Business

Although they attract a large percentage of the online buying audience, e-tail giants like Amazon and eBay are not the biggest competitors of other e-tailers, according to a new report from Nielsen//NetRatings. The report said most shoppers do not click directly from niche sites to Amazon or eBay; r...

The stock market and the dot-com world may be down for now, but that does not mean launching a new e-business is out of the question. New York University business professor Christopher Tucci pointed out that many of today's technology and commerce giants began life at a time when startup capital was...

In its annual 10-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Cisco reported that its order backlog has fallen 30 percent over the past year, from about $2 billion to about $1.4 billion. Analyst reactions were mixed, with some surprised and others saying they expected the news. One pos...

In a business traditionally built on partnerships and cooperation, Dell Computer seems bent on making more enemies than friends of late. In July, Hewlett-Packard terminated a four-year reseller agreement with Dell after word leaked that Dell intended to make and sell its own line of printers and oth...

Six months after Buy.com took a page from Amazon.com's playbook by forming an e-commerce outsourcing division, the company has landed its first customer, online movie ticketing site Fandango. United Commerce Service, as the Buy.com spinoff is known, will create a co-branded Buy.com site for Fandango...

The online fraud-fighting field is a crowded one, with a variety of commercial and nonprofit organizations involved in educating consumers, setting e-commerce standards for e-tailers and releasing software designed to nab fraudsters. But despite the wide variety of groups attempting to remedy or kee...

In the early days of e-commerce, small businesses flocked to the Web with grandiose visions of transforming mom-and-pop shops into mega retailers. Those visions turned out to be pipe dreams for most merchants, and the dawn of reality convinced many early adopters to retreat to the brick-and-mortar w...

About a year ago, even true dot-coms were distancing themselves from the Internet label. But as e-commerce enjoys a somewhat tempered revival, the dot-com is no longer a pariah. In fact, some analysts say the name may help consumers distinguish pure-play Internet firms from their multichannel counte...

Despite all the reports of bankruptcies and losses, some companies are doing just fine on the Internet. But the list of companies that are "getting rich" may be surprising. Aside from the obvious handful of bellwether e-tailers, such as Amazon.com and eBay, some seemingly unlikely candidates are rak...

Hewlett-Packard has announced plans to sell products directly to more than 2 million small businesses. Previously, the direct sales model had been reserved for the company's largest enterprise customers. The company said it will release a quarterly catalog that will feature PCs, notebooks, servers, ...

Founded in September 1998, Google is at least three years younger than most of its search engine competitors but already has surpassed its rivals in terms of popularity. However, as scores of failed dot-coms can attest, big crowds do not always mean big money. Will Google's heavy traffic translate i...

Use of the Internet to conduct business-to-business (B2B) transactions grew substantially in the second quarter, possibly signaling the early stages of economic recovery, according to a report from Forrester Research and the Institute for Supply Management (ISM). "Organizations are buying significan...

E-tailers have come to the costly understanding that providing a general e-mail address on a Web site is no way to handle customer queries. Gartner analyst Adam Sarner told the E-Commerce Times that companies are turning to high-tech e-mail management tools and shifting strategies in a bid to curb i...

Amazon.com has sued partner Expedia, claiming the travel site has failed to make agreed-upon payments in a partnership deal, which stipulated that Amazon would receive up to $16 million from Expedia. Amazon claims it is owed about $3.7 million to date. Analysts said the flare-up should serve as a re...

Although innovation can be wonderful, there is something to be said for sticking to the basics. In fact, that is how venture capitalists seemingly have come to feel about high-tech companies as they contemplate which to fund with now-limited resources. Those who remember the manic days of VC funding...