Pixmania, a European retailer, is bucking the trend. While most physical retailers are downsizing to focus on ecommerce, Pixmania is growing its presence by opening 20 brick-and-mortar stores in major European cities. Paris, Marseille and Barcelona are some of the big locations Pixmania is expanding to, Internet Retailer reports.

The France-based retailer says its network of websites attracts upward of 30 million unique visitors a month, with annual sales topping $1.1 billion annually. By opening brick-and-mortar stores, the brand hopes to target the 80 percent of European shoppers who are still interested in buying Pixmania products (which range from electronics to furniture) at physical locations.

"Today the web accounts for 5 percent of total European furniture sales, 10 percent of television sales and 20 percent of camera sales," Jean-Emile Rosenblum, co-founder and vice president of the company, explained. To capture more sales, the company needed a physical presence.

"To satisfy consumers' purchasing habits, you have to look further than internet and seriously think about opening stores," he added.

Whether merchants are expanding to the web or brick-and-mortar, it's crucial to look at their audience. Retailers should always do what makes the most sense and enables them to provide a better experience to their customers. For Pixmania, he notes that a lot of their products have strong cross-channel opportunities, which drove the company to consider a physical expansion.

For example, a lot of customers conduct research on the web when buying big-ticket items – such as furniture. Rosenblum estimates between 20 percent and 80 percent of customers take to the web to research products. However, before they commit to making a large purchase, many will want to go in-store and actually look at and touch the product. By offering both online and in-store experiences, Pixmania keeps the shopper engaged with their brand the whole way through.

"In our 1,076-square-foot store in Barcelona customers can see a thousand of our products," Rosenblum says. "Online, they have access to 1.4 million products, and can also order a product that was not available in store and have it delivered either at home or at the store."

According to separate data from Ecommerce Europe, approximately half of EU country members shop online. However, the number varies wildly from upward of 70 percent in some regions to less than 10 percent in others. This highlights the need for both brick-and-mortar and ecommerce operations for retailers in Europe.

Amazon, one the largest ecommerce internet retailers in the world, has reached an agreement with the state of New Jersey to begin collecting sales tax from residents who make purchases on the website by 2013. This helps local retailers gain equal footing with the ecommerce giant as consumers now have less incentive to purchase from Amazon.

On July 1, 2013, Amazon will begin taxing purchases made by New Jersey residents. The company will also build two warehouses in the state to expand distribution operations. Amazon has similar deals in place with other states, including Virginia, Indiana and Tennessee.

"I’m pleased Amazon is committed to helping New Jersey grow and create quality jobs," Governor Chris Christie said, as quoted by Internet Retailer. The new distribution centers are slated to create upward of 1,500 full-time jobs and will cost $130 million to build.

Many retail merchants have found Amazon's practice of not charging state taxes to shoppers to be unfair, claiming it gives the ecommerce retailer an unfair advantage at a time when many brick-and-mortar businesses are struggling.

Best Buy, one of the most popular electronics retail brands, recently suffered through a difficult first quarter. Interim CEO Mike Mikan believes the chain will need to radically rethink its position in order to stay relevant to consumers worldwide, Internet Retailer reports.

Mikan recently told analysts the way the company will do this is by scaling down brick-and-mortar operations in favor of ecommerce. Best Buy looks to be going the Apple route, meaning it wants smaller stores that serve specific needs, while offering more robust selections online.

"The annual rate of growth of ecommerce transactions is far outstripping traditional retail sales,” Mikan told analysts on the company's first quarter earnings call. "Consumers have needs and preferences that are new and changing rapidly. Today, they need virtual products and services as much, if not more, than they need hardware."

Best Buy's traditional focus on customer service is no longer the unique draw it used to be, according to Mikan, which is why he is looking toward new business models.

A separate report from comScore highlights the rapid growth of ecommerce spending, which experienced double-digit growth during the first quarter of 2012.

Ecommerce is still a relatively young shopping medium in France, with less than half of the country's population making purchases on the web, according to recent data from research companies Fevad and Mediametrie. However, retailers in the country are quickly adopting mobile devices as parts of their ecommerce strategy.

A separate report from CCM Benchmark suggests that nearly half of French retailers have mobile-optimized sites or applications. Forty-five percent of respondents said they had some sort of presence tailored to these devices, compared to the mere 22 percent who answered the same during the first quarter of 2011. An additional 19 percent also plan to launch a mobile app or site sometime this year.

"IPhones are the top smartphones used in mobile commerce, according to the study – accounting for two-thirds of mobile sales for the companies surveyed," Internet Retailer adds, citing the research. "Therefore, most businesses that are launching apps are focusing on the iPhone. However, smartphones using Google's Android operating system are on the rise in France, the study says."

With the advent of ecommerce, brick-and-mortar retail operations have been devising a variety of strategies to offer customers the same convenience, low prices and selection of products that their online counterparts do.

However, in the past few years, experts have been advocating a different approach for brick-and-mortar retailers: multichannel engagement. Basically, numerous reports have suggested that retailers' sales, marketing or even service strategies would benefit from a greater channel of avenues through which to connect with shoppers.

A recent article in Forbes calls this strategy one of "bricks and clicks," and highlights one mega-retailer's success with it. Luxury department store Saks Fifth Avenue explained that it has found its most profitable and loyal customers to be those who shop both online and in-store.

Forbes attests that this revelation is true for every retailer – they just don't understand this principle. The article notes that most retailers believe that when a consumer is shopping on their website, it only means fewer customers in store.

