The huge volume of marketing emails sent on Cyber Monday in the US caused delivery queues at ISPs that led to spam filters going on high alert and only 76.2% of emails making it to the recipient’s inbox, according to an analysis by Pivotal Veracity.

69% of respondents to an international survey conducted by Strongmail plan to integrate social media and email marketing next year — but only 42% of those who have already done so have seen a lift in the performance of their campaigns

Amazon, Argos and Play have retained their positions as the top three UK online retailers in the latest IMRG-Hitwise Hot Shops List, whilst Apple enters the top ten at number four, John Lewis is new in at number nine and Tesco Direct is the new number ten.

The majority of online retailers have yet to embrace the idea that more delivery choices can improve their customer proposition, with only 9.7% offering AM/PM options and just 6.9% offering evening deliveries, according to a new survey.

Sales were up 11% overall this year compared to last year, but several major retailers had problems keeping their sites online.

Customers can now order online or in store and can opt for either home delivery or collection from store.

Retailers should take full advantage of the ‘dead zone’ between Christmas and New Year, says Emailvision.

‘Driving traffic’ has been replaced by ‘conversion’ as the criteria of measuring ecommerce success, but GSI Commerce’s Steve Davis and Jeff McCall warn that placing too much importance on conversion as a measure of success can be an over-simplified and even dangerous approach.

Growth in online sales dipped by 5% during the postal strikes at the end of October, according to the latest IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index.

The search giant has rolled out ‘Product Extensions’, a way of showing specific product images and prices in AdWords ads, in the US market and the UK is set to follow.

‘Shopping and shipping’ service allows 93% of world’s online shoppers access to UK etailers.

The fashion designer has chosen Yoox Group to design and implement a new transactional website that delivers to shoppers in 46 countries around the world.

A number of fashion retailers including Faith, Jigsaw and Fenn Wright Manson are launching new affiliate campaigns via LinkShare in the run up to Christmas.

Why do so many organisations put their most effective channel in the hands of their least experienced marketers, asks E-Dialog International’s Simone Barratt, as she calls for more recognition — in terms of both budget and staff — for email marketing.

The upmarket supermarket chain is to re-platform using an IBM Websphere Commerce based solution that will be co-developed by Waitrose and Infosys Technologies.

The supermarket chain says it has seen a significant improvement in its bounce rate since adopting Maxymiser’s conversion management solutions

Having successfully reintroduced the Woolies name as an online-only venture earlier this year, there are now plans to bring Woolworths back to the high street as a franchise business, supported by the buying power of new owners Shop Direct.

The troubled bookstore has stopped taking orders on its website, as it seeks to raise money to see it through the Christmas period.

At a time of year when the pressure is on to find really creative ways of increasing sales, Kevin Rice of Clash-Media explains how online lead generation techniques can boost not only online sales, but also in-store sales.

Avail has launched a new online service aimed at enabling small to medium online retailers to improve their conversion and average order values — and Internet Retailing readers can win a six month free trial.