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Online retailers sank in early trading Monday, brought down by news that eToys (Nasdaq: ETYS) expects a weak quarter, as well as by analysts' downgrades at Goldman Sachs & Co. eToys was down 3/4 at 9/32 in early morning trading. Goldman analyst Anthony Noto said he lowered his rating on the co...

Suddenly, the word no one would utter is on everyone's lips -- the R-word, that is. Predictions of soft landings have given way to outright claims that a recession is upon us, or at least poised like a tiger to pounce at any moment. Given the host of factors working against e-commerce, the questio...

Many e-tailers will not have the capabilities to meet growing customer service demands this holiday season, according to a report issued by Jupiter Research and the NPD Group. Sixty-two percent of consumers who shopped online in 1999 and contacted customer service had a negative impression of onli...

The bad news from Internet companies continues unabated, with recent days bringing more reports of layoffs and grim financial forecasts. Internet consulting firms Organic and Bigstep.com, as well as RealNames.com, a company that operates an Internet keyword system, are among the latest dot-coms to ...

eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) and General Motors (NYSE: GM) announced Thursday that they have signed a co-marketing agreement that will see the Internet auction site and the auto giant partner on both online and offline promotions. Rich Christensen, Director of Alliances and Acquisitions at GM, told the ...

Despite spending almost US$500 million over the past 12 months to improve their customer service operations, e-tailers could face a loss of some $11 billion in sales by the end of this year, according to a report released Friday by market analysis firm Datamonitor. Poor customer service all too oft...

Threatened with the loss of its coveted relationship with the National Football League, Internet powerhouse Yahoo! said Thursday that it will remove gambling advertisements from its football Web pages. "All professional sports leagues are sensitive to being associated with wagering," Jupiter Media ...

Eight of the 10 fastest growing retail sites on the Web are run by traditional retailers, according to a report released Friday by Jupiter Media Metrix. The New York-based market research firm said that while pure-play e-tailers continue to hold onto the top four spots in its overall ranking, offli...

Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) was down 4 7/16 at 51 1/16 early Friday, as the software giant became the latest technology company to warn of a soft December quarter. "We believe, like many other technology companies, that the current weakness in worldwide economic conditions is resulting in a slow...

All of us who have watched a lifetime's worth of CNN (and CNN.com) over the past 36 days are rubbing our eyes and realizing that Christmas is just 10 days away. And guess what? Not only have we not finished our holiday shopping yet, many of us have yet to start. We will get the shopping done. The ...

Auction sites are dominating the 2000 online holiday shopping season, according to a report issued by Media Metrix. For the two weeks ended November 26th and December 3rd, Web auction giant eBay averaged 60 percent more unique daily visitors than the Internet's top retail site Amazon.com, the r...

More than half of the roughly 46 million adults in the UK have Web access and nearly a third of them are frequent online users, according to new data released Wednesday by Forrester Research. As part of its semi-annual Internet User Monitor, the research firm also found that the country's gender...

Furniture.com. Garden.com. Mortgage.com. Pets.com. If any four e-tailers had reason to believe they could succeed by name alone, these four did. Instead, within a 16-day span, all four generically-named companies announced they were shutting down operations. The momentum of the dot-com shakeout ha...

In a bid to stop a "new wave" of software pirates, the Business Software Association (BSA) announced Wednesday a set of voluntary guidelines to help online auction houses curb sales of illegal software at their sites. The guidelines are necessary because "many of the people who used to sell softwar...

The number of online shoppers continued to boom during the second week in December, with brick-and-click operations seeing the most traffic to their Web sites, according to the latest survey from measurement firm Nielsen//NetRatings. Traditional retailers' Web sites have seen a 103 percent surge...