News

Consider it a Black Friday dress rehearsal as 99 Cents Only Stores invites all sorts of lunacy into stores with extended hours and a discount promotion in advance of Halloween.

The retailer is offering a $5 discount on purchases of $25 or more as part of its Halloween Midnight Madness promotion involving numerous stores in Southern California. The promotion period runs from 10 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 30 until midnight. The premise behind the promotion is that customers can use the extra time to secure amazing last minute Halloween deals, according to the company.

Austin, Texas -- The platform behind today’s most inspiring shopping experiences today announced the results of a recent study based on an audit of 220 websites across 10 retail segments to identify benchmarks for how online shoppers are able to navigate in the digital realm. The study compared those results to existing attribute categories of current Edgecase retailers in the same categories to show the current disconnects in navigation standards.   

Two massive Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s stores are planned to open in the United Arab Emirates capital city of Abu Dhabi in what could be the first of other international moves for the department store operator.

New York -- As the holiday season approaches, shoppers are apprehensive about the rise in credit card breaches at major retailers and adjusting their shopping behavior accordingly. According to a new survey from TheStreet conducted by GfK, two-thirds of them are concerned that their credit card and personal information will be stolen whether they shop online or in stores.  

Beijing, China –- Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Apple Inc. are reportedly considering partnering on digital payment. According to the Wall street Journal, Alibaba executive chairman Jack Ma and Apple CEO Tim Cook have both made separate public statements about partnering, with Ma more specifically citing digital payment, and plan to meet on the matter.  

Bentonville, Ark. –- Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has reportedly apologized for offering Halloween outfits labeled as “fat girl” costumes on its e-commerce site. According to Bloomberg, Wal-Mart issued the apology after receiving social media criticism from offended consumers.  

Sears and Amazon.com both recently came under fire for allowing rings decorated with the Nazi swastika symbol to be posted for sale on their third-party seller sites. While both retailers quickly pulled the items down and issued public apologies, they received a large amount of negative publicity and surely damaged their brand image with many offended customers, perhaps to the point of permanently losing some of them.

Minato, Japan –- Japanese telecom/technology investment firm Softbank is reportedly planning to invest $10 billion in Indian e-commerce players during the next 10 years.   According to TheStreet.com, Softbank’s investments will include $627 million into Indian e-commerce platform Snapdeal.