Indian home shopping business Homeshop18 has closed a $30 million funding round as it edges closer to an IPO.

Reuters reported in April of 2012 that the Mumbai, India-based online retailer is eying a $100 million public offering. And this infusion of growth capital is a sure sign that the company is moving in that direction.

Homeshop18 claims to be the largest home shopping and e-commerce business in India. It launched the first home shopping channel in 2008, and sells everything from mobile phones to apparel.

“We are now on the throes of our next phase of growth, and we believe OCP Asia’s investment will help put us on an accelerated path of growth,” said CEO Sundeep Malhotra, in a statement.

The company is poised to take advantage of the rapid growth of India’s online commerce market. The country’s rising middle class and urban population is spending big on products at discounted rates, and is increasingly active on the Internet.

India has 52 million active Internet users and 40 percent of them have shopped online, according to the Internet and Mobile Association of India.

Hedge fund manager OCP Asia has invested $15 Million into the company, matched by an equal contribution from mass media company Network18. The terms of the deal stipulate that Network18 will remain the majority stakeholder in HomeShop18.

Top image via Shutterstock

And you thought Amazon reviews were interesting. Today, StellaService has just taken a huge $15 million dollar check to the bank, and all for its capability to track and rate the online shopping experience.

This round of funding is the New York City-based startup’s second institutional financing. Altogether, it’s raised $22 million since its founding in 2009. Norwest Venture Partners led today’s funding; NVP general partner Josh Goldman will take a board seat. Previous investors include DFJ Gotham (Draper Fisher Jurvetson’s NYC branch) and RRE Ventures.

Currently, StellaService helps big retail customers like GNC, 1-800-Contacts, and Eddie Bauer to understand and improve how they rate with online shoppers — and how those ratings compare to those of their competitors.

StellaService uses analysts, accountants, and mystery shoppers to “stress test” all the many points of contact between customers and brands online, such as processing returns and engaging in Twitter conversations.

“Not only does StellaService capture how we are performing against the customer service targets we’ve set for ourselves,” said an Eddie Bauer sales SVP in a statement on the news. “We know where we stand amongst the leading retailers and where the best in class perform across key customer service metrics. This insight pushes Eddie Bauer to continually make improvements to be the best.”

Turkey Day is no longer just a day to gorge, give thanks, and watch football. We’re now celebrating our American heritage with our pocketbooks too, using the holiday as an excuse to shop until the tryptophan kicks in.

Internet traffic-watcher Experian measured our fleeting familial attention on Thanksgiving Day and found that online retail-specific traffic increased 71 percent in 2012 compared to 2011. The top 500 retail sites pooled together more than 181 million U.S. web visits for the day.

Amazon, Walmart, Target, BestBuy, and Sears benefited the most from our celebratory dispositions.

With more than 25 million U.S. online visits, not counting mobile traffic, Amazon was the top visited retail site on Thanksgiving Day. The e-commerce haven noticed a 16 percent uptick in web traffic from the previous day, as people (trapped?) at family gatherings turned to the web for a little retail therapy.

BestBuy, the fourth most popular online retail destination, proved it can be more than America’s electronics showroom. Traffic to the big-box retailer’s website skyrocketed by 104 percent between Wednesday and Thursday to reach 11.4 million U.S. visits on Turkey Day, which was good enough to make BestBuy the winner of the highest day-over-day traffic growth award.

Collectively, Americans are shopping more online this holiday week than in years past, Experian found.

“So far this Holiday week of online traffic to the top retail sites is up 8 percent on average,” said Matt Tatham of the Experian Marketing Services.

Photo credit: Sugar Daze/Flickr

Subscription e-commerce is like dating. The excitement comes from anticipation of the unknown and delight in variety. However, with love, as with online retail, consistency has its benefits. OrderGroove is a startup that helps companies move their “casual daters” into committed partners, and it has raised $6.7 million to help customers take that next step.

OrderGroove’s platform powers subscription and membership commerce for large companies and their brands. This software-as-a-service technology can regularly deliver the products to customers. People can receive a package with dog treats every month, a shipment of vitamins three times a year, or baby diapers on a weekly basis. It gives companies the chance to build recurring revenue, guarantee retention, and increase the lifetime value of each customer.

Over the past year, OrderGroove has tripled its client roster and currently works with over 60 companies, including major names like L’Oreal, Jockey, Johnson & Johnson, Rogaine, and wine seller Lot18.

