It’s too early to know for sure; there are two days left for last-minute packages to be delivered, wrapped and placed under the tree in time.

So, while it’s hard to say whether there will be any widespread panic come Sunday, there are some early indicators that the system is reaching capacity.

In perhaps the biggest demonstration of holiday stress, a FedEx delivery driver was caught on camera tossing a box containing a new computer monitor over a customer’s fence. The owner claims he or she was at home at the time, with the front door wide open. After nearly five million people watched the security footage on YouTube, FedEx responded by posting an apology on YouTube. (Only 193,000 people have watched that.)

Then there are the canceled orders at Best Buy, which ran out of heavily discounted merchandise and was forced to void some orders that consumers had placed last month. A few more reports have surfaced from other retailers, such as Sears, which was failing to keep up with orders that were placed online for in-store pickup.

But perhaps this sort of thing is to be expected when you see 15 percent year-over-year online growth in online shopping.

ComScore reports that e-commerce spending for the first 48 days of the holiday season has reached $32 billion, jumping 15 percent over last year. Last week alone, ComScores said, four individual days surpassed the $1 billion mark, to help set a weekly record of $6.3 billion.

On a positive note, retailers’ Web sites have been able to keep up with the demand. Compuware, which has been monitoring the Web and mobile performance of the top 50 retailers, reports that there have been no prolonged site crashes.

At this point, most online purchases won’t get to people in time for Christmas, although Amazon is offering some expedited shipping options for consumers in some markets as late as Saturday.

Besides stress on the retailers, one other choke point in the system has been delivery.

This week will be the busiest week of the year for UPS, which estimates that it will deliver more than 120 million packages worldwide. In particular, it was anticipating that today would be its busiest day, with more than 26 million packages shipped — which breaks down to about almost 300 a second.

UPS’s close competitor, FedEx, previously predicted that Dec. 12 would be the busiest day in its nearly 40-year history. The company was forecasted to ship more than 17 million orders that Monday, which was double its daily average volume.

That’s Target’s motto this holiday season, as it promises on-time Christmas deliveries for online orders placed by Tuesday.

But some retailers are being a little more jolly.

In today’s fast-paced digital world, procrastinators are being rewarded, and will be able to shop online as late as Thursday and still get presents safely underneath the tree in time for Christmas.

For example, Wal-Mart will rush packages to your door for orders placed as late as Wednesday; Amazon is offering regular free two-day shipping as late as Wednesday; Zappos is offering free shipping for orders made by 1 pm PT on Thursday; and Toys “R” Us will go as late as noon on Thursday for express shipping.

There are exceptions, of course, and Amazon is a big one.

For orders placed on Thursday, one-day shipping will cost shoppers $3.99 an item; for items ordered on Friday, only Amazon Prime members will be able to pay $9.99 an item for on-time delivery; those in 11 U.S. cities can wait until Saturday, at which point it will cost $3.99 per item to ship by local express.

Amazon Prime is the e-commerce company’s membership service; it charges $79 a year for free two-day shipping and other perks, like free streaming videos.

One of the biggest limitations for the holiday is the logistics of getting a package from a distribution center to someone’s home. For example, FedEx won’t be running on Christmas, but will be running partial operations on Christmas Eve, a Saturday.

At this late point in the year, physical retailers shine.

For example, Apple’s shipping cutoff date is on Wednesday, but it will allow customers to order online and pick up in the store until 11 pm on Friday. On Christmas Eve, many of its stores will be open until 6 pm. Toys “R” Us and Best Buy are also offering free in-store pickup, adding late hours to accommodate the busiest of people. Best Buy will be open until 3 pm local time on Dec. 24, and Toys “R” Us will will stay open for 112 hours straight, starting at 6 am Tuesday, Dec. 20 and closing at 10 pm on Saturday night.

Online retailers can’t compete with store hours but, conversely, stores have had a hard time competing with the deals online, especially earlier in the season.

