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Update at 1:38 p.m. PDT, with additional details from the ComScore report.

Online shoppers put a stranglehold on their wallets in the first several weeks of November, marking the first historic decline in e-commerce sales, according to a ComScore report released Tuesday.

Market researcher ComScore said online shopping declined 4 percent during the first 23 days of November, compared with a comparable time period last year.

During the first 23 days of the month, ComScore said online retailers rang up a total of $8.19 billion in sales.

For online retailers, growth in e-commerce sales had been steadily … Read more

Yahoo has sold its European comparison-shopping site Kelkoo to private-equity investors, according to a TechCrunch report.

Yahoo, which acquired Kelkoo for approximately 475 million euros ($579 million) four years ago, reportedly sold its wholly owned subsidiary for less than 100 million euros to U.K. private-equity firm Jamplant this holiday shopping season.

In a copy of an e-mail obtained by TechCrunch, Glen Drury, Kelkoo's managing director for the United Kingdom, had this to say about the organization's sale and rumors about its future. The "Toby" he mentions is apparently Toby Coppel, who heads up Europe for … Read more

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Best Buy lowered its fiscal-year earnings forecast on Wednesday, citing fears that consumers will keep their wallets under lock and key during the holiday-shopping season.

Best Buy, which saw its archrival Circuit City file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Tuesday, said uncertainty surrounding consumer spending has made it difficult to project revenue for the rest of fiscal 2009, which ends February 28, 2009.

Uncertainty usually scares investors, who pushed Best Buy's shares down a steep 10.85 percent to $21.29 a share in early morning trading.

Best Buy CEO Brad Anderson sized up the current situation with this … Read more

Stateless Systems, the creators of BugMeNot, PDFMeNot, and RetailMeNot have a new site called Beat My Price that helps you find the lowest price for online goods. You simply plug in the link to something you want to buy, and it will compare that to prices it, and other users have found.

All the while, the system takes advantage of companion site RetailMeNot. This lets you see if you can save even more with the use of online coupons. These coupons don't change a product's total price listing, but you can quickly eyeball ones that might save you … Read more

Girly blog company Sugar Inc. has announced a new affiliate marketing program for bloggers, based on ShopStyle, the social-shopping and product-search site that it acquired last year. It's called ShopSense.

Here's how it works: if style, culture, or shopping bloggers write about a given product that's in the ShopStyle directory, they can add a ShopStyle widget so that readers can actually buy the product or can use the ShopStyle API to further customize the app. The blogger gets a cut of the revenue.

Sugar started as a content company, with an inaugural celebrity gossip brand called PopSugar, … Read more

Sometimes the greenest technology improvement is going back to the old low-tech option.

Amazon.com announced Monday it's working with retailers to cut back on the packaging you'll need to open to get to your goods.

The Seattle-based company plans to start shipping items in plain brown cardboard boxes, instead of putting a pre-boxed or plastically sealed item inside another Amazon box. The cardboard box will have Amazon, and in some cases the retailer's name, on the front.

Memory cards, for example, are often sold in disproportionately large clear plastic packaging to prevent shoplifting at physical stores. Transcend's memory cards when bought via Amazon will be shipped in a recycled cardboard envelope. Children's toys, such as a Fisher-Price pirate ship set, will be shipped in a plain brown box with cardboard padding and a plastic bag holding the toy people and whatnot.

So, in addition to being less annoying to open, the new packaging will also be more environmentally friendly, according to Amazon.… Read more

If you're buying a budget computer, it's worth your time to look into the Compaq Presario SR5610f desktop. It's not far off from a barebones machine, and you don't get a ton of extra features, but the price is so low that it's hard to complain. You get a dual-core 2.5GHz AMD processor, 3 gigs of ram, an integrated video card, and a 320GB hard drive, which should be enough power to get you through the standard applications, stuff like word processing, streaming video, mp3 playback, etc...but you definitely shouldn't expect it … Read more

ShopSavvy, Barcode Scanner (by the ZXing team), and CompareEverywhere (an Android Challenge winner) are three free shopping applications for Google Android poised to help you find the best deals in town and online.

At their core, they're nearly identical, using the phone's camera to auto-focus on a barcode. That barcode is then matched to a product using an open source decoding library, ZXing, that was developed by Google engineers last year. (You can also search by product name.)

While these shopping apps share a back end, the front ends are distinct. Unfortunately, they all produced varying results that … Read more