This second round of funding will go toward expanding OrderGroove’s team and adding services to the platform as well as moving into new channels. Fung Capital led the investment, with participation from Lerer Ventures, Legend and Swan Ventures, Allegro Venture Partners, Bee Partners as well as former Walmart.com CEO Raul Vazquez and NEW Corporation’s Chairman Fred Schaufeld.

OrderGroove has based in New York. Read the press release.

Online shoe store Spartoo is stepping into €25 million.

Known as the “Zappos of Europe,” Spartoo is a straightforward e-commerce site that sells affordable footwear. The inventory contains roughly 30,000 options provided by 700 brands, including popular retailers Ugg, Nine West, and Dolce and Gabbana. The selection is wide, spanning women’s high-heeled stilettos, men’s work boots, and children’s flip flops, as well as bags and other accessories. Delivery is guaranteed, and free returns are possible for up to 30 days.

Spartoo was founded in France in 2006 and has since expanded to 20 European countries. It sold 2 million pairs of shoes last year and is growing fast. This investment will go towards sustaining the rapid growth and entering new markets.

Sofina, A Plus Finance, CM-CIC Capital Privé, Highland Partners, and Endeavour Vision contributed to this round, which brings Spartoo’ total financing to €45 million. Read the press release.

Fashion startup Warby Parker has raised $36.8 million in a new round of funding to make stylish-yet-inexpensive glasses, which could end up reaching as much as $40 million by the time it closes.

An SEC form for the round came in Thursday, reports Fortune. General Catalyst Partners led the round, adding one of its partners, Joel Cutler, to the company’s board.

The money will help Warby expand its product offerings, staff, and marketing reach, according to a source close to the company. Warby Parker is also looking to launch its first retail store in New York City later this year (the company already has its products on display in some hip NYC stores).

While there’s no shortage of websites selling dirt-cheap eyeglasses, Warby Parker wants to bring style and quality to its relatively low-priced $95 glasses (prescription sunglasses cost a bit more at $150). Traditional glasses retailers typically offer frames for more than $100, and that doesn’t include the price for lenses. Without insurance, a typical pair of prescription glasses could cost $300 — or more.

As someone who’s shopped for glasses online quite a bit, Warby Parker is refreshing because it offers a select choice of high-quality glasses and has a 30-day no questions asked return policy. Many sites have a huge catalog of glasses, but most of the choices are ugly or cheaply made. And I haven’t seen any other online glasses retailer with a good return policy (this is especially important, since it’s easy to input an incorrect prescription).

For the indecisive, Warby Parker also offers a helpful home try-on service in which you can try five different pairs of glasses for five days. Once your time is up, simply send the glasses you don’t want back in the mail.

Founded in February 2010, Warby Parker previously raised $13 million from First Round Capital, Lerer Ventures, Tiger Global Management, SV Angel, Thrive Capital, and Menlo Ventures.

For online shoppers, getting your neatly packaged goods on time is an absolute necessity. Once you’ve added an item to your shopping cart, you want to feel it, hold it, and try it on. Stat.

To give retailers a competitive edge, Shopify announced a partnership today that promises to cut shipping time anywhere from a half to a third. Shopify, a website used by thousands of retailers to build and launch their online store, is integrating with ShipStation, a web-based shipping solution.

“This partnership not only introduces ShipStation to a whole new set of retailers looking for a better shipping solution, but it also offers a new, online retailing option to our current customers,” said Byron Wier, cofounder of ShipStation.

Austin, TX-based ShipStation specializes in order import, batch label creation and returns management software. The startup has also integrated with e-commerce giants, like eBay and Amazon, and processes over 1 million shipping labels each month for over 2,000 online retail stores.

This announcement is one of a recent spate of integrations for Shopify. The company, which competes with Magento and BigCommerce, also teamed up with Stitch Labs, a cloud-based solution for small and medium sized business to manage inventory and orders.

Retailers, this is not a free service. ShipStation is offering a 30 day trial, but after that, it will set you back anywhere from $25 to $145 per month depending on the volume of orders.

Image via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

For shopaholics, it’s easy to pile up credit card debt, and lose track of how much you’re actually spending. ShopVibe, a Silicon Valley-based startup launching today, was founded by two serial entrepreneurs who needed a better way to help their wives’ track their purchases.

