Costco Wholesale Corp.

Hoboken, N.J. – Early results indicate Amazon.com may be getting beaten by upstart e-commerce rival Jet.com on price, but Amazon is still outdoing the new kid on the online retail block in one key area. According to data from cloud services provider Instart Logic, the Jet.com homepage takes 25% longer to load than Amazon’s homepage.

Data security has been a hot topic in the world of retail IT lately. Based on some recent retail data security-related news items, I have compiled a list of two don’ts and one do when it comes to securing your data.

Don’t outsource whole portions of your e-commerce platform

Sam’s Club, Costco, Rite Aid, and other retailers have shut down their photo services to deal with a potential data breach.

According to Reuters, CVS, which also uses the same photo hosting service as the retailers named above, temporarily shut down its photo sites last week after noticing possible credit card data irregularities.

According to Reuters, some of the companies temporarily shut down the services after photo hosting service PNI told them about the breach, while others proactively shut down after reading reports.

Vancouver – The third-party vendor hosting online photo sites of at least six major retailers may have been the victim of a security breach. The photo pages of CVS, Sam’s Club, Costco, Rite Aid, Wal-Mart Canada and Tesco, all clients of Vancouver-based PNI Digital Media Inc., have been temporarily taken down.

Louisville, Colo. – When it comes to filling their tanks, consumers are most satisfied by two retailers.

Wawa and Costco are the most satisfying gas station/convenience store and wholesale/grocery/big box retailers for fuel, respectively, according to a new survey of 6,935 U.S. consumers by Market Force Information.

London - Two e-tailers, Amazon.com and Netflix, are the respective number one and two ranked brands in the U.S., according to the mid-year Brand Index from consumer research firm YouGov. Social video platform is the number three brand in the index, meaning the top three is made up of brands that focus on services delivered through the Internet.

New York -- Although the list of retailers reporting monthly sales has grown considerably slim over the past few years, a handful are still going public with the metric.

Costco Wholesale Corp. announced on Thursday that its same-store sales fell 1% in June, following a 1% drop in its most recent quarter (ended May 1), which was the chain’s first quarterly drop since 2009.

Headwinds from fuel price fluctuations and currency exchange rates lessened for Costco in June as the retailer posted a bump in same store sales.

The warehouse club reported net sales of $11.01 billion for the month of June, the five weeks ended July 5, an increase of 1% from $10.88 billion during the similar period last year. Same store sales, excluding the negative impacts from gasoline price deflation and foreign exchange, were 6%.