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Online retailers are failing to tap into the highly lucrative gift sales market by wasting resources on shopping tools and services that are of little interest to potential buyers, according to a study released Monday by Forrester Research. As part of its report on "The Hidden Value in Gift Sales,"...

Yahoo! said Monday it will now offer product ratings and buying guides from Consumer Reports on its shopping site, a move the Web portal says will attract more traffic to its existing merchants and provide revenue from pay-per-view content sales. The deal involves both free buying guides and pay...

More than a year after first being announced, controversial travel mega-site Orbitz officially launched Monday. Chicago-based Orbitz said that at launch, it already had 175,000 registered users and had sold US$3.5 million in tickets. In addition to airfare, Orbitz offers consumers hotel and rent...

In addressing the issue of Internet privacy and the handling of data collected in e-commerce transactions, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) seems to be employing that old adage: No harm, no foul. If only it were that simple. Instead, by letting Amazon.com and its subsidiary Alexa off the...

Covisint, the business-to-business (B2B) automotive e-marketplace backed by the major car companies, is taking longer than expected to ramp up -- and experts agree that the delays could mean that Covisint will not be the driving force it had hoped to be. Covisint is moving "slower than they shoul...

Office Depot's purchase of e-tailer Officesupplies.com is the first such purchase for the company, which has been expanding its online and offline presence.

In a boost to the fledgling electronic books industry, the National Book Foundation said Friday it would consider e-books for its prestigious National Book Awards this year for the first time. The National Book Awards, which carry a US$10,000 prize in four categories, are widely considered on...

Hollywood.com and CinemaNow announced Thursday that they are creating a new, co-branded pay-per-view movie site scheduled to open in June. The deal gives the smaller CinemaNow a much needed venue for distributing mainstream, full-length films. Whether it will help give the overall online movie ...

Priceline.com announced Thursday that it is launching a resort getaway service that it claims will save travelers up to 40 percent off typical rates. The Norwalk, Connecticut-based company said it was able to introduce new category, which follows its name-your-own-price operating model, by buildin...

Online travel company Travelocity on Friday announced an advertising campaign touting the company as "more than just an online travel site." The campaign will launch with two 30-second television spots set to begin airing Monday. The campaign comes as Orbitz, a travel site backed by five major ...

The launch of Orbitz is drawing near. And the travel industry, both offline and on the Web, would have us believe that the approaching footsteps it hears are those of a monster, a Godzilla coming to stomp Tokyo into submission. But is it really a monster? It seems that only a fraction of the fe...

Businesses around the world that have established Web sites can expect to see the proportion of revenue they receive from Internet-generated sales to double in 2001 from 2000, according to data released Thursday by IDC. "The value of sales influenced by the Internet is growing," said the Framingh...

Web portal Yahoo! said Thursday that its decision to charge listing fees for auctions on its site has resulted in a higher percentage of auction items being sold and a higher sales price for each item. Over the past five months, the percentage of items sold has risen to 31 percent for all aucti...

Government agencies, fighting red tape, have not embraced e-procurement as rapidly as their private counterparts, according to a report released Thursday by Jupiter Media Metrix. The study found that despite the best efforts of the Clinton administration to promote e-procurement, 1 percent of go...

Despite the heavy losses realized by venture capital firms in the dot-com shakeout, analysts say that there is actually a great deal of capital available in the VC market for both startup and later-stage funding. However, even with a renewed spark of optimism in the e-business sector, many obser...