Last year was a bad one for many companies selling expensive fashion, handbags, and jewelry. For the first time since the financial crisis of 2008, the global market for personal luxury goods failed to grow, stalling at €249 billion (about $258 billion).  Will Trumps tax proposal send their sails soaring or will his proposed tariffs interfere?

The good news is that 2017 should see a return to growth, according to a Dec. 28 report on the global luxury market by management consulting firm Bain & Company, only it won’t look anything like the boom years from 2010 to 2015, when global sales of such goods jumped 45%, fueled by Chinese consumers with high-end appetites. The slowing of China’s economy and its government’s ongoing crackdown on corruption, paired with turmoil in the US and Europe from Brexit, terrorism, and the US presidential election, have created a “new normal” of low single-digit growth and intense competition. The years ahead will produce “clear winners and losers,” Bain sa

The Extraordinary Size of Amazon in One Chart

It’s bigger than most brick and mortar retailers together

The Chart of the Week is a weekly Visual Capitalist feature on Fridays.

What has more value: all major publicly traded department stores in the United States, or Amazon?

Amazon takes the cake, and its no contest.

Add together the market caps of Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Nordstrom, Kohl’s, JCPenney, Sears, and Macy’s, it amounts to a significant $297.8 billion:

However, it’s not enough to beat Amazon.

The online retailer alone is worth $356 billion, making it one of the largest companies by market capitalization in the world.

The Death of Traditional Retail

Ten years ago, the future of brick and mortar retail sill looked bright. The aforementioned retailers were worth a collective $400 billion, and A

Some may say that technical analysis is 'bunk' but it's just that which caused me to short AMZN.  Now you can say they're #1 when it comes to online sales but my question is, has their growth hit a plateau?  Trading at 170x p/e, anything is possible. (click chart to enlarge).  Talk is that MSFT is bringing the smart home to Windows. The feature will allow Cortana to be summoned on any Windows 10 PC lock screen.  It's expected to appear in Win 10 updates starting in 2017 and this software-only feature could trump AMZN Echo and GOOG Home due to the obvious convenience of screen access.  From an investor point of view, I would definitely take some off the table at this point and invest it in banks, industrials and insurers.  But let's take a look at sales.  No growth in 2016?  Now that's interesting.

Amazon sports some pretty startling numbers. Let’s dive into various reports for a close look.

Amazon captured 31% of online spending over Cyber Weekend

CNBC reports Amazon captured 31%

In a bid to improve its position in the ever-growing e-commerce market, Walmart announced today that it agreed to acquire Jet.com for approximately $3 billion in cash. Jet.com is a relatively young e-commerce startup that made a name for itself with an innovative pricing scheme that allows customers to reduce prices by, for example, ordering items from the same distribution center or by forgoing the ability to return items for free.

Walmart and other big-box retailers have struggled to break Amazon’s stranglehold on online retail in the United States, where the market leader’s internet sales exceeded the aggregate sales of its nine largest competitors in 2015. According to estimates by Internet Retailer, a leading provider of e-commerce market intelligence, Amazon’s U.S. e-commerce sales amounted to $92.4 billion in 2015. Walmart generated $13.7 billion in online revenue last year.

My question is who is ready expand their market share?

You will find more statistics at Statista

Innovation continues in the advertising sector as cookies, which can be blocked or disabled, are fast being replaced with a digital "fingerprint".

This new, extremely persistent type of online tracking is shadowing visitors to thousands of top websites, from WhiteHouse.gov to YouPorn.com...and they're difficult to stop.

First documented in a forthcoming paper by researchers at Princeton University and KU Leuven University in Belgium, this type of tracking, called canvas fingerprinting, works by instructing the visitor’s Web browser to draw a hidden image. Because each computer draws the image slightly differently, the images can be used to assign each user’s device a number that uniquely identifies it.

Like other tracking tools, canvas fingerprints are used to build profiles of users based on the websites they visit — profiles that shape which ads, news articles, or other types of content are displayed to them.

But fingerprints are unusually hard to block: They can’t be prevented b

Step aside Sears and Roebuck catalog.  As if brick and mortar wasn't already struggling against online shopping, EBay Inc is launching virtual stores called "shoppable windows" this month that the e-commerce company hopes will help retailers generate more sales from their existing physical store networks.

The screens, which have been Beta tested in San Jose the last few months, will now be expanded to four locations in NYC according to an eBay blog.

The new screens measure about 9 feet across and 2 feet (0.6 meter) high and will appear on the front windows of closed stores. Shoppers will be able to touch the screens to order and have products delivered to them within an hour via courier. Payment will be accepted by the couriers through PayPal Here, a mobile payment service developed by eBay.  Read more........