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UK businesses racked up roughly US$82.7 billion in online sales last year, according to data released Monday by the British government's Office of National Statistics (ONS), accounting for 2 percent of total sales in the sectors the agency examined Although the ratio of transactions conducted over the Internet compared to overall sales might seem l...

Want to see the future of online advertising? Among other things, it looks just like something you would find on your TV set....

A few years ago a popular song asked, "How do you keep the music playing?" Owners of music file-sharing services and recording companies are now asking the same question, with a twist "How do we keep the music playing on the Internet?" is more like it these days. What seemed a highly progressive and potentially profitable idea is now teetering on t...

A system that allows U.S. businesses and individuals to make estimated tax payments over the Internet is now live, following a pilot program that beganlast October, the Internal Revenue Service said Thursday The system "provides a convenient and secure method for paying taxes that isconsistent with the way people do business," said IRS Commissioner...

For you and me, it's death and taxes, as the old saying goes. Certain things are inevitable And in the world of e-commerce, several issues are sure to return, each and every year. These are perennial Internet issues, the ones that you can count on being wrestled with, pondered over, but never quite put to rest....

Internet auction powerhouse eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) said Thursday it might seek to sell up to US$1 billion worth of stock in coming months. In a shelf-filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, eBay said it would use proceeds from the share sale for general corporate purposes, including capital expenditures. eBay also said some of the ca...

Can we conclude that as long as e-tailers carefully manage consumer expectations, and leverage technology and delivery partnerships, they can rest easy about their logistics processes? Not quite Managing logistics costs continues to be a major hurdle for e-tailers, and is often the key reason that e-tailers look to partners for help.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) will sell more computers and other products on eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) as part of a broad software and marketing agreement announced by the two companies Thursday. eBay also said that it will use IBM's WebSphere software to power the upgraded version of its online marketplace The deal is a big win for IBM, Giga Information Group vice pr...

Following the lead of five other movie studios, Walt Disney Co. (NYSE: DIS) and News Corp. (NYSE: NWS) said Wednesday they intend to launch a video-on-demand Internet-based service early next year. Movies.com will be a joint venture between Disney and Australia-based News Corp., the companies said, and will offer films from Walt Disney Studios, Tw...

Although their companies continue to spend money on many different aspects of e-business, corporate managers see less promise in the Internet than they did a year ago, according to a report released Wednesday by the Yankee Group "Over the past year, the perception of Internet business has swung from oneextreme to another, from the extremely positiv...

With a crop of new film, publishing and music releases ready for harvest this fall, marketing executives in the entertainment industry should consider the Internet as a key tool to boost sales, forge online word-of-mouth campaigns and control post-launch buzz among consumers, according to a report released Wednesday by Forrester Research (Nasdaq: FORR)...

Looking to meet the much-anticipated consumer demand for electronic books, leading portal Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) joined with four publishing houses Wednesday to launch an e-book site on its shopping network. Yahoo! said the deals with Simon & Schuster, Penguin Putnam, Random House and HarperCollins give it one of the largest collections of e-books ...

Like spoiled children who get every toy they could possibly want for years, only to have Santa Claus skip their house one Christmas, e-commerce is in for a rude awakening. Don't get me wrong, e-commerce sales might well post strong growth for the rest of 2001. But one thing seems certain: The days of rocket-ship, triple-digit growth are a thing of...

If you lost 100,000 customers in the course of one fiscal year, as Internet-only banks have, what would you do? Close up shop? Revamp your product line? Perhaps you would take the plunge and pour venture capital into a major marketing push.

By all accounts, use of the Internet continues to grow steadily, undaunted by an economic slowdown and the 18-month-old dot-com shakeout. In fact, Nielsen//NetRatings recently estimated that the number of online users grew 16 percent from July 2000 to July 2001, with nearly 60 percent of Americans now online. The Internet, NetRatings said, is "now...

Fry's Electronics said Friday it has agreed to buy electronics e-tailerOutpost.com (Nasdaq: COOL) in a deal that includes an immediate US$13million loan. The all-cash deal values Outpost shares at 25 cents each, for a total of about $8 million. Including the cash loan, the deal is worth about $21 million....

Online travel company Expedia (Nasdaq: EXPE) said Monday it is making its services available to French travelersthrough a joint venture with French national railroad company SNCF Expedia's airline, hotel, train and car reservation services will beavailable on SNCF's Web site, which Expedia says is the top travel site inFrance, reaching 10.2 percent...

Remember when the concept of a "paperless society" was all the rage? Offices would eliminate file cabinets, newspapers wouldn't need newsprint and the stationery business would become obsolete.

When Buy.com announced that its ability to accept credit cards -- and therefore its viability as a business -- was in doubt, the admission shed new light on some important but often overlooked partners for many e-tailers: credit card processors As Buy.com noted in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), more than 90 percent...

U.S. e-commerce sales in the second quarter of 2001 dropped 1.8 percent from the previous quarter, the Census Bureau of the U.S. Department of Commerce announced Thursday. Online sales for Q2, not adjusted for seasonal, holiday or trading-day differences, were US$7.458 billion -- 0.9 percent of total retail sales. In contrast, overall retail sale...