This holiday period, Amazon prompted consumers to consider the moral dilemma of shopping in stores versus online, when it kicked off a Dec. 10 promotion that offered $5 off to consumers as an inducement to walk out of stores empty-handed. EBay fired back with its own promotion, which gave online shoppers a $10 coupon to return to stores.

To be sure, online retailers will have something to celebrate on Sunday.

ComScore, which is tracking online spending habits this holiday season, said $30.9 billion had been spent online during a 46-day shopping window that ended Dec. 16, marking a 15 percent increase over last year.

Spending last Friday — dubbed Free Shipping Friday — hit $1.07 billion; it was the fourth day to surpass the billion-dollar mark this year. Still, Cyber Monday — the Monday following Thanksgiving — appears to rank as the heaviest online spending day of the year for the second consecutive season.

With only 13 days until Christmas, today has historically ranked as one of the heaviest online shopping days of the year, thereby earning the nickname “Green Monday.”

This year it’s almost a guarantee that history will repeat itself.

Already, six individual days have surpassed the billion-dollar threshold this holiday season, according to comScore. That’s up from last year, when only one day eclipsed $1 billion in spending.

The term Green Monday was coined by eBay in 2007 to describe the second Monday of December because it tended to attract shoppers who wanted to make sure their presents would arrive in time. And, well, because the color of money is green.

This year, a number of online retailers are banking on it by offering a number of holiday specials.

But one of the biggest benefactors of all is FedEx, which must ship all the orders.

The commercial postal service is predicting that today will be the busiest day in its nearly 40-year history. The company is forecasting that it will ship more than 17 million orders today, double its daily average volume, and will exceed last year’s busiest day of 15.6 million shipments.

FedEx might be one of the first indicators to reveal how well the online shopping is fairing.

It says the increase is largely driven by residential shipments sent from online and catalog retailers. ComScore’s data would agree with that hypothesis. Already, the research firm says that online shopping is up roughly 15 percent from Nov. 1 to Dec. 9, compared to the same period in 2010.

ComScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni said, “We know that Green Monday will rank among the top online spending days of the season.”

But he added that it will likely not be the last hurrah of the year.

Other important days to come include the promotional day coined “Free Shipping Day,” which occurs on Dec. 16, and other days this week as we near the end of the year.

One retailer, however, was not in the holiday spirit.

Amazon-owned Zappos put out a press release today calling itself the Anti-Green Monday. It said shoppers don’t have to get caught up in the hype because it is guaranteeing that all orders made on Dec. 22 will receive next-day delivery for Dec. 23.

Now that’s the true definition of a procrastinator.

Here is comScore’s list of the 10 biggest shopping days of 2011:

Last week, the six-month-old service’s profile received a big boost after eBay announced it was buying its parent company, GSI Commerce, for $2.4 billion.

As part of the acquisition, eBay plans to spin off a few of the company’s properties to create a well-funded entity.

The spin-off includes ShopRunner, GSI’s licensed sports merchandise business, and Rue La La, a flash sales site. EBay, which is retaining a 30 percent stake in the new entity, is also loaning it nearly $500 million in capital.

ShopRunner, which is headquartered along with GSI outside Philadelphia in King of Prussia, is positioning itself as a defensive play for retailers that are competing against the Amazonian e-commerce giant.

Amazon Prime members pay $79 a year for free two-day shipping on all orders, and more recently, Prime added additional perks, such as free access to 5,000 streaming movies. Similarly, consumers pay ShopRunner $79 for free two-day shipping, but it works across a number of retailers, such as Borders, Barnes & Noble, Toys R Us, Drugstore.com, PetSmart and 40 sites in all.

Mike Golden, ShopRunner president and co-founder of GSI Commerce, says the service is super relevant today as retailers try to defend themselves against Amazon’s increasing dominance.

Not only is it growing its market share online, but it is also becoming a threat in physical stores. He said consumers are increasingly looking at brick-and-mortar stores as showcases, where they can touch and feel products, but then use their smartphones to comparison shop and buy online.

With free two-day shipping, Prime has become the modern day loyalty program.

But it’s unclear how successful Amazon’s so-called Prime service has been since launching in 2005.