Cofounders Ken Leeder and Sandeep Nawathe left their previous companies to build the technology that bridges machine learning and e-commerce. ”Despite consumers’ hyper-connectivity, their shopping experience is still very disconnected,” said Leeder in an interview with VentureBeat.

To make it easier for shoppers to track online and offline shopping, ShopVibe is launching with four core features: a bookmarklet to track potential purchases from any online retailer, a product card to keep a visual record of the products you buy, a QR-code enabled scanning technology for mobile, and a social feature to share favorite items with friends.

ShopVibe has positioned itself in the murky middle-ground between mobile commerce tools, social discovery sites, and bookmarklets like Wantworthy, a startup which recently pulled in funding from Google Ventures. It’s taking on an army of competitors, but the founders claim that their solution combines aspects of all these sites.

For instance, certain features are highly reminiscent of Pinterest and the Fancy. These features are designed for people who like to organize their favorites and list their aspirational purchases. On the homepage, users share items that they’re “vibing,” which is not dissimilar to “pinning” your favorites on Pinterest. ShopVibe integrates with Facebook, so you can ask friends’ for feedback.

But why “vibe” when you can “pin”? Where it gets a bit more interesting is that the founders have developed a proprietary machine-learning technology that automatically hunts for bargains when you “vibe” an item. On the backend, they are building a product database that enables ShopVibe to crawl the web for lower prices on any product while people shop and recommend similar items. Leeder said that building this smart database was their greatest technical challenge.

With this technology, ShopVibe is taking on mobile commerce darling ShopSavvy, a barcode scanning tool for in-store comparison shopping. ShopSavvy opened the playing field by convincing thousands of retailers to give up their pricing and inventory data. For this reason, ShopVibe was able to partner with 100 retail outlets in its alpha phase. While ShopSavvy focusses on the in-store experience, ShopVibe’s founders told me that mobile is not their singular focus.

ShopVibe has raised $300,000 in angel investment, and is looking to raise a seed round of funding in the coming weeks.

Amazon is hiring some new team members to improve and enhance the Amazon Prime membership package.

Currently, an $80-per-year membership gets you free, fast shipping and some media freebies. But if you’re not a die-hard online shopper or streaming media junkie, $80 annually can seem like a lot.

The new employees will be charged with “Prime Expansion” and dreaming up new benefits for Amazon Prime members, as well as marketing the service and pushing it into new geographical regions.

A full listing of Prime-related job listings at Amazon reveals the company is working on “awesome new business opportunities” for digital subscriptions, launching Prime services in Italy and Spain, working with major studios to improve the site’s Instant Video offerings, and creating new designs to get more members onboard.

As we read in a few of these job descriptions:

“We are going through a period of dramatic evolution, working on new benefits and pairing Prime with some of our top strategic marketing initiatives including Amazon Student and Amazon Mom…

The Prime Expansion team is aggressively driving innovations and architectural designs that will allow the program to be easily expanded to allow Prime customers to enjoy benefits on a growing list of Amazon locales and beyond. Our core team mission is to enable the right Prime programs in new places (on and off Amazon) by designing flexible software architectures that will allow for a rapid expansion of the Prime program everywhere!

The Amazon Prime Expansion team is a great place to grow your career. Our roadmap is bursting with opportunity for engineers to bring their best (and then some), solve intriguing challenges, and tangibly impact the customer experience on and off Amazon Come join our team where fun, smart, passionate engineers challenge and support one another in pursuit of goals that have a huge impact on our customers and the company.

Of course, it’s kind of a given that Amazon would want to improve its current offering of virtual products and services; that’s more or less par for the course. What’s interesting is the timing of this rapid acceleration of Prime offerings.

Prime first launched its instant video service as an incentive for new members back in February 2011. However, one year later, Amazon Prime membership was still much lower than anticipated. As Amazon continues to grow in all its other offerings — from its massive Kindle adoption to its cloud hosting services — Prime can’t be allowed to lag behind.

hat tip: All Things D

Image courtesy of Vladimir Gerasimov, Shutterstock

Sephora staffers will also highlight their favorite products on Pinterest pinboards. Following a meteoric rise, Pinterest is now the third most visited social network in the U.S. after Facebook and twitter.

Given that Pinterest’s users are overwhelmingly female and Pinterest has been shown to drive considerably more revenue per click than either Twitter or Facebook, the fact that Sephora has pinned its hopes on Pinterest is perhaps unsurprising.

