With the nation seemingly emerging from recession, American consumers remain skittish about spending their money during this upcoming holiday season.

Ken Cassar, Vice President, Industry Insights, Online Division
I was very interested to hear the news yesterday that Amazon had acquired Zappos for $847 million in cash and stock. Since Zappos founder Tony Hsieh asked and answered some of his own questions about the deal in a letter to employees so I thought it’d be useful to engage in a Q&A with myself about the deal.
1. Why did Amazon buy Zappos?
A: Two numbers answer that succinctly: About 5 percent of Amazon’s sales are apparel/footwear sales, compared …

In November, eBay drew more unique visitors than any other apparel and beauty retail website: 7.05 million.
But it was Bath & Body Works’ website – ranked ninth, with 3.56 million unique visitors – that showed the most impressive year-over-year growth: 39%. 
American Eagle (+25%) and Gap (+23%) also logged impressive gains over November 2007.
The top 10 apparel and beauty online shopping destinations, ranked unique visitors in November, are below.

Web traffic from home and work to sites included in Nielsen Online’s Holiday eShopping Index increased 10% year over year on Cyber Monday, Nielsen Online reported Tuesday.
Unique visitors to the sites included in the Index reached 35.9 million, a 13% increase over this year’s Black Friday Web traffic.
Many of the top online retail destinations on Cyber Monday were the same as those on Black Friday. eBay drew the largest unique audience (10.6 million), while Amazon and Wal-Mart claimed second and third places, with 9 million and 5.2 million unique visitors, …

Germany-based sports apparel brand Adidas AG is set to open its largest international store in Beijing, China.  The shop is about one-and-a-half times the size of Adidas’s previous largest outlet, on Paris’s Champs-Elysées, reports The Wall Street Journal.  Christophe Bezu, who heads Adidas Asia, told The Journal that China will overtake Japan as the company’s second-largest market, after the U.S., by the end of 2008.
In the same story, Richard Basil-Jones, Nielsen’s managing director of Asia Pacific media, noted a recent Nielsen survey, which suggests that Adidas faces significant challenges from both Nike and Li …