Black Friday is an important holiday for retailers who see huge numbers of consumers shopping for the holiday season. It has long been held as the ultimate annual shopping holiday, but Cyber Monday has quickly been picking up speed and pulling in equally large amounts of sales.

With the 2015 holiday shopping season now upon us, it’s “go time” for retailers across the country — an opportunity to put their carefully crafted holiday plans into action and deliver on their bottom-line expectations. That includes e-commerce retailers, which continue to claim a growing slice of overall retail sales. Last year alone, online holiday sales rose 15% over 2013 figures, including increases of 32% on Thanksgiving, 26% on Black Friday, and 17% on Cyber Monday.

You have probably heard of several projects from @WalmartLabs, such as Polaris, a Walmart.com search engine; Shopycat, a social gift finder; Classrooms, a program to simplify back-to-school shopping.

Goodies Co has today November 26 introduced Free Shipping to help shoppers enjoy goodies from Cyber Monday till Friday, November 30 as Christmas fast approaches.

Retail therapy has long been a rich country’s rite of passage. Although, the way we indulge our retail therapy is changing as quickly as our smartphones. This Black Friday we reached record retail sales at traditional brick-and-mortar stores, yet the merging Cyber Monday is proving to be a fighting younger brother. Up 33% this year, according to the Washington Post, online commerce is trending upwards from $175 billion in 2007 to a projection of $335 billion in 2012 (Forrester Research).

Groupon ushered in the new era of group buying, and now hyper local and vertical deal sites are the name of the game. One such company, Santa Monica, Calif-based FamilyFinds, launched this week with $5.75 in funding from Split Rock Partners.