However, Forbes confronts this point. "If retailers don’t encourage shoppers to buy from both their stores and their website, if they don't make the experience between the two seamless, if they don't analyze and build a relationship with shoppers through both, then the shopper drain will be so fast heads will spin," the news source explains.

A recent study from Jones Lang LaSalle suggests that retailers may actually be making the move to a more multichannel consumer experience. The report, Retail 3.0, found that 92 percent of retailers sell online, 68 percent maintain brick-and-mortar retail locations and 64 percent send out catalogs.

One of the factors driving an increased interest in online outlets by brick-and-mortar retailers is the potential savings digital channels offer. In many ways, the study found, online operations can be a cheaper distribution model.

"With multichannel selling comes a major focus on retail distribution, and how to get from ship to shore to store or your door as quickly and as efficiently as possible," said Kris Bjorson, head of Jones Lang LaSalle's retail/e-commerce distribution group. "Traditional retailers must support the delivery of merchandise and manage both in-store and online inventories."

Companies should also avoid thinking of "multichannel" sources in a purely online versus in-store binary. Keeping abreast of new mobile technologies will help retailers stay a step ahead.

French consumers are spending more money shopping online, driven primarily by the sheer number of retail merchants that finally took to the web this year.

Fevad and Mediametrie, two French audience monitoring companies, noted that more than 100,000 France-based retailers were now online. As a result, the number of ecommerce shoppers in the country hit 31 million, with sales hitting 11 billion euros (US $14.25 billion) during the first three months of 2012, up 24 percent from the same time frame last year.

"The frequency of online shopping continues to develop," says Bertrand Krug, director of Mediametrie NetRatings department of online efficiency measures, as quoted by Internet retailers. "Forty-seven percent of internet users have purchased online in the past month alone, compared to 43 percent a year ago."

Ecommerce continues to grow in the United States as well, with separate data from comScore noting a remarkable 17 percent year-over-year increase in online sales during the first quarter of 2012. If merchants aren't selling their products and services online, now is the time to consider integrating ecommerce into store operations.

If retailers needed any additional evidence to highlight the growing importance of offering consumers mobile commerce sites, a new report from comScore suggests more Americans are leveraging their mobile devices to visit online retailers.

Of the approximately 100 million U.S. adults who own a smartphone, 44 million of them visited Amazon.com's mobile retail website in March. Meanwhile, 27.2 million headed to eBay's mcommerce website using either mobile web browsers or downloaded applications.

However, mobile apps and websites are not even, and retailers may want to focus on the former before developing the latter.

"Analysis of the share of time spent across apps and browsers revealed that even though these access methods had similar audience sizes, apps drove the lion’s share of engagement, representing four in every five mobile media minutes," the report added. "Analysis of the top properties also revealed widely varying degrees of time spent between app and browser access methods."

Mobile apps carry the additional benefit of always being present on consumers' smartphones once they are downloaded, providing a quick shortcut to a retailer's product page.

Retailers continue to see the benefits of operating an ecommerce platform, with newly released data from comScore suggesting online spending experienced double-digit year-over-year growth during the first quarter of 2012.

American shoppers spent upward of $44.3 billion during the first three months of 2012, an increase of 17 percent from the same time frame last year. With the economy still slow to recover, many consumers are budgeting their expenses more carefully. That means they are turning to the web, where they can frequently find better deals on the goods and services they want to purchase.

"The first quarter of this year was especially strong for retail ecommerce as we returned to year-over-year growth rates in the high teens, numbers we haven't seen since 2007," said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. "… the channel shift to ecommerce appears to be accelerating. This presents opportunities but also challenges for brick-and-mortar retailers if they can’t hold onto their offline market share in the digital world."

Despite the growth of ecommerce, many retail industry experts expect brick-and-mortar store operations to continue to be important for the overall shopping experience, at least for the next decade.

With many retailers considering upgrades of their point-of-sale software to accept mobile payments, a new survey from Catapult Marketing suggests consumers aren't looking to use these new payment tools anytime soon.

Nearly half of respondents (41 percent) said they were completely disinterested in using mobile payment tools, while 17 percent were "not very interested." Conversely, only 15 percent were very interested and 10 percent were somewhat interested. Meanwhile, 17 percent were neutral on the use of these payment platforms.

The key to establishing mobile devices as viable payment tools lies in privacy and security.

"Privacy and security concerns must be addressed upfront," Catapult Marketing explains. "And theft concerns are real and must be addressed, for example, by using double sign-on, or fingerprint, retina or voice activation. While there may be early adopters of mobile wallets, nothing broad-based is likely until some of these barriers are addressed."

Some technology professionals think that by 2020, mobile payments will become mainstream like credit cards and cash, according to a separate report from PEW Research.

Ecommerce continues to become more integral to the shopping experience, regardless of where consumers live. For example, recent data from BeCommerce suggests ecommerce sales grew by more than 20 percent year-over-year in 2011, hitting the €1.1 billion mark ($1.4 billion).

Online retailers are expecting growth to remain brisk, with domestic merchants "resolutely optimistic" about the future of their businesses. More than eight in 10 Belgium retailers (83 percent) expect at least 10 percent growth in 2012, driven strongly by the rapid adoption of mobile shopping.

"In Belgium, we are seeing growth in everything concerned with online shopping," Patricia Ceysens, BeCommerce president, explained. "In 2012 we also expect the growth trend to continue, with total online sales reaching the €1.18 billion mark ($1.5 billion)."

Throughout the country, more brands are heading online to capture consumer dollars. Kiabi, e5mode and Brantano are just a few of the big names that recently began selling online.

In the United States, ecommerce has already been established as a retail must. More than $50 billion was spent on ecommerce in the last quarter of 2011 alone.