Web supermarket Ocado is reported to be in the process of appointing bankers for a planned stock market flotation this summer.

The clothes retailer will use TagMan to identify how customers find their way to its websites and gain a better understanding of how different marketing channels interact and which are most responsible for driving sales.

The outdoor equipment and clothing retailer has reported double digit sales growth in many product lines since creating a cross-functional team dedicated to ‘doing what it takes to get everything right for the customer.’

Customers can track the progress of their purchases online and are updated by text and email as soon as the goods arrive in-store.

The delivery firm has become the first in the industry to tell customers to within an hour when their parcel will arrive.

In a move that could have a major impact on multi-channel retailers, the search giant is rumoured to be adding images of the interior of stores to its Street View function on Google Maps.

BT, Orange & Yahoo! inboxes are the most difficult to reach in the UK, according to the new edition of Return Path’s Email Deliverability Benchmark Report, with only 75% of legitimate marketing messages getting through to ‘the most marketer-unfriendly ISP’.

The percentage of consumers who feel the marketing emails they receive are irrelevant has increased 34% over the last year, e-Dialog has found.

European internet sales hit £127.7bn last year, according to new research from Kelkoo, and Poland, France and Spain will see the fastest growth in 2010.

The Mall in Luton has set up a Facebook page and a Twitter account to keep shoppers informed of the latest offers at all its retail stores.

A new British Population Survey analyses the growth in internet shopping by both consumers’ age and by their socio-economic grouping.

The seed, plant and horticultural goods merchant has replaced its manual recommendations system with Avail’s behavioural merchandising system.

“We see a genuinely integrated trading solution as critical to our ambitions to become the pre-eminent cycle brand in the UK,” says Merlin Cycles’ John Moss.

Creating an ecommerce website that supports multi-currency transactions can be a monetary minefield, says Chapter Eight’s Mario Thomas. Here, he provides a ten point check-list of the key areas you need to consider when selling outside the UK.

With online due to account for more than 70% of sales this year, the catalogue retailer says it now has excess capacity in its contact centres and plans to close three with the loss of 1,500 jobs.

Most shoppers who find a product is out of stock on the high street go straight to a price comparison service to find it online — not to the website of the store they visited.

On average, 4.6% of orders are rejected due to suspicion of fraud, according to CyberSource’s Sixth Annual UK Online Fraud Report, and 1.6% of orders accepted turn out to be fraudulent.

The Argos website has been updated with a new logo and a subtle makeover as the retailer reports it has received 1.28 billion visits since it first became transactional in 2000.

The company’s international operations, comprising the UK, Germany, Japan, France and China, hit $4.56bn in the fourth quarter of 2009, up by nearly a half on the year before.

Asda.co.uk could overtake Tesco.com within six months if consumer trends continue, according to a bold prediction by MyVoucherCodes.