Articles by Lori Enos

Brick-and-click retailer Office Depot on Thursday announced that it is purchasing Officesupplies.com for an undisclosed sum Delray Beach, Fla.-based Office Depot said the acquisition, its first in the online office supplies market, would boost its market share and help it leverage existing infrastructure....

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 government spending occurred over the Internet in 2000 an...

Within the next few weeks, the U.S. Department of Commerce, in partnership with IBM (NYSE: IBM), is scheduled to launch a new business-to-business (B2B) e-marketplace to help U.S. sellers hook up with foreign buyers Dubbed BuyUSA.com, the new marketplace will particularly help small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) find international buyers and dis...

After a lengthy investigation into the privacy policies of Web information provider Alexa, a subsidiary of Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN), the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has declined to take action against the company, Alexa said Tuesday The FTC launched its investigation of Alexa in March 2000 to determine if the company's software improperly ...

After setting a record in April, the number of dot-com job cuts fell by 24 percent in May, according to a report released Tuesday by Chicago, Illinois-based outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas (CGC). John A. Challenger, chief executive officer of CGC, told the E-Commerce Times that the slowing layoff rates could be a sign that dot-com f...

The U.S. government sold more than US$3.6 billion via e-commerce in 2000, topping the $2.8 billion in online sales seen by e-tail giant Amazon, according to a study released Sunday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project and Federal Computer Week "It is a natural evolution for the government to sell directly to the public," said Bill Piatt, dir...

E-shoppers remain a forgiving lot when it comes to e-tail outages, according to analysts, if those interludes are not too frequent "As long as outages are not consistent and persistent, e-tailers should be okay," Forrester Research analyst Christopher Kelley told the E-Commerce Times.

Most small businesses in Australia are "barely active" in e-commerce because they are not fully convinced of its benefits, according to a new report from the Australian arm of IDC The market research firm said that 56 percent of small businesses it surveyed currently have no Internet-related revenue. However, company responses to IDC queries indica...

BlueLight.com announced Wednesday that it is paring its staff and planning to rely more heavily on the resources of its majority investor, Kmart Corporation BlueLight said the strategic actions were designed to improve the e-tailer's overall efficiencies and accelerate its "march towards profitability." In addition to reducing costs, the actions wi...

Criminal charges have been brought against approximately 90 individuals and companies as part of a nationwide crackdown on online fraud schemes that victimized over 56,000 people, the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said Wednesday The schemes -- which included auction fraud, non-delivery of merchandise, inv...

Plans are afoot for Kmart to buy the 40 percent of BlueLight.com it does not already own and end the e-tailer's stand-alone status, according to published reports A report Tuesday at CBS Marketwatch said that the retail giant was close to an agreement to absorb BlueLight, which launched in December 1999 as a joint venture between Kmart and Japan's ...

The Internet may offer a new channel for selling merchandise, but basic customer loyalty principles first developed in the real world are still central to making money online, according to many of the e-commerce leaders speaking Tuesday in Chicago at a retail forum hosted by Jupiter Media Metrix Companies doing business on the Internet need to focu...

Because software piracy and online fraud can cost companies millions in profits and lost goodwill -- and because government agencies do not have the resources to keep pace with cybercriminals -- many high-tech companies have formed their own investigative units to catch Internet con artists. For conventional law enforcement, business crimes are si...

The future of e-commerce lies with multichannel retailers who leverage their Internet presence to enhance the real-world shopping experience, according to speakers Monday at a retail forum in Chicago hosted by Jupiter Media Metrix "There is very limited room for Internet-only retailers," Jupiter research director Michael May told the E-Commerce Tim...

PurchasePro (Nasdaq: PPRO) announced Tuesday that its net loss for the quarter was US$14.3 million more than originally reported The Las Vegas, Nevada-based business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce company now says that its net loss, including non-cash charges and amortization of equity-based compensation and goodwill, was $32.4 million for the quarte...

Thousands of online consumers are out millions of dollars, according to a bankruptcy filing by e-tailer CyberRebate.com made May 16th in U.S. bankruptcy court in New York Of the top 20 debtors listed on the bankruptcy filing by CyberRebate, a site that promised rebates of up to 100 percent on its highly overpriced merchandise, nine were individuals...

Brick-and-click toy store KB Toys announced Friday that it has purchased the Web site, name and logo of defunct toy e-tailer eToys at a bankruptcy auction for approximately US$3.35 million The eToys site currently tells visitors that it is closed and no longer accepting orders, but soon visitors will be automatically redirected to KB Toys' Web site...

Business-to-business (B2B) site Egarden.com has closed, its parent company U.S. Home & Garden (Nasdaq: USHG) announced Wednesday "The decision to discontinue the operations of Egarden's lawn and garden Web site, although a difficult one, was necessary given the challenging market conditions confronted by many e-commerce businesses today and the unl...

As the Web becomes an increasingly global marketplace, U.S. based companies will need to create multicultural, multilingual Web sites in order to compete, according to a report released Thursday by Aberdeen Group The report, "Web Globalization: Write Once, Deploy Worldwide," found that some big companies are already taking steps to "globalize" thei...

Dashing cold water on recent encouraging news for the e-tail sector, the U.S. Department of Commerce reported Wednesday that online retail sales in the United States fell by 19.3 percent during the first quarter of 2001 During the quarter, online retailers posted $6.99 billion in sales, down from $8.67 billion in the fourth quarter of 2000. The dec...