Sephora’s sleek stores have long functioned as the cathedrals of the beauty product world. The French retailer operates more than 300 stores in the U.S. and Canada (and many more globally) and is something of a trailblazer in integrating technology into its retail experience. Last month VentureBeat reported how the retailer, having noticed the high overlap between its customers and Apple users (70 percent of visits to Sephora’s website are from iPhones) introduced iPads running a custom, in-store Sephora app into 20 stores across the U.S.

The iPad application leverages the iPad’s camera functionality to create a “virtual mirror” that lets users see themselves practicing makeup application as a video of the relevant technique are played below. Shoppers can review their purchase history (to avoid shopping disasters such as buying two of the same lipstick) and product information like ingredient lists. Sephora also invested in iPod touches which can be used for mobile checkout in every store.

Sephora’s website is the world’s biggest beauty store. Mobile shopping grew 300 percent on Sephora in 2011 and the company expects another 100 percent increase this year. iPad traffic was up 400 percent in Q1 2012 compared to Q1 2011.

“We cut out the whole complex content management system when it comes to making a great online shop and replaced it with drag and drop” Marcus told VentureBeat by phone. “So in the same way, we are hoping to cut out spreadsheets and third-party tools for people who want to scale up their sales. They will find everything they need in one place.”

Merchants can design an email campaign using a drag and drop interface that integrates with Goodsie’s backend. The real time sales analytics show who the best customers are and which products are producing the best profit margins. They also show sellers where consumers are coming from, both in terms of geography and online referrals like Facebook and Twitter.

The premium package is going for $40 a month. Goodsie raised angel financing last year from folks like Path’s Dave Morin and Techstars’ Dave Tisch. Marcus says the company’s cash flow is sufficient right now to continue to grow. “We’ve gotten by so far without doing a ton of marketing, so once we see how these new features work, expect us to ramp things up in the middle of this year.”

It’s not all cyber crime and shadowy government dealings over there in China. Apparently, Chinese supercompany Alibaba is testing out social shopping via a Pinterest clone.

Sounds yummy, especially for the ladies. If there’s one thing we know about the ladies, it’s that the only things they love more than shopping and being social are Pinterest and low-fat yogurt.

But we digress. Alibaba’s search engine eTao (a collaboration with Microsoft launched about a year and a half ago) has just rolled out Faxian or Fa Xian, which roughly translates as “discover” (and is also the name of a traveling Chinese Buddhist monk, for you trivia lovers).

Faxian was launched as a beta product after about three months of research and is currently getting around 60,000 uniques per day. Its aim is simple: Let users share their interests, then guide users toward becoming purchasing customers via eTao’s search features. The image-heavy layout and pinning/re-pinning features are a direct nod to (or smash-and-grab from) Pinterest, and the site is targeted at the young female demographic — you know, the same demo that Pinterest seems to have nailed, no pun intended.

Check out this pinboard called “The Temptation of Nude,” which anyone, Chinese or otherwise, who loves stilettos will immediately understand:

eTao itself is a subsidiary of Taobao, an Alibaba Group company that controls around 75 percent of Chinese online retail commerce.

“We have about 10 partners right now,” eTao director Chen Lijuan told Reuters. “At the end of the year, I hope to see if we can achieve 100 partners, because this year China’s social shopping industry is very hot.”

You know what else is hot? Pinterest cloning. We’ve got an exhaustive list of all the niche-oriented Pinterest clones worth checking out, and we’ll be posting it this weekend, so stay tuned.

Image courtesy of zhu difeng, Shutterstock

Wayfair is the friendly, e-commerce version of Leviathan, a movie monster that scared the $#!% out of me back in 1989. In the horror flick, the slimy sea creature with sharp teeth went around a submarine and consumed the crew. The crew then became a living part of the monster, their faces protruding from the beast, making it hard for survivors to want to kill Leviathan.

Formerly CSN Stores, Wayfair is an e-commerce giant that has quietly taken 200 sites that it created or acquired — Cookware.com, Luggage.com, Strollers.com, BedroomFurniture.com, and more — and folded everything into one mega-site in an effort to create a more memorable brand. Only two of the companies it has created, AllModern.com and members-only retailer Joss & Main, will continue to operate outside of the Wayfair Leviathan. They are the survivors, while the rest of the domains direct shoppers to Wayfair.com.

The only companies that could stand a chance of “killing” Wayfair are the ones it has partnered with: Amazon.com, Walmart, Sears and Best Buy. They all share revenue with Wayfair and, in turn, gain access to those recognized market places are that keeping Wayfair financially afloat while the mega site constructs a new brand.

