H&M will allow its newsletter subscribers to shop exclusively on its UK ecommerce website on September 9, before opening it up to shoppers a week later.

The Swedish fashion group, which yesterday reported a 24% rise in profits to SEK 5.2bn (£448m) for the second quarter of the year, will launch its first online store to coincide with its autumn collection.

Shoppers will be able to choose from a range of clothing and accessories across womenswear, menswear and kidswear.

(Reuters) - John Stuart has been chained to his BlackBerry for years, first as a systems manager for Wall Street bank Morgan Stanley and then as chief information officer for Beverly Hills Wealth Management.

But this week, Stuart ordered an iPhone from Apple Inc, ending his 7-year relationship with BlackBerry maker Research in Motion.

His move highlights how even security-conscious banks and IT managers, who have been among RIM's most loyal customers, are starting to defect, lured by improvements

LONDON/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Apple Inc's latest iPhone looks set to become its bestselling device ever, and one reason appears to be disenchantment with rival smartphones.

Nearly one in four people who thronged Apple stores from Tokyo to San Francisco told Reuters on Friday they were ditching BlackBerries, discarding Nokias or even giving up Google Android-based phones, hoping for something better.

The majority of the 127 iPhone 4S buyers polled informally by Reuters in the United States, Japan, Australia,

SAN FRANCISCO - Google on Friday said it will kill its Buzz social networking tool in favor of young but fast-growing Google+ online community.

"We aspire to build great products that really change people's lives, products they use two or three times a day," Google product vice president Bradley Horowitz said echoing words oft spoken by chief executive Larry Page.

"To succeed you need real focus and thought -- thought about what you work on and, just as important,

SAN FRANCISCO - Google Inc's free Android smartphone software, already a big hit with consumers, is starting to win the hearts of investors.

The world's No. 1 Internet search company offered a peek at its mobile business during quarterly results on Thursday, revealing that the business was generating revenue at an annual run rate of $2.5 billion, up from $1 billion last year.

That helped Google sail past third-quarter financial targets set by analysts, sending its shares up nearly

THE HAGUE - A Dutch court on Friday rejected a bid by Samsung to ban sales of rival Apple's 3G phones and tablet devices, the latest round in a worldwide legal battle over alleged patent infringements.

The judges in District Court of The Hague rejected Samsung's request in a decision published online.

LONDON (Reuters) - Britons are now including internet passwords in wills to ensure their online music, photographs, videos and other digital data are not lost when they die, a British study showed.

Around 11 percent of the 2,000 British people surveyed by the Center for Creative & Social Technology (CAST) at the University of London for their "Cloud Generation" report said they had included internet passwords or plan to include them in their wills in a trend that CAST

(Herald Sun)  MEN who can't stand traipsing around stores are leading an online charge that has crowned Australians the world's most frequent internet shoppers.

A study has found a quarter of Aussie web users are buying goods and services online at least once a week, eclipsing Europe, the US and other countries.

The ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation at Swinburne Institute report also shows biggest online spending growth among consumers aged over 50.

Swinburne

Why are Australian retailers losing the online battle to offshore companies? They’re not engaging the customers, says report.

With Australian online retail sales increasingly going to offshore sites, eMarketingConnected decided to examine the online practices of national retailers. The results presented in its Beyond the Basics report show that Aussie retailers are failing to engage consumers and to provide them with a full online experience.

This year, 44% of all Australian online retail sales will go to retailers overseas,

(Brisbane Times) U.K. grocers are building more advanced websites and smart-phone applications to tap shopper demand for home deliveries.

U.K. online grocery sales will almost double in the next five years as more shoppers use mobile phones and the internet to buy food, an industry group said.

Online purchases will surge to 11.2 billion pounds ($17.6 billion) in 2016 from 5.9 billion pounds this year, according to a survey by theInstitute of Grocery Distribution. That

(Source: Arnnet)

Australian consumers and their smartphones are driving the country’s ecommerce growth, with a new study predicting online commerce will grow at 12.2 percent throughout 2012.

A panel of experts earlier this month said Australian consumers were ahead of retailers in the ecommerce revolution, enjoying the benefits of a global marketplace accessible from their mobile devices.

Today a research report issued by online financial transaction facilitator, PayPal, confirmed their speculations saying Australia’s ecommerce market would

(BusinessDay) AUSTRALIA has a two-speed digital economy, with the divide between advanced and functional internet users widening, according to new research.

A global study of internet attitudes and habits found digital savvy people are becoming more active online, using the internet in a wider variety of ways. But this group is leaving behind those who are less confident and less active online.

The study, by global market research company TNS, also found that Australians' confidence in online retail was

(BusinessDay) Online Branding A Smart Move - Clare Kermond, October 28, 2011

Many brands are not engaging with customers via mobile phones.

Over the next three years, mobile use of the internet will ''reign'', creating massive opportunities for marketers and advertisers. But with less than 7 per cent of brands using mobiles effectively, many risk being left behind.

According to several high-profile speakers at a forum on digital communications and marketing, the use of mobile devices to access the

(Smart Company) Australia's bricks and mortar retailers have been doing it tough of late. But then, it is getting hard to remember a time when they weren't.

But while news reports are filled with stories of companies such as Borders, Blockbuster and Premier Retail closing stores, many of Australia's online retailers are going from strength to strength.

The April 2000 dotcom crash wiped out many world-be online retails moguls, but that is now just a distant memory. And the

(Mashable)  Adobe confirmed what reports were saying all morning: It’s done with the Flash Mobile Player and has now thrown its lot in with the HTML5 crowd — for mobile at least.

“We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc.) following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook,” wrote Danny Winokur,

(Mashable) If you were to throw a dart at Google+, it would be more than twice as likely to land on a man’s profile as a woman’s profile. Although the social network, according to recent estimates, has improved its gender ratio since it first launched, men still drastically outnumber women.

SocialStatistics and FindPeopleOnPlus, third-party sites that gather data from about select Google+ profiles, both report that about 68% of Google+ users are Male. In July,

(Mashable/SMH) Internet Explorer can no longer claim more than half of the web's traffic, as of October, ending more than a decade of the default Microsoft browser's reign.

Safari's hold on 62.17 per cent of mobile traffic has reduced IE's overall share of web browsing, despite still claiming 52.63 per cent of desktop traffic, according to Netmarketshare.com.

The Microsoft browser's diminishing share reflects its near absence from the realms of mobile and tablet, which now make

(News.com.au) Amazon slammed for price reporting deal  

The deal dubbed "Price Check" involves customers finding and sharing in-store prices and receiving a discount of five per cent - to a maximum of $5 - from the online

REUTERS 10.11.11
Australian consumers appear to continue their migration to online shopping but most players in the retail industry seem to continue miss the significant surge because they have yet to implement the necessary adjustments on their websites.

In a report released on Thursday by Google Australia, searches for available products online have spiked by more than 200 percent yet these opportunities were effectively bypassed by Aussie retailers as their websites were not configured for mobile inquiries,

(Radio New Zealand ) Australia's Federal Government has launched a retail taskforce to investigate the viability of lowering the GST threshold on online imports.

Australians are currently spending more than $4 billion a year on overseas-based websites but imports under $1000 are exempt from GST.

Retailers want the threshold lowered.

The Government says at a threshold of $100 it would cost $1.2 billion to collect $500 million worth of tax.

Assistant Treasurer Bill Shorten says the Government has