Business

By year's end, more than 600 million people worldwide will have Internet access and collectively will spend more than $1 trillion online, according to research firm IDC. Experts said regional e-commerce reach seems to correlate closely with affluence and education, although first-world status by ...

As e-commerce and security companies continue to search for the answer to consumers' privacy concerns, Visa has announced that retail giant Wal-Mart's Web arm has signed up to use Visa's password-protection program. Although additional passwords have not been beloved by consumers in the past, For...

Size matters a lot in the world of brick-and-mortar commerce. But online commerce in many ways is a great equalizer, and experts say small players can stay in the game -- and score some niche victories -- by using the same tools and strategies available to entrenched combatants. "Make sure you ha...

E-commerce services provider Digital River said it has completed its acquisition of assets and customer contracts related to Beyond.com's eStores business. The company said it expects the Beyond.com purchase will be neutral to its earnings in the first quarter of 2002, and will contribute to earn...

E*Trade has announced it will partner with Yahoo! to provide its customers with streaming financial data and access to trading through Yahoo's instant messaging technology. The deal is one of the first to target instant messaging as a new e-commerce channel. E*Trade and Yahoo! noted that Yahoo! M...

As the April 15th filing deadline approaches, consumers are flocking to tax sites. But according to Jupiter Media Metrix, most visitors are doing research rather than filing online. Forrester analyst Jaime Punishill said the online tax market grew 400 percent in 2000 and 140 percent in 2001, but ...

Dot-com job cuts more than doubled in March compared with February, according to a new report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas. A total of 1,549 job cuts were announced during the month. Still, the damage was far less severe than a year ago, when more than 9,500 cuts were made in March. The ...

In its youth, as it struggled for acceptance, e-commerce could count on the spirited support of a handful of influential stock analysts. One by one, however, those cheerleaders have put away their pom-poms. "Analysts got too powerful, and they've been forced to back off considerably since things ...

In spite of a post-September 11th drop in online travel bookings, Jupiter Media Metrix expects online air, car, hotel and cruise sales will reach $64 billion in the next five years, up from $24 billion in 2001. In fact, the lagging economy is driving travel buyers to the Web in ever-increasing nu...

Economic realities forced e-commerce and the Internet to turn away from voracious growth and focus on long-term viability in 2001, creating a slew of new challenges, according to a report released by Nielsen//NetRatings. "Shoppers came with different expectations," T.S. Kelly, director and princi...

The Web is haunted by the ghosts of failed dot-coms, but at least the ones that have survived now have a good understanding of what not to do. One "deadly sin" of bygone days was e-tailers' single-minded focus on low prices. "The problem with being a low-cost provider is that you're constantly in...

Auction giant eBay has struck a partnership that will let it cozy up to the catalog industry, which in general has excelled at combining its traditional sales channel with the Web. "[Catalog firms] have the infrastructure in place already, the customer sales reps, the warehouses," Harris Interact...

According to auction giant eBay, government regulators have closed an investigation into whether the company engaged in anticompetitive practices in its battle with now-shuttered Bidder's Edge. "All the antitrust stuff, including the Bidder's Edge investigation, seems to have been much more of an...

It has been a tough year for the technology sector, but research firm Forrester said it expects the tech sector, propelled by a robust U.S. economic recovery, to turn around faster than previous projections indicated. "E-commerce growth will continue to expand independent of the tech recovery, bu...

Even as online shoppers multiply and increasingly mirror mainstream consumer profiles, sizable pockets of e-commerce abstainers remain. These neophytes, hampered by security or fulfillment concerns or inadequate Internet connections, still rely on the Web only for product research. To reach this u...