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Sometime over the holidays, Henry Blodget packed up his box and officially left Merrill Lynch, where he had been the lead Internet stock analyst. Blodget, who some pundits have all but blamed for single-handedly causing the dot-com bubble, has left behind a life of touting Yahoo!, Amazon, EBay an...

Industry analysts say retailers can generate increased revenues from their Web operations without cannibalizing the sales that would have been made in their offline stores and without having to make huge new investments. E-tailers that do a better job of integrating all of their sales channels --...

Further expanding its reach, this time into the employee benefits field, Yahoo! said it would develop personalized Web portals for the 16 million customers of health care and retirement benefits giant Cigna. Yahoo's business services unit, known as Yahoo! Enterprise Solutions, will develop a cust...

Upping the e-commerce stakes in the competitive fast-food business, pizza chain Papa John's said that it is making online ordering available at all its free-standing restaurants across the United States. Papa John's said it is the first pizza chain in the U.S. to offer online ordering throughout ...

We may have seen the worst of e-tailing attrition in the last two years, but we have not seen the last of it. Surviving online retailers still have substantial work to do in order to reach the end of 2002 without closing up shop. "The shakeout is not over," Gartner Group research director Geri Sp...

AOL Time Warner lowered its earnings forecast for the quarter just ended and issued a bleak outlook for the current year. Results will include a first-quarter charge of up to US$60 billion to cover the declining value of Internet stocks since the media giant was formed last year. AOL said the one...

Amid all the bumps in the road for e-commerce in 2001, few sectors were shaken as hard as companies in the online grocery market. Even so, analysts see Internet grocers staging a comeback for a number of reasons. "Online grocery sales will grow much faster than brick-and-mortar stores' sales, eve...

Online shopping traffic during the 2001 holiday season rose 50 percent over 2000 levels, with more than 50 million unique visitors each week, according to a report by Jupiter Media Metrix. "We've been waiting for the inevitable dominance of the traditional retailers over their pure-play counterpa...

The post-holiday time is always a quiet one. There is a natural letdown as the New Year begins and people quietly work their way back into their workaday routines. But because the expectations were higher there than anywhere else, the silence is particularly deafening in Seattle -- the home of Am...

Travelocity has lowered its outlook for fourth-quarter revenue, saying airline ticket sales in December were slower than expected. The company said quarterly revenue will total about US$68 million, about 9 percent below previous guidance -- but pro forma earnings will remain within the previously...

E-commerce sites that promote a sense of community among visitors by soliciting feedback and other content have a better chance at success, according to a new report by McKinsey & Co. The study, which McKinsey prepared along with Jupiter Media Metrix, found that such features as chat rooms, b...

Until recently, e-commerce was an exercise in trial and error, a hit-or-miss playing field in which all newcomers were welcome, but where few stuck around for long. By now, those of us who have watched the industry blossom have seen what does not work -- over-spending, poor or non-existent busine...

If the Yahoo!/HotJobs merger is done right, Yahoo! can become a force in the online job listings market. Yahoo! has been making an all-out effort to become a Web solutions provider for corporations, and job listings are just one more tentacle of that octopus. In its online job listing battle with...

Analysts agree that if EBay were to disappear tomorrow, there would be plenty of competitors to grab up the online auction giant's customers. "EBay has become the model for all kinds of online commerce," Giga Information Group's Steve Telleen told the E-Commerce Times. Although no company has bee...

Online retailers, especially pure-play e-tailers, did a poor job of responding quickly to customer service requests during the holiday season, according to a report released by Jupiter Media Metrix. Jupiter said that its survey found that only 30 percent of Web retailers answered basic customer s...