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Online music provider MP3.com (Nasdaq: MPPP) announced today that it will expand its services by acquiring privately held online event planning Web site seeUthere.com in a stock deal valued at approximately $150 million (US$) The San Diego, California-based MP3.com will issue almost six million shares of its stock to acquire seeUthere.com. The comp...

Further fueling speculation that Net stocks and rushed IPOs have set e-commerce up for a retrograde period, Value America (Nasdaq: VUSA) is cutting its workforce nearly in half and will reduce its product offerings to a handful of categories that are proven sellers on the Internet Value America, which launched its online department store in Februar...

Despite the horror stories of canceled orders and late deliveries, most online merchants have every right to feel proud about how they performed this holiday season However, if there is one lesson to be gleaned from the online shopping frenzy of the last couple of months, it is that customer service is much more than making sure that the right cred...

The week before Christmas, U.S. talk radio shows and newspapers were buzzing with horror stories about dot-coms that were not going to be able to fulfill orders in time for the Christmas holiday The ripest target of these reports was Toysrus.com, the online branch of the brick-and-mortar superstore. After a string of e-commerce failures in 1999, th...

According to a recent survey of 9,800 online shoppers by BizRate.com, almost 90 percent of respondents consider an e-tailer's return policy to be the determining factor in whether or not they will continue to do business with the merchant Customers are expected to return five percent of the 36 million orders placed via the Internet this holiday sea...

As the digital economy continues to surge, e-commerce companies are increasingly seeing the wisdom in incorporating customer service into their business strategies and long-term plans. In fact, a 1999 Gartner Group report estimates that companies will soon spend $6 billion (US$) a year on Web-based customer service applications The attention to ser...

With a nod toward the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has announced plans to use an arbitration panel to resolve disputes over domain name ownership before cases reach the courts WIPO established its own internal arbitration panel early this month to handle such disput...

RealNetworks, a leading maker of software for playing video and audio online, is suing startup Streambox for an alleged violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act This clash is the latest in an ongoing e-commerce battle over which format will ultimately dominate the lucrative music and video Internet downloading market. Additionally, it unde...

According to a new study by InsightExpress, the online arm of market research giant NFO Worldwide, online shoppers may have spent as much as 33 percent of their holiday shopping budgets online The study was conducted completely online through a random survey of 300 adults across the United States on December 20th. According to the company, the surv...

Last week, as the Amazon.com holiday season symphony neared its crescendo, someone sounded a sour note Richard Stallman, an early developer of the Linux operating system, called for a boycott of Amazon in an article posted on the Linux Today Web site.

Although the technology is in place to sell insurance via the Net, consumers are not giving up the one night a year when they sit in their living rooms and listen to their insurance agent pontificate about the advantages of "Plan A" versus "Plan B." Now that dynamic may be changing, albeit not right away. One big hurdle for online insurance sales t...

Customer support solutions provider Kana Communications (Nasdaq: KANA) announced today that it has opened regional offices in Munich, Germany and Sydney, Australia The Redwood, City, California-based company said that the Munich office will support the growth of e-commerce in Germany, where it forecasts that $720 million (US$) will be spent on Web ...

1999 has been a tough year for Toys "R" Us. Still, despite major problems, it has proved itself a worthy e-commerce player In August, when Toys "R" Us chief executive officer Robert Nakasone stepped down, many analysts believed that the resignation was a direct result of the company's inability to formulate an effective online marketing strategy.

The German unit of eBay has reportedly decided to sell companies online after a recent machinery auction led to the sale of a small construction company eBay Germany has been promoting its business-to-business area since November with the launch of eBayPro.de, a section of the auction site that offers commercial goods and services ranging from prin...

According to published reports, priceline.com is planning to apply its "name-your-own-price" Web model to the tried-and-true traditional yard sale The new site, to be known as Perfect YardSale, will begin testing in January and will attempt to match buyers and sellers in much the same way that giant online auctioneers eBay, Yahoo!, and Amazon.com d...

The latest figures released by Internet measurement service Media Metrix (Nasdaq: MMXI) show that that this year's holiday e-commerce traffic is up 37 percent over last year, with reigning king Amazon.com leading the way again The figures released by the New York-based company today also reveal a six percent drop-off in online shopping this week, a...

According to a new report from Jupiter Communications, European e-tailers will rack up online sales of about 790 million Euros ($797 million US$) this season, despite the fact that their Web sites are woefully lacking in customer service Jupiter's survey discovered that a dismal 65 percent of European sites did not respond to e-mail queries within ...

While shoppers have flocked to online toy stores in record numbers this year, the two toy store leaders -- eToys, Inc. and Toys 'R' Us -- have both had rough times recently Toys 'R' Us has had serious performance problems with its Web operations, earning it the moniker "Toys 'R' Oops.com," while eToys has seen its stock slide precipitously despite ...

With Christmas just days away, a number of e-commerce sites are now displaying disclaimers stating that they cannot guarantee deliveries before the holiday, further fueling debate over whether e-commerce is ultimately capable of giving brick-and-mortar retailing a legitimate long-term challenge For its part, UPS has set today as the last day it wil...

A new type of company is attempting to attract online shoppers by providing them with incentives, such as cash, mutual funds and contributions to non-profit organizations, when they shop on Web sites with affiliate programs These new companies do not provide the shopping themselves, but create links to multiple e-tailers that have affiliate shoppin...