British supermarkets have said a collective “thank you” to investigators who were looking at suggestions the stores were anti-competitive. The Competition Commissioners found that all was OK with the supermarkets. This is in spite of the fact that many small store owners complained that the large superstore owners were driving

Retailers with successful “bricks and mortar” stores are – once again – failing to capitalise on the Internet. That’s the conclusion you can draw from the analysis of the annual WebCredible Ecommerce report. The report looked at ten major retailers and got 1,000 people to score them for various aspects

Shoppers at Tesco have been promised that if there is one person in front of them and there are available tills, all they have to do is ask and a new checkout will be opened. The idea is that you should never have to queue – there will never be

You will probably know someone in their 80s – a grandparent, perhaps even a parent. Anyone under the age of 50 at the moment is expected to live into their 90s – and life expectancy – at least in the Western world – is growing each year. But turn the

Sir Richard Branson knows a thing or two about business. Whether you like him or not, you can’t deny that overall his business activities have been rather successful. So this week we hear that he has sold his Virgin Megastores chain in a management buyout that involves taking the Virgin

Market researchers are telling us that online shopping has all but peaked. Apparently, these “experts” tell us that the growth in Internet retail is set for a serious slow down. Indeed, one of the market analysts says, “most of the people who are ever going to be buying online are

Eight out of ten purchasing decisions are made by women, according to Trendwatching. The future thinking organisation suggests that women are the real buyers in society, so forward thinking businesses are targeting women instead of men. This suggestion follows hot on the heels of research from the University of Newcastle

Shoppers are in different states of mind depending upon which activity they are engaged in. Imagine, for instance, that you are in a store browsing for something; you are not looking for anything in particular, but you might buy if you see something interesting. Would you respond to an in-store

Happy Bastille Day – today is the day when the people of France go to town celebrating over 200 years of independence. But will they be using their time off to go online and hit the shopping sites? Probably not. The French are not amongst the busiest shoppers online. Indeed

Readers of The Times woke up this morning to discover that many of them were not as “green” as they thought they were. According to the newspaper, Internet shoppers could be doing more harm to the environment than good. That’s because of a two fold effect Internet shopping has had.

Music buyers have stopped buying CDs forcing retailers into drastic action. Fopp, for instance, has closed down all 105 of its High Street stores. At the same time, music giant HMV has seen its profits halve in the past 12 months. At the same time digital music sales have doubled

Researchers at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire have discovered some interesting new information on the effect of choice in buyer behaviour. According to the study published in Psychological Science, choice of available options has a varied effect on buyer behaviour. Previous research suggested that choice actually prevented buyers from making

Shoppers at supermarkets have witnessed a silent revolution in shopping in the past few years. Supermarket giants like Wal-Mart, Tesco and so on have all installed new checkouts that are rapid and reliable. One of the bottlenecks in the whole supermarket “shopping experience” was the checkout. You would happily (perhaps)

Shoppers on the Internet are prepared to pay more for what they buy from you if your site has a clear privacy policy. According to research from Carnegie Mellon University, shoppers want to see your privacy policy plus they will pay more for goods and services from sites where such

Women do the bulk of shopping. Study after study reveals that, in general, men dislike shopping. Even when men go shopping for things they say they like, such as cars, research shows that in most cases the purchasing decision is actually made by a woman. Many web sites that offer

Internet shoppers are spending more money than ever before and the trend is upwards, says a new report on online retailing. However, the report concludes that the future for Internet retailers is one of gentle growth, rather than the substantial rise in online shopping we have seen in recent years.