Christmas, and during a year when online sales are up 15 percent to $32 billion for the holiday season so far. Morningstar analyst R.J. Hottovy told WSJ that the cancelled orders a "hiccup" for Best Buy, adding that the chain was already "kind of behind the curve building our their online channel." While the cancelled...
Read more...
It's still just the beginning of December, but now that we've made it past Thanksgiving and have had time to let all that turkey settle in our bellies, it's time to go shopping for gifts. And just in time for the holiday shopping season, ThinkGeek just announced the availability of nine officially licensed Portal 2 products, including a Portal Companion Cube Cooke Jar and a Portal 2 Plus Turret with Sound. Those are rad, and so are some of the other items up for grabs, including: Aperture Laboratories Shower Curtain Portal Cookie Cutters Portal Bookends Wheatley LED Flashlight Portal 2 PotatOS Science Kit Portal 2 Cave Johnson Talking Portrait You can view the full lineup of Portal products on...
Read more...
Apple is spreading some holiday cheer to iDevice fans by offering free shipping on all products ordered online through its Apple store or via the Cupertino company's Apple Store iOS app. There's no minimum amount you have to spend; if it's available for purchase, it ships free to your door until December 22nd. Somewhat tying into the promotion is a holiday gift guide on Apple's website that has "all kinds of gifts for all kinds of lists." Most of the items are high priced items that would have qualified for free shipping anyway, like the iPad 2 (from $499) and Apple TV ($99), but there's at least one item that wouldn't have qualified: the HEX Icon Watchband for iPod nano ($39.95). Also in line...
Read more...
No one will deny that Groupon struck gold by bringing daily deals to locals all around the country. But like the original gold rush, not everyone who goes in search of riches ends up finding it. Groupon knockoffs are having a tough go on the Web, and so are deal sites in general. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, roughly a third of all daily deal sites in the nation have called it quits so far in 2011. To attach some hard numbers to that claim, WSJ says exactly 170 out of 530 daily deal sites have fizzled out so far, and there are still more than three months left in the year. Part of the problem is it's simply too expensive to run a daily deal site. It takes a great deal of marketing...
Read more...
If you find yourself frequently disappointed by gifts from Aunt Mildred or Uncle Fred, Amazon may have a solution in store for you. Amazon was recently awarded a patent for a solution that will enable gift recipients to automatically exchange an item before they ever receive it. With Amazon's system, you'll get the chance to choose something else or get a gift card without ever letting the sender know you returned his or her gift. Amazon further describes the system in its patent: "As in other gift-giving situations, it sometimes occurs that gifts purchased online do not meet the needs or tastes of the gift recipient….In such situations, the recipient may wish to convert the gift to something...
Read more...
Those who plan to sneak in a couple hours here, a couple hours there to do some holiday shopping while at work can, perhaps, take comfort in the fact that they're not alone.Not even close.Apparently, employees, on average, plan (plan!) to spend nearly two full working days — 14.4 hours — shopping online while at work. One in 10, in fact, plans to spend a whopping 30-pus hours shopping online from work.ISACA, an association of IT professionals, conducted two surveys, one of 1,210 U.S. consumers and the other of 1,513 IT professionals in nine countries. There was a huge disconnect between what the employees planned and the IT folks predicted - fully 48 percent of the latter were estimating employees...
Read more...
Just in time for the holidays, Amazon is launching Local Express Delivery, a new shipping option that will provide customers with same-day delivery of their orders in seven major cities. The service will initially be available in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, Las Vegas, Seattle, and Washington D.C. and will expand to Chicago, Indianapolis, and Phoenix in the coming months. There are thousands of items that are available for Local Express Delivery. The service costs just $5.99 per item for Amazon Prime members. Rates for other customers are available at www.amazon.com/help/shipping. Orders must be placed before a local cut-off time in order to be delivered the same day: New York City...
Read more...