I wonder if a slimy, toothy version of Wayfair is keeping Amazon execs up at night. The partnership seems to be a situation in which keeping your enemies close pays off. Literally. Wayfair is expected to make $500 million in sales this year.

I asked chairman and co-founder Steven Conine if Wayfair is the next Amazon.com. “That would be nice,” he laughed. “We have a partnership with them, so they’re pretty excited about our growth.”

I’m excited about Wayfair’s shopping platform. The site is cleaner than Amazon.com and searching for products is easier. I purchased outdoor furniture off the Wayfair site, even though I originally came across the items during a search on Amazon.com. The Wayfair name didn’t ring a bell, but I was much happier with the user interface so I decided to give them a shot.

Founded in 2002 as CSN, Wayfair raised its first round of institutional funding in June 2011. The $165 million came from Battery Ventures, Great Hill Partners, HarbourVest Partners and Spark Capital. It was the largest Q2 funding in the U.S., according to The MoneyTree Report.

Conine will spend “tens of millions” on advertising this year. Pretty soon, you’ll know what Wayfair is. Don’t be scared though, unless you’re in the business of selling home goods.

(Image courtesy Wayfair.com)

These online pop-up stores are accessible via special tabs at the top of the site. Each pop-up shop will focus on a specific theme and will run for around 30 days.

For its first pop-up shop, Fab.com is partnering with Fast Company for that magazine’s special edition on design in the United States.

Called the Fab.com & Fast Company Magazine Presents U.S. Design Pop-Up Shop, the ecommerce outlet (both its products and its ads) focuses on that design theme. It will feature American-made products from some of the country’s most interesting and influential designers, all of whom were selected by Fast Company, which is featuring 76 American designers in its current issue on U.S. design.

These designers’ work will be available in the shop for the next 30 days.

Finally, to sweeten the deal even more, Fast Company is giving Fab.com users a free subscription with each purchase from the pop-up shop.

Many startups are attempting to solve the problem of how to get people to buy products that have been featured in entertainment and media properties, and Fab.com has an elegant solution: Read about it in the magazine, then buy it on Fab.com. It’s a solution that extends well to other media, too.

In fact, many more pop-up shops will be popping up on Fab.com to augment the site’s flash sales.

Also in the Fab team’s pipeline is a suite of mobile apps and “new social commerce innovations unlike anything ever seen before,” according to a company spokesperson.

On another note, we just had Fab.com CEO Jason Goldberg in the VentureBeat offices to talk about how he successfully accomplished a complete and wildly successful reboot with his company, which used to be Fabulis, a social network for gay men. Interested parties can watch his interview with us about the art of the pivot.

Image courtesy of robinsonsmay.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

In yet another example of how tablet computing is drastically changing the consumer landscape, online retail store giant Amazon is testing a new website design geared toward tablet users, reports The Next Web.

The new design could be in response to rumors that Amazon is working on an Android-based tablet that could be serious competition with the Apple iPad, which was first reported in July.

Based on the images in the report, the new design features much larger menu navigation buttons as well as a more eye-catching search bar, which is common in sites optimized for tablets. There is also a greater emphasis on its Instant Video, MP3s, Cloud Player, Kindle, Cloud Drive, Android apps and audio books.

Overall the design is much more polished than the current version of the site.

It’s possible that the new site design will roll out to everyone by October, which is when Amazon is reported to launch its new tablet.

Amazon was unavailable for immediate comment about the design.

Images via The Next Web

Amazon.com generated about $12.95 billion in sales in the fourth quarter of 2010, up 36 percent from $9.5 billion in the same quarter in 2009. The site served as a major hub for shoppers during the holiday season. Holiday sales were quite good by most metrics, so expectations were pretty high for Amazon. The site had 25 percent more unique visitors during the holiday shopping season in 2010 when compared to a year earlier, according to comScore.

But that just wasn’t enough for investors, with its shares dropping to around $166.45. Analysts on Wall Street estimated that the company would bring in $13.01 billion in revenue. While Amazon just barely missed the mark, the fact that it underperformed during what was supposed to be a heavy shopping season — now that the economic recession has for most intents and purposes come to an end — apparently didn’t bode well for the company.