Golden claims he’s done his homework and believes it is one of the smartest moves by the Seattle-based retailer to date. And by tracking what analysts have said and by conducting focus groups with dozens of Amazon’s Prime customers, he feels he has a fairly good handle on how well Amazon is doing.

Amazon does not release data on Amazon’s Prime service, and a spokesperson did not return a request for comment.

So, with that in mind, here’s a bullet point list of Golden’s estimates, which he considers conservative:

• In nine purchases out of ten, a Prime consumer would have already qualified for free shipping because their order was above $25. Now, Amazon is collecting $79 a year and all they had to do was upgrade one out of 10 shipments.
• Out of the 25 million items Amazon sells, he believes only 30 percent are eligible for Prime (the item has to be stored in Amazon’s own warehouses to qualify). That means Amazon has an impressive seven to 10 million products that are eligible.
• There are at least five million Prime users in the U.S.
• After joining Prime, users spend two to three times more.
• Prime members were already some of Amazon’s best customers, who were spending on average $600 a year. With Prime, that goes up to $1,200 to $1,800.
• In total, Prime members spend roughly $7.5 billion annually.
• 88 percent of Prime members start their shopping experience on Amazon, rather than any other portal, like Google.

Golden said the three attributes that have made Amazon successful are: having a huge assortment of products, having a huge reach in terms of customers and being a place where people shop frequently. ”We don’t think there’s any other retailer that has the strength to replicate the value proposition that Prime has,” he said. “How do you compete with Prime? You have to have a stronger value prop, not a weaker one, and all we’ve seen launch so far has been weaker and has failed.”

Other stores have tried one-off super saver shipping programs, including Sears, William Sonoma, Walmart and Overstock.

He said what they needed was a coalition.

While Golden was generously willing to share what he knew about Amazon’s Prime program, he was fairly mum about how ShopRunner’s math pencils out. Of course…

But roughly speaking, he said the membership fees consumers pay, along with the cost of two-day shipping, is split among the retailers and ShopRunner, which is then compensated for managing the program.

This week, ShopRunner launched a Marketplace where members can visit one location to search for products they want. This way, they don’t have to memorize which retailers are associated with the program. When searching for watches, you’ll see results from Toys R Us, Drugstore.com, Calvin Klein, Sports Authority and Lord & Taylor. Once an item is clicked on, the user is redirected to that retailer’s Web site to complete the transaction.

Next month, ShopRunner will roll out an iPhone application that allows people to search for merchandise in the store, but ultimately buy from one of the participating retailers online.

He said ShopRunner has more than five million items available overall. When they launch an additional 40 retailers soon, it will have 10 million items, which is getting close to Amazon’s scale.

Golden said the lines between brick and mortar and e-commerce are blurring. It’s no longer a weakness to have low inventory in a story if you can steer users to your online site, where they can get free shipping. A mobile application can help with that–and no longer be considered a threat.

“By using ShopRunner along with smart use of leveraging your store footprints and your e-commerce and distribution centers, they have a better chance of not making it a weakness or a threat, but a competitive advantage,” Golden said.

Extrabux, a price comparison site that pays you cash for making purchases from particular retailers, has compiled a list of the best and worst states for e-commerce customers.

The company said it evaluated four factors when making its list: Shipping time, including the location of many warehouses; shipping costs; sales tax rates; and states where you don’t have to pay sales tax at all.

The top five states were generally praised for having the lowest shipping costs, the fastest shipping times and the cheapest sales tax rates (if they charged at all).

1. Delaware
2. Mississippi
3. New Hampshire
4. West Virginia
5. Oregon

The five states at the bottom of the list ended up there because of long shipping times and high costs due to shipping or sales taxes or both. The results may surprise you, since the group includes two states with big populations and the state where Amazon.com is based, among other e-tailers.

1. Hawaii
2. Alaska
3. California
4. New York
5. Washington

A full breakdown of the reasons these states were chosen can be found on the Extrabux Blog.

