Americans love to shop. Whether online, in a small mom-and-pop business, or at a big-box retailer, shoppers turned out in droves this past holiday season. From Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday for example, online sales were up 12.6%–a record week–according to the IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark. For the holiday season overall, …

Just going by the headlines, you’d think mobile is the prime mover in the payments business. But desktop PCs still dominate online sales, and for the holiday-shopping season they’ve been ringing like cash registers. Since the official start of the season on Nov. 1, consumers using PCs have registered $48.3 …

Digital goods have matured way past ringtones for a mobile phone. And with that, merchants need to adapt their anti-fraud measures, suggests LexisNexis, a Dayton, Ohio-based risk-services company. Today’s consumers are completely comfortable buying books, movies, and apps for the smart phones, tablets, and computers, Aaron Press, LexisNexis Risk Solutions …

  Fraud-prevention efforts typically intensify during the holiday-shopping season, but many marketers don’t know what those efforts cost them, finds a survey from 41st Parameter, a data-technology company owned by Experian plc. In a survey of 250 marketers, 60% said they were unsure about the cost of fraud prevention to …

  Gift cards sales in 2014 will top $124 billion in the United States, but that comes amid slowing growth, says a new report from CEB TowerGroup. The Arlington, Va.-based advisory firm predicts that gift card sales will see annual growth rates from 5% to 6% through 2017, an indication …

With Black Friday results nearly in the books, the holiday-shopping season has officially started, though some observers argue it really began this year on Thanksgiving day itself with a flurry of mobile commerce. Much of that commerce is being driven by users of Apple Inc. devices. Controlling by far the …

Electronic-commerce spending from work and home desktop computers from Nov 1-23 hit $17.5 billion, up 11% from $15.8 billion in the same period a year earlier, Internet metrics firm comScore Inc. reported Tuesday. Most e-commerce spending is charged to credit and debit payment cards, so the early results for the …

  Consumers are expected to use their smart phones and tablets to do more than check prices this holiday season. More of them expect to make mobile-commerce purchases—forecasted to reach $1.6 billion on Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday— finds the Adobe Digital Index, a research service from Adobe …

  PayPal Inc. will use electronic gift card services from InComm Holdings Inc., a move that will enable PayPal to expand the number of retailers’ gift cards that it sells on the PayPal Digital Gifts store and in the eBay marketplace. PayPal, a unit of San Jose, Calif.-based eBay Inc., …

  Want to know where the chargebacks are coming from? Chargebacks911 has ranked the top five U.S. cities in terms of chargeback rates, placing a ZIP code in Show Low, Ariz., with a 2.2% rate, at the top. The study of 500,000 chargebacks of e-commerce transactions made in 2013 indicates …