customers

Facebook dipped a big toe into the group-buying waters on Tuesday, launching a test of its Deals on Facebook service. But though it's coming late to the game, analysts and merchants say they won't be surprised if the social networking titan soon poses a viable threat to market leaders Groupon and LivingSocial.

Verizon Wireless stores were braced for a crushing wave of customers seeking the newly available Verizon iPhone Thursday. But thanks to a strong pre-order campaign, the crowds were lighter than expected, and happy shoppers got their phones quickly.

U.S. retailers are planning store expansions and increased initiatives to monitor and serve their customers -- with a heavy focus on the Web and social media -- as they work to accelerate their growth in 2011.

Knowing customers' likes and dislikes is about as basic as it gets in retailing. But for years, national department stores got it wrong. More concerned with controlling costs, big retailers focused on sameness. Not anymore.

America is in a group-buying frenzy. The rapidly growing craze sparked by website Groupon has spawned hundreds of clones and threatens to overwhelm people's e-mail boxes with Daily Deals. But businesses that use them risk resetting their customers' ideas of what a fair price is.

The verdict is in: Black Friday wasn't that big a deal. But the good news for retailers is there's still plenty of holiday shopping to go. The International Council of Shopping Centers released its report on sales for the week of Thanksgiving and found the numbers slightly below those from the...

Amidst the noise over the new Droid handset, Google's new free GPS navigation application, and Rupert Murdoch's dance with Microsoft (MSFT) to put News Corp. stories exclusively in the Bing search engine, Google (GOOG) slipped in another new product that could prove to have far more impact on its...

Yogurt manufacturer Dannon has settled a class action lawsuit that alleged that Dannon had, "overstated the yogurt's health benefits" of its Activia and DanActive yogurt lines. As part of the settlement Dannon will set aside $35 million to reimburse customers up to $100. The settlement,...

It's commonplace for customers to ask for some kind of freebie if a meal is screwed up or if the service is poor at a restaurant and most places will happily oblige. It's another story entirely when consumers threaten to leave a bad review of the restaurant on an online review site. This has been...