Founded in 1999, the Salt Lake City company offers a wide variety of merchandise, ranging from bedding and home decor to appliances and sporting goods–at discounted prices.

But with a little bit of marketing polish, the practice has become a new, chic burgeoning industry.

A discount center conjures up imagines of large warehouses with cement floors full of unsold items. A flash sales deal, however, leads you believe you’ve found a pair of designer jeans for half off after sifting through dozens of boutiques on Rodeo Drive.

With that in mind, a micro industry of flash sales sites has been born.

The Gilt Groupe, HauteLook, One Kings Lane, Rue La La and Jackthreads all have their own niche, focusing on curating clothing for women or men, or furniture and home decor.

One big question is, is there enough inventory to sustain it all?

“It’s the dirty little secret in manufacturing,” said Overstock’s CEO Patrick Byrne. “The answer is that there is far more than you can possibly think. A company will say they don’t have overstock, but if you talk to the CFO, they will ask, ‘what can you truck away?’ The world is filled with excess inventory and is looking for channels to get rid of it.”

But just because the inventory is there, Byrne doesn’t believe they can all survive.

“We think the world only needs one pipeline, and we’ve built the one pipeline to do that,” he said. “The suppliers are better off with one big pipeline. If one pipeline emerges, where all the liquidation gets done, there will be price integrity in the rest of their marketplace. It’s our aspiration to be that one thick pipeline.”

On average, he said Overstock’s inventory is about 60 percent off the manufacturer’s recommended price. He said, general retail stores sell items for an average of 15 percent off and Walmart is even more heavily discounted at 30 to 40 percent off. Sites like Amazon.com, are normally somewhere in between, and flash sales generally claim discounts of 50 to 70 percent.

About a year ago, Overstock jumped on the bandwagon to launch Eziba.com, which focuses on selling a small number of items, ranging from furniture to jewelry, at heavily discounted prices via a daily email.

Eziba has the boutique look, with large photos of the products and colors bleeding off the page. That’s in sharp contrast to Overstock’s more straight-forward layout that stresses searching and browsing for items that are displayed in small thumbnail pictures.

Byrne said one of the big differences between items sold on Eziba and those sold on Overstock is the amount of inventory in stock.

Items on Eziba may have up to 5,000 on the virtual shelves, whereas products sold on Overstock have only a couple of hundred left.  Another difference is that there’s only a dozen or so items for sale on Eziba at any given time, while Overstock’s inventory spans 300,000 items (not including books and movies).

One of the big differences between Eziba and the competition is that it’s able to leverage Overstock’s infrastructure.

For instance, Eziba customers get the same customer service as Overstock and have the same flat-rate shipping of $2.99 an order.

So far, Byrne says the introduction of other sites has not affected the company’s business.

“It’s like swimming around in Lake Michigan and asking did you bump into each other. The world is so much bigger than anyone gets. It’s so enormous,” he said.

Overstock has been steadily growing over the years.

In 1999, the company recorded revenues of $1.8 million, and last year, revenues totaled $1.1 billion. Still, it’s a microcosm of the super-large e-commerce world. The company’s stock is trading at $14.31 a share for a market cap of $333.4 million. In contrast, Amazon’s is valued at around $75 billion, and eBay is worth $40 billion.

Generally, Byrne categorizes the company as a nice profitable company that has built a very solid foundation over the past few years.

He said the recent stability, compared to the start-up years, gives him the chance to experiment with new lines of business. ”We are very agile. We can develop new things really quickly and snap them into the platform we’ve built.”

In addition to Eziba, the company also runs Worldstock, a site that helps artisans from around the world sell their crafts online. Byrne made the recent decision to give all of its profits to a charity that’s focused on helping build classrooms in developing countries around the world.

It’s also recently launched Main Street Revolution, which helps small business around the U.S. sell their goods online, ranging from children’s clothing to specialty home-made cookies.

The company’s latest endeavor includes experimenting with a significant rebranding of the Web site.

In January, it introduced the domain name O.CO, which is a shortcut to its regular Web site. During an initial introductory period, customers who shop at O.CO will receive free shipping.

