Business

More than 18 months after becoming a symbol of the sharp rise and spectacular fall of many pure-play e-commerce ventures, Furniture.com is poised to return from the dead under new ownership with a new business model. Furniture.com president Carl Prindle, who was executive vice president of the or...

Experts have a message for undecided shoppers who think a single comparison Web site will give them all the information they need to choose from among a dizzying array of options: Keep looking. Because of comparison sites' various agendas -- not to mention wide variations in their ability to deli...

This week, the U.S. Postal Service made it official: The cost of a first-class stamp will rise from 34 cents to 37 cents on June 30th. The rate hike will accelerate companies' moves toward electronic billing, according to GartnerG2 analyst Kenneth Kerr. However, Forrester Research analyst Ron She...

Just two days after shaking up top-level management, AOL Time Warner has named a former radio executive to head its interactive services unit, which includes online flagship America Online. The executive shuffle was spurred by investors' fears about slower growth in the online unit. However, Morn...

Much to the consternation of the technology sector, tech spending has yet to turn the corner. A new report from market analysis firm Aberdeen Group predicts worldwide tech spending will reach $1.43 trillion by 2005, up from $1.21 billion in 2001, but as Aberdeen senior vice president Hugh Bishop ...

E*Trade has announced it will pay $100 million in stock for privately held Tradescape. The move will nearly double the number of daily stock trades on E*Trade's network, making it the category leader. But GartnerG2 vice president and research director David Furlonger told the E-Commerce Times tha...

Yahoo! reported a net loss of $53.6 million in its first quarter, slightly beating analysts' expectations, and earned higher-than-expected revenue of $192.7 million. However, the company raised its projections for the second quarter. That forecast may give a much-needed boost to the Internet sect...

In the realm of e-commerce, credit cards rule. But the distant relationship between buyer and merchant, combined with the anonymity enjoyed by potential wrongdoers, makes the processing job tougher than it would be for a brick-and-mortar purchase. That is why invisible investigators and bouncers ...

IBM has released its first earnings warning in more than a decade, announcing that it expects first-quarter revenue and profit will fall short of analysts' estimates. The warning sent IBM's stock down 10.1 percent to $87.41 and dragged some other tech stocks down with it. But even as confidence i...

Online auctioneer eBay suffered a series of Web site outages on Sunday, including a glitch in the clothing and jewelry categories lasting more than nine hours. "We understand the frustration that any system issue causes our user," eBay said, apologizing for the inconvenience the outage caused. Be...

Ticketmaster.com is planning to launch two new features that will let users resell unused tickets and bid for tickets online, rather than waiting in line at retail outlets. The reselling feature will be sent via e-mail with a bar code, which the buyer must print and take to the stadium. Only the ...

E-tailers may be the only businesses not betting their livelihoods on an imminent economic recovery. "E-commerce is still in a growth phase of about 5 to 10 percent per month," Forrester Research analyst Carrie Johnson told the E-Commerce Times. Still, retailers that maximize their use of multipl...

The search engine wars are heating up, with Google joining Yahoo! and MSN as front-runners in the race for control of this important Web sector, according to a Nielsen//NetRatings report. Although Google ranked third in terms of traffic, it powered well past the competition in terms of length of ...

The seeds of the trends now taking hold in e-commerce were planted in the industry's early days, long before the shakeout began. But only now are they starting to point the way clearly toward the future of e-commerce. One trend is a growing legion of niche firms operating on shoestring budgets...

Just days after acknowledging that its existing Web hosting capabilities leave it vulnerable to outages, auction giant eBay has tapped a division of tech titan Intel to provide additional hosting services. "By the nature of the business, keeping its site up and running 24/7 is more important to e...