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Yesterday I completed my national civic duty to the economy and to the retail industry by finishing up my shopping for the holidays and spending twice the amount I budgeted.  It started at 4am on black Friday and finished up yesterday at Circuit City for a few last minute stocking stuffers. 
My wife was able to [...]

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I’m giving Bestbuy.com a C+ for their holiday widget strategy this holiday season.  They provided two widgets, one in the form of Yahoo Widgets for your desktop and the second for igoogle.  Both are identical in look and functionality.  The visual design was well done, although the functionality came up short IMO.  Details below.

This is the first [...]

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I’m not sure I can think of a worse story to come out at Christmas time for a retailer.  Right in the middle of the peak of the holiday shopping season, a store manager at Dillards in Texas decided to eject a disabled Marine Iraq war veteran out of the store because he had a [...]

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Strong words from the CEO of Ikea.  Furniture Today has an article today that says that a memo is making the rounds in Sweden from Anders Dahlvig, CEO and President.
“According to the memo, which came from Anders Dahlvig, Ikea’s CEO and president, the Swedish company will focus on the in-store experience as “the only sales channel,” [...]

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I haven’t been writing much over the past couple weeks because I’ve been focused on developing a new mashup app that will track the top 500+ ecommerce sites on the web.    Trying to keep up with what the top companies are doing is always a difficult and time consuming task so I decided to pull [...]

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Brandon over at “The life and times” wrote up a great article on Optimizing for Google Product Search (Formerly Froogle).   Definitely worth checking out. 

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Gas stations in Colorado and Chicago started accepting Pay by Touch payment using biometric fingerprint scanning.  Your fingerprint is associated to a payment method on file through a pre-registration process and allows you to pay for your gas without pulling out your wallet.   Pay By Touch, the company providing the solution has been around for 5 [...]

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Along with Walmart putting their secret sales online early this year, other retailers are deciding to release their ads earlier than Thanksgiving.  According to an article on ToledoBlade.com, Best Buy will release their ad on Wednesday before Thanksgiving and Meijer has already released their ad including a 37 inch LCD TV for $500.   After a [...]

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A Secret Black Friday Walmart site was found showing some products at steeper than normal discount with “Secret In-Store Specials”.  It appears they are trying to start the holiday savings early with this site.  It will be interesting to see if this applies pressure to others to follow suit.
The site makes extensive use of Flash.
Update from NY Times [...]

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After writing the last post about Rooms to Go’s success with Local PPC (Pay Per Click) Search, I decided to research the topic a bit and write up these tips to improving your Local PPC and SEO efforts.  
1. Make sure your PPC links list the city you are advertising for.  When your ad is seen, you want to [...]

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