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Growth of Canadian at-home traffic to retail Web sites almost leveled off in December, according to a study released Monday by Media Metrix Canada. Though 6.3 million people, or nearly half of all Canadians online, visited a retail Web site in December, that total represented a 3 percent increase fr...

Anyone who has ever worked in sales knows what separates the winners from the slackers is The Big Get. It's all about closing the sale, reeling them in. It comes down to one part psychology, one part manipulation and one part luck. So when we're dealing with selling online, the psychology and ...

Following one of the hottest trends in e-commerce, Internet grocer Webvan.com announced Monday it had joined forces with another e-tail site, in this case Petsmart.com, to open a pet store on the Webvan site. However, while other online partnerships have generated mutual benefits, there is some dou...

The good news about the recent e-commerce holiday season is that e-tailers succeeded in attracting more customers. The bad news is that a growing number of online shoppers went away unsatisfied. According to a study released Monday by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), 80 percent of Internet users shopp...

Following the announcement of staff layoffs and an executive departure last week, Drugstore.com on Monday reported a narrower than expected loss for the fourth quarter and that net sales for the fourth quarter of 2000 topped sales figures for all of 1999. Not impressed with the results, Wall ...

Although online retailers spent heavily last year to avoid the fulfillment and delivery difficulties that bedeviled Internet heavyweights and fledglings alike over the 1999 holiday season, a report released Monday found that these problems continued to haunt many Web merchants in 2000. Accordin...

Dell Computer Corp. (Nasdaq: DELL) was down US$1.38 at $24.25 early Monday after the computer maker said operating results for the fourth quarter will be below earlier expectations because of "deterioration in global economic conditions and overall demand for computer systems and services." Austin,...

Fresh off an impressive earnings report and a significant court victory, eBay said Monday it would expand its live auctions feature to give users access to items being sold at auction houses around the world. eBay said it would link with London-based Icollector.com to widen the reach of its Live Auc...

AOL Time Warner (NYSE: AOL) rose $4.03 to $53.80 Friday after the newly merged company said it will buy back up to US$5 billion of stock and sell $10 billion in additional securities. Reports that Morgan Stanley Dean Witter analyst Mary Meeker began coverage of the stock with a strong buy recommend...

Internet companies can, in theory, locate anywhere that telephone and power lines reach. So why did so many consolidate in Silicon Valley? Unfortunately, trend-following played a role -- too big of a role -- and now it's time to pay the piper, who also happens to the local utility. Rolling bla...

All the Clinton administration did to promote e-commerce was, well, little more than nothing. The online shopping boom exploded during Clinton's time in office for a host of reasons, few of which have anything to do with his policies. The fact is when the Internet's time came, nothing was goin...

Adding to the mounting evidence that the personal computer market is still in a slump, new figures released Friday showed that "sluggish" sales over the fourth quarter and a weakened economic outlook helped drag the industry down in 2000. According to preliminary estimates from Gartner-owned rese...

Web portal AltaVista announced Thursday that it is laying off 200 employees, or 25 percent of its workforce. The company said that the layoffs would primarily affect employees at the company's Palo Alto, California headquarters. AltaVista said its European offices would only be "minimally affected...

Critical Path, Inc. (Nasdaq: CPTH) plunged US$9.38 to $10.63 in the first few minutes of trading Friday, after the company, which provides messaging and Internet infrastructure services to online businesses, reported a fourth-quarter loss and offered a grim forecast for the year ahead. Revenue for ...

In the most obvious sign yet that struggling e-tailer eToys is facing an immediate cash crisis, the company acknowledged Thursday that it had missed some payments to a temporary staffing agency. eToys confirmed the missed payments after the agency said it would write off US$2 million worth of billin...