The holiday season is a make or break scramble for retailers. Their offices are busy and everyone is in a high stress mode to make the season profitable. They invest in getting people in their stores or on their sites with attractive offers. Unfortunately, this omnichannel approach has given way to increase "out-of-stock" challenges.

Today's consumer is a lot different than the consumer of 5 years ago, or even one year ago. Consumers today are making purchases both on and offline, through mobile devices, and even social channels from all over the world. Retailers are transforming their business strategies to engage these consumers, wherever they are, but not every retailer is seeing the payoff for their efforts.

Apparel is the most popular retail category among all channels, according to a survey by OneStop Internet. The survey revealed that apparel is driving online growth, with 45 percent of respondents saying they plan to buy more clothing online than any other retail category in the next year.

Continuing growth in e-commerce is fueling a tight market for distribution and fulfillment centers space, either leased, purchased or through a partner, as companies look to expand their networks to meet growing consumer demand for rapid parcel delivery.

Turtle Wax drove 1.3 million page views with its content when it added consumer-generated content to its website. The goal for Turtle Wax was to transform a static website into a dynamic place where showcasing its products was a priority.

Breaking up may be hard to do. But breaking products during transit is all too easy.

Much as it has with cloud computing, Amazon is poised to move in a big way into third-party transportation and logistics services, leveraging its vast network of fulfillment and distribution centers as well as its massive data and cloud assets, according to an equity analyst and media reports.

It's no secret that competition in online retail sales is a cutthroat business.