Tuesday, Best Buy announced its third quarter earnings report and while noting $10.75 billion in revenue, those numbers are down $500 million from the same period last year. Best Buy has been facing this downward trend for the past three years, and while Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly has a 5-point plan, called “Renew Blue,” to turn the company around, only time will tell before we can see if...
There’s little doubt that Amazon is a colossal pain in the rears of brick-and-mortar retailers across the country. Among them is Target, who was not too thrilled with its competitor’s jugular strike… er, promotion last holiday season: Amazon gave discounts to people who used its mobile PriceCheck app to buy goods. What that did was prompt people to whip out their phones while at the...
Online shopping topped $200 billion last year, and Q1 2012 saw it jump even 15 percent further. With all that cash making the rounds, you've got to know that the taxman is just wringing his hands, trying to figure out how to get a bigger piece of the action. He might get his due sooner than later. States are reportedly moving toward a new sales tax policy for online purveyors, likely...
Technology has transformed so many aspects of life, including one of the most universal human activities of the modern era — shopping. Not only can we bleed our wallets dry at any hour of the day or night via app or website, but even when we do leave our couches and hit the sales floors, we're burning through comparison-shopping tools, reading online reviews and watching how-to vids,...
Eventually, every tech company will be delving into the niches of every other tech company. This, I firmly believe, especially after watching e-retailer Amazon launch an e-reader, then a tablet, not to mention Apple merrily zinging its way through computers, smartphones, web-enabled set-top boxes, tablets and — at least if you believe the rumors — potentially televisions. But there's...
The state of North Carolina has been after Amazon for some time now to turn over detailed customer records so that they can can charge residents of the state appropriate “use tax” on every item they’ve ordered from the retailer. While Amazon doesn’t have to charge state taxes in locations where it doesn’t have a physical presence, consumers are supposed to report each item purchased...
It seems to be a subject that never quite gets settled, but once again the prospect of an Internet sales tax is rearing its ugly head as states scramble to fix budgets that seem to be horribly broken. The world economy is currently a mess, and when you get down to the state level int he United States, it is just disaster after disaster. States are scrambling to cut costs wherever they...
As the various states of the United States face increasingly large budget short falls, they are trying to come up with any measure they can to collect more tax dollars. One of the biggest tactics for some time now has been to try to find a way to tax sales on Amazon. Due to the current way laws are written, retailers only have to collect tax for states that they have a retail presence...