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For those who have gotten comfortable buying products online, here are two questions. First, how do you get the stuff you buy serviced? Second, can you get an extended warranty like the kind that is readily available from most brick-and-mortar sites?

On January 1st at 12:00:01, Italian motorcycle manufacturer Ducati Motor SpA (NYSE: DMH), put its latest model -- a limited edition of 1,000 bikes -- up for sale on its Web site.

Now that the holiday dust has settled, many online businesses are struggling to figure out how to combat the notion that e-commerce is marred by poor customer service.

Last November, when priceline.com (Nasdaq: PCLN) began selling groceries online, it was anybody's guess whether the public would take the bait. Now, two months later, priceline.com has more than 75,000 members in its "name-your-own-price" WebHouse Club grocery service, and the company is looking to ...

Customer service portal Feedback Direct joined the ratings game this week by launching the Feedback 50 online companies with the best customer service operations.

A new Web-based service from PrivacyBot is offering e-commerce businesses the ability to create and display a customized privacy policy to its customers. It also allows the site to display the Trustmark seal of approval for a price of $30 per year.

The B2B market was given a boost this week by the launch of two sites that will specialize in B2B banking and advertising, respectively.

As the holiday e-nickels are counted, an Ernst & Young survey indicates that the total e-commerce take will surpass estimates by reaching between $10 and $13 billion (US$). If the figures do hold, 1999 will deliver a tally that is 300 percent higher than 1998's $4 billion.

Q How did your company get started selling over the Internet? A There's a great Silicon Valley story here about a gentleman named Pierre Omidyar. He was working as a software developer here in Silicon Valley, and he had always been fascinated by how you can establish marketplaces to buy and sell g...

According to a new study by Forrester Research, the Internet healthcare industry is poised to explode in the U.S. and become a $370 billion (US$) business by 2004.

The 1999 holiday shopping season may have boosted many online companies' hopes for continuing growth, but the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business says that such hopes may be unfounded.

Even if 1999 was the year of glitz, glamour and unprecedented consumer online spending, the tremendous movement in the business-to-business (B2B) sector may turn out to be 1999's most important story.

The battle lines have been drawn for one of the great e-commerce clashes of 2000. Proponents of online privacy and innovators of site-specific personalization are set to struggle with the big question: At what point does personalization become an invasion of an online shopper's privacy?

When it was reported yesterday that online shoppers have been forsaking pure-play e-tailers in favor of brick-and-click sites, it surely sent a shudder across the dot-com landscape.

City information and ticket vendor Ticketmaster Online-City Search (Nasdaq: TXCS) announced today that it has expanded its access to cultural offerings in about 1,500 cities across the United States by signing a marketing and distribution agreement with CultureFinder.com.