Bezos did his best to spin the news in a positive light, pulling a card from Apple’s deck in exclaiming that the company finally hit a $10 billion quarter (Steve Jobs was on Apple’s third-quarter conference call to commemorate the company’s first $20 billion quarter.) Unfortunately for Bezos, Amazon didn’t have the firepower to crush earnings expectations like Apple typically does. The online retailer’s income was up 8.3 percent, from $384 million in the holiday shopping season in 2009 to $416 million in the fourth quarter of 2010.

The company (as usual) was mum about how many Kindles, the company’s electronic book reader, it sold during the holiday season. The device is typically pegged as one of the top Christmas gifts on many sites. But it did say that for every 100 paperback books sold off Amazon.com, the company sold 115 eBooks for Kindle readers.

Make that $18.5 million instead, in a venture-capital round led by two of Silicon Valley’s top venture-capital firms, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Accel Partners. That’s a huge vote of confidence for a business that Dunn told me was on track to do $10 million a year in sales, based on September figures. It’s growing fast, though: Dunn says sales have tripled in the past six months and jumped from $830,000 a month in September to $1.3 million in November.

Bonobos, which launched in 2007 and is based in New York City, starting out making pants that Dunn and cofounder Brian Spaly felt fit better. (A disclosure is in order here: I have two pairs of amazingly well-fitting Bonobos shorts in my dresser and an unopened Bonobos box under the tree in my living room.) It has since expanded into shirts and jackets and sells third-party menswear brands as well to round out its selection.

Lightspeed and Accel seem like similarly good fits for Bonobos: Lightspeed managing director Jeremy Liew, who is joining the board, recently wrote for VentureBeat about the reinvention of e-commerce as a top trend for 2011 — specifically, the need to make online shopping fun versus merely efficient.

While Bonobos isn’t as whimsical as, say, the ultra-quirky San Francisco clothier Betabrand, its online store, its company blog, and the solicitous emails from its customer-service reps, whom Dunn has dubbed “ninjas,” collectively ooze a cheeky wit.

Accel, whose partner Sameer Gandhi is also joining Bonobos’s board, has invested in Etsy, ModCloth, and Groupon — three startups also reinventing the online-retail experience. Gandhi’s also on the board of Quidsi, the parent of Diapers.com, which Amazon.com recently agreed to buy for $540 million.

Dunn told me not all Silicon Valley venture capitalists were as easy to win over as Liew, who wore a pair of Bonobos turquoise corduroys to their first meeting. Some remain highly averse to retail businesses like Bonobos, which take on inventory.

“Saying inventory is toxic to a business is kind of like saying all people are bad because some people are bad,” said Dunn. “It’s a question of cash and how fast you turn that inventory. Enormous value has been created by companies like Amazon.com, Overstock.com, and Blue Nile, because they turn inventory rapidly.”

Fashion, too, was a tough sell for some American investors. European investors like Index Ventures, he said, were way ahead of Sand Hill Road in backing fashion startups. Index’s Net-a-porter sold for $553 million earlier this year.

“That’s why I’m so excited about Bonobos,” said Dunn. “We’re going to create enormous value because guys like that don’t get it.”

[Photo: Bonobos Blog]

Cyber Monday is typically a day when the most popular online retailers, like Amazon.com and computer hardware retailer Newegg.com, offer the most deals. It’s a way to lure in consumers that are looking to get their holiday shopping done early but don’t want to be trampled by shoppers at 4 a.m. the day after Thanksgiving.

Sales at online retailers were also 59 percent higher than the roughly $650 million generated by foot-traffic directed sales on Black Friday. To date, shoppers have spent a total of around $13.5 billion for gifts and the like during the holiday season since the beginning of November. Consumers are also spending more when buying from online retailers this year. The typical shopper spent an average of $114, which is up 12 percent from typical sales last year. The number of buyers edged up only slightly, growing from 8.7 million consumers last year to 9 million this year.

It seems that at least a few individuals were slacking off and getting their holiday shopping done during work, since most of the shopping occurred on computers that were connected to a workplace network. That’s pretty typical, though — more than half of online retail sales happened at work last year as well. But as a sign of tougher times, the number of shoppers buying while at work actually fell this year. So more employees are actually buckling down and working regardless of the sweet deals happening on the Internet.

Holiday sales are expected to ramp up over the next several weeks in advance of Christmas. The next three weeks are typically the best performing weeks for retailers — especially online retailers. In 2009, retailers raked in around $5 billion each week for the three weeks leading up to Christmas.

[Photo: garethjmsaunders]