Byrne said the reason behind the name is to have a more recognizable brand across the 90 countries it operates in. While the domain name will change permanently internationally, the company is only experimenting with the name domestically.

Today, he says it’s all “new eBay.”

At the company’s analyst meeting at its headquarters, the company demonstrated the major changes made over the past couple of years and laid out plans for how local, mobile and social will lead the next wave of commerce.

In the afternoon, Bob Swan, eBay’s CFO, took the stage to give the financial rundown that everyone had been waiting for since the morning.

Swan highlighted PayPal’s growth trajectory by saying that it expects to double revenues over the next three years to between $6 billion and $7 billion, compared with $3.4 billion in 2010.

He also talked up how mobile was gaining speed by saying that PayPal mobile transactions were estimated to double to $2 billion in total payment volume, and that mobile on marketplaces will double to $4 billion in gross merchandise volume.

Meanwhile, when looking at the company’s gross merchandise volume, he sees the business increasing from $60 billion in 2010 to $75 billion in 2013. And, to support the strength of the business, the company anticipates generating $7.5 to $8 billion in free cash flow by 2013.

Swan wants to stress that these growth rates are being driven from the company’s core businesses, and not from the more innovative stuff eBay is working on in local, mobile and social. “We are in a  different state than we were in March 2009, where the crystal ball was murky and full of potholes. Now the crystal ball is full of opportunities. We have unmatched advantages that position us to win.”

That’s possible because of the improvements the company has been making over the past two years.

“We’ve made significant and necessary changes necessary for growth. Two years ago, search was optimized for auctions and suffered. Two years from now, search will be a competitive advantage for eBay,” said Mark Carges,” eBay’s CTO of marketplaces. “We’ve rolled out many tailored experiences and selling on eBay will be vastly simplified.”

To illustrate the change, Carges showed how there’s no more irreverent banner ads on the search results page, and instead of returning up to 19 paid results, it gives shoppers the “best matches” and cuts the time in half that it takes to return results.

The company also launched the buyer protection program, which will return the price of the item and the cost of shipping to customers unhappy with purchases.

Christopher Payne, VP of eBay marketplaces North America, said the company will start to increase marketing spend on these improvements to drive awareness: “We’ve been intentionally quiet as we fixed fundamentals, but starting in the second half, we’ll start marketing this new experience.”

At lunch, analysts were so eager to talk to Donahoe he wasn’t even able to get to his seat. They crowded around him in the lobby to grill him on what impact Facebook, Apple and Google were going to have on the company’s payments aspirations.

Donahoe wasn’t phased, saying that PayPal is technology agnostic. He will support BlackBerry, Google’s Android, Apple’s iPhone — and all of the iterations they produce from phones to tablets. What’s more, he says, the company is building the tools and technology for merchants to keep up in what can be a daunting world.

Analysts appear impressed with the improvements. Today, the company’s shares traded up nearly 8 percent, or $2.57, to $34.53, coming close to marking a 52-week high.

That’s similar to other shopping apps such as those from e-commerce powerhouse Amazon, but Smoopa has a few neat features.

First of all, Smoopa always includes shipping costs in its prices. It also shows recent prices for the 12 million products in its database, so you can get an idea of whether to buy now or later (kind of like what Farecast/Bing Travel does for air flights). And it gives users the ability to track the price of a product and be alerted when it comes down. Users can also share a product price with friends through in-app Facebook integration.

Boston-based Smoopa currently has data from Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Office Depot, Buy.com and TigerDirect. CEO Mendel Chuang said the company doesn’t carry Amazon feeds yet, in part because the company obscures shipping costs in the product listings it provides through its API.

Chuang reported that retailers are increasingly comfortable with customers pulling out smartphones while they browse, even if it makes them likely to spend their money elsewhere. Best Buy has a policy of matching its own online prices, which are apparently often lower than those on its shelves. And after all, you’re already in the store, so you may value the convenience of buying a product right there, where shipping is always free.

