The January sales are set to generate £21.9bn and online will account for 21% of total spending, according to the latest research from Kelkoo.

UK consumers spent over £5bn online in November, according to the latest IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index, but growth was the slowest in November for ten years.

The recession, customer research, rich media, social networking and the latest trends in Christmas spending, fashion etailing, online clearance sites and third party advertising topped the list of the most read stories on InternetRetailing.net this year.

Michael Matzer, our new Germany editor, will be creating a German-language version of Internet Retailing in 2010. He is beginning with the first in a series of letters from Germany, bringing IR readers in the UK up to date with the state of play in this key European market.

Last month we held the inaugural Internet Retailing/Beringer Tame eCommerce Charity Pub Quiz and after a tough evening in which we realised that competition on the High Street had nothing on the cut-through environment in …

Shoppers in Birmingham and the greater London area can use Amazon’s Evening Delivery service to order gifts until 8:30am on Christmas Eve and Net-a-Porter will deliver orders placed right up to 10am in greater London. Can anyone beat that?

The retailer has chosen an online conversion specialist to redevelop its website, with the aim of increasing its checkout conversion rates.

The number of items that are purchased per transaction has also increased significantly, from 2.7 in 2007 to 3.7 per order in 2009, Coremetrics has found.

Four in ten city dwellers surveyed for a new PayPal report say they have increased their reliance on internet shopping this year, despite having easy access to high street stores.

15 million shoppers will spend £1.1bn on Saturday December 19, according to new research from Kelkoo and the Centre for Retail Research.

A comprehensive new study of internet usage across sixteen European countries has thrown up some interesting data on the way the internet is being used to aid purchasing decisions across the continent.

The online gadgets retailer used an innovative crowdsourcing service to bug test its new payments system at low cost and in record time.

The majority of online shoppers are continuing to experience ‘virtual’ shop queues in the run up to Christmas, according to new research from web hosting provider Fasthosts Internet.

The use of online customer reviews this Christmas is up 128% on a year ago, according to Bazaarvoice.

The retail sector is likely to experience a tough 2010, says the Management Consultancies Association, and retailers must turn their attention to innovating new products and services to recover and prosper post-recession.

Consumers often abandon online purchasing at the research or checkout stage because they don’t have enough information about the product to be certain of the purchase, research by Foviance has found.

Adobe Scene7 is conducting its annual global retail survey, this time focusing on Customer Experience in the New Decade, and Internet Retailing readers who complete the questionnaire will have the chance of winning an iPod Touch…

The new delivery service provides multi-channel retailers with a way to offer internet shoppers delivery direct from their local store in as little as 90 minutes after they place an order.

The UK and France have both seen significant gains in online retail traffic, says ComScore, with Germany experiencing more modest growth.

Amongst Keynote Systems’ basket of top online retailers, availability and response times on 7 December stayed strong — although Amazon and John Lewis both suffered small down times and slower than average response rates.