“A glamour hangs over the glittering booth, and a tantalizing air of clever new things”. Selfridges? Abercrombie & Fitch? No – Henry James describing a WHSmith railway bookstall in 1888. Today a good bookshop still provides a focal point for its community, a peaceful haven to while away spare hours, and a stimulating environment [...]

In 2009 we posted the first part of an assessment of grocery home delivery. Given the barnstorming results of the online grocery services of the major UK supermarket retailers over Christmas, we thought we should post the second part of the assessment: a blow-by-blow account of the service provided by each. For the record, Tesco [...]

Received wisdom would have us believe that if there is a type of retailing that is surviving if not thriving in the economic downturn, it is Internet-based retailing. In the UK, headlines have consistently suggested that savvy consumers have abandoned the High Street and taken to the Internet in their droves to take advantage of [...]

Some interesting data just published by the Department of Transport on internet-related purchasing and trips in the UK. This confirms that internet-based ordering has increased over the 6 years since the last National Transport Survey Omnibus, (not really a surprise!) but also contains some confirmatory evidence on the size of the UK domestic e-commerce market [...]

(More) discouraging news from the US, where market research company Comscore reports that online spending fell between Black Friday and Christmas Eve in 2008, compared with a 20-25% growth in the equivalent period of 2007. Online sales had been US retailers’ “last, best hope” and this finding is less than helpful. FT’s Lex column last [...]

Here’s an interesting initiative, with which all consumers will feel considerable sympathy (http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/?ie=UTF8&docId=1000276271 ). Amazon’s focus seems to be to strip away those impenetrable, hermetically sealed transparent plastic clamshells that are used to package so many electronic accessories and toys. There is a clear consumer, and environmental, benefit from this but of course it must [...]