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As the deadline for filing U.S. tax returns draws nearer, a new report released Thursday by the General Accounting Office (GAO) may give some taxpayers pause about submitting their returns through the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) electronic filing program. According to the study -- commissioned b...

Online toy sales are on track to grow from US$793 million in 2000 to $1.2 billion by 2002, according to a report released Wednesday by The NPD Group. When consumers were asked which Web site they would consider buying toys from online in the next six months, Amazon dominated with a 23 percent share...

Online delivery service Kozmo.com quietly, yet significantly, dropped the "dot-com" from its name recently, and announced it would mail out almost a half-million printed catalogs, complete with a good old-fashioned toll-free number to call for ordering. Although simple and straightforward, it ma...

Luxury e-tailers who spend millions trying to imitate the offline luxury shopping experience to attract upscale customers may be wasting their money, according to a report issued Wednesday by Forrester Research. The report, "Selling to the Affluent Online," warned e-tailers not to forget that w...

A contest posted on BountyQuest asking for examples of technology that would invalidate Amazon's 1-Click patent ended Wednesday without a winner, but with some damage to the intellectual property claim, according to publisher Tim O'Reilly, who launched the initiative. The submissions from the 1...

Amazon jumped ahead of eBay during the month of February to become e-commerce's most visited Web site, according to a study released Tuesday by Jupiter Media Metrix. Amazon rose from the No. 11 position overall in January to No. 10 last month with a marginal increase of 71,000 unique visitors, to 1...

Business-to-business e-commerce revenues reached US$433 billion in 2000, marking a 189 percent increase over the $145 billion spent online by businesses in 1999 and exceeding industry expectations significantly, according to a study released Tuesday by Gartner Group. Last year, Gartner had pred...

In a bid to capture a larger market share of the personal financing industry, Priceline.com (Nasdaq: PCLN) announced Wednesday that it is expanding its mortgage service to allow borrowers to secure the lowest possible interest rates. The new options will be offered through the e-tailer's licensee ...

Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) announced Wednesday that Anil Singh, its chief sales and marketing officer and senior vice president of business operations, was retiring in early May "to spend more time with his family and pursue personal interests." The giant portal has lost a string of high-profile ex...

One week after the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) named auction fraud as the most common online scam, LiquidPrice.com proposed Tuesday that the industry move quickly to regulate itself. Calling some kind of industry regulation "inevitable," Piyush Gupta, the chief executive officer ...

The Web sites are fancy, and the merchandise is nicely arranged with descriptions telling you exactly what your hard-earned money will buy, but these e-tailers aren't selling books or blenders. They're virtual brothels, offering sex for sale. "Online prostitution has proven to be a highly profit...

Video game giants Nintendo of America and Electronic Arts announced Monday that they would drop a trademark and copyright infringement lawsuit against Yahoo!. The three companies also pledged to work together to prevent the sale of counterfeit video game products through Yahoo! Auctions and Yaho...

By most accounts, last year's holiday season was an encouraging time for e-tailers, especially those Web sites that managed to make gift buying hassle-free. With the exception of online clothing merchants. For some reason, American consumers still can't see their way clear to buy clothes on the...

Amid relentless news coverage of the difficulties e-commerce firms have faced in reaching profitability, a study released Tuesday by ActivMedia Research found that half of online business-to-consumer (B2C) companies are bucking the current market downturn and operating in the black. More than on...

Motorola (NYSE: MOT) rose to US$15.19, up 19 cents, in morning trading Tuesday after the company said it will cut about 7,000 more jobs in an effort to reduce costs in its wireless handset business. The new job cuts, which will affect all locations of the business, bring the total number of cuts ...