Smoopa is available for free in the U.S. through Android Market, and online at www.smoopa.com. The company is working on an iOS version.

Chuang, who formerly led marketing for Google Friend Connect, launched Smoopa with a team of three other MIT grads. The company is bootstrapped and expects to make money from affiliate revenue sharing. It built its bar-code-reading technology in-house.

In December, retail sales jumped 0.6 percent as consumers bought more goods from online retailers, drugstores and building-supply companies.

When excluding auto sales, which can vary wildly, sales were up 0.5 percent, which was just shy of the 0.7 percent forecast that economists surveyed by MarketWatch were expecting.

The biggest gains in the retail sector were led by online and catalog companies, such as Amazon and Land’s End. That category witnessed sales jump 2.6 percent, the biggest increase in almost three years.

Earlier reports by comScore hinted that may be the case, with December online sales up almost 12 percent over last year. Many retailers encouraged shoppers to spend online by offering discounts and free-shipping incentives up until the last few days before Christmas.

Overall, the full-year gains were the most impressive numbers from today’s government report. Retail sales jumped 6.6 percent in 2010 compared to the year-ago period. The last time sales rose at a faster clip was 11 years ago during the Internet boom, when sales surged 8.2 percent.

Here is yet another video spoofing the spooky trailer for “The Social Network”–the movie about the origins of Facebook and the machinations of its co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

And it is actually very funny, because it is about an online shipping marketplace site, uShip, which somehow works with the social networking site’s plot. Plus it uses uShip’s execs well.

Enjoy:

Nokia says the cuts have been on the table since October, when it announced a personnel restructuring during its Q3 results. And indeed it has. From a press release issued that month:

“Altogether, the planned changes are expected to result in a reduction of up to 1,800 employees globally, as activities are planned to be discontinued and integrated. Nokia will begin applicable consultations with employee representatives about these plans.”

News of the layoffs comes on the same day that Nokia said it will miss another shipping deadline for its new E7 smartphone. That device, which will run the next iteration of the company’s Symbian OS, was expected to launch this year. Now its debut has been postponed until early 2011.

The program, called ShopRunner, will cost $79 per year—the same as the Prime shipping program offered by the largest online-only retailer Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN).

Participants include many existing GSI Commerce e-commerce service clients such as Toys “R” Us Inc. and GNC Corp. In the coming weeks, outside retailers such as Borders Group Inc. (BGP), Barnes & Noble Inc. (BKS) and Drugstore.com (DSCM) will also join ShopRunner.

“If it wasn’t for the scale, these retailers were likely to have done something like this on their own,” said Mike Golden, president of Shop Runner Inc., which is wholly owned by GSI Commerce. He declined to say how much the companies were paying to participate in the program, but GSI is spending about $5 million this year to launch ShopRunner.

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UPS is rolling out marketing Monday to highlight a push into Web-based printing, in which clients can send documents such as business presentations to UPS retail stores via the Internet to have printed copies made. FedEx already offers online printing at its FedEx Office/Kinko’s locations.

The competing retail chains, acquired by the two shipping companies earlier this decade, serve small businesses and executives who frequently travel. In addition to shipping packages and documents, the more than 6,000 stores combined offer services such as packaging, photocopying, printing business cards and notarizing signatures.

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And that’s exactly what consumers are looking for, according to Google (GOOG).

“We’ve seen quite an increase in queries for things like discounts and bargains and things like that,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt told “Meet The Press” this past weekend. “And we know that shoppers are using the Internet to get better pricing.”

The estimated bill of materials for the G1: $144. The estimated bill of material for Apple’s 8GB iPhone 3G: $160.

Now, iSuppli’s estimated bill of materials for the G1 is based on component and materials costs alone. It doesn’t account for other expenses like research and development, software, shipping and distribution. It does, however, account for “wow factor,” of which the G1 apparently has a paucity. Though Tina Teng, iSuppli senior analyst of wireless communications, described the G1′s interface as better than average, she said it “still has a gap to close with Apple’s interface” and “lacks the wow factor of some of its slicker competitors.”