Business

Citing sweeping antitrust concerns, 20 U.S. states have filed a letter with the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) voicing their concerns about the controversial Internet mega-travel site Orbitz. According to published reports, the filing by state attorneys general from New York, Iowa and ...

Heidi Miller, hailed as a potential savior for Priceline.com (Nasdaq: PCLN) when the e-tailer hired her last year as chief financial officer, said Wednesday she has taken a job in the insurance industry. Miller -- whom Fortune magazine in 1999 called the second most powerful female executive in th...

There is an interesting paradox developing in the online bookstore industry. Fourth quarter revenues (including holiday sales) are up, and books continue to be the top-selling product category on the Net, but virtually across the board, book e-tailers are falling short of analyst earnings estimates....

Internet auction fraud accounts for 87 percent of all incidents of online crime, according to a new study released Tuesday by eMarketer. As part of its "ePrivacy & Security Report," eMarketer also found that more than 34 percent of Internet users have been targeted by a Web-based privacy or ...

Does the decision by Internet giant Yahoo! to start charging its users auction listing fees mark the beginning of the end for free Internet services and content? Starting Wednesday, Yahoo! began assessing fees of up to US$2.25 for auction listings, based on the starting and reserve prices of the it...

The Texas Attorney General's Office confirmed Wednesday that a Walt Disney Co. subsidiary has offered to pay bankrupt e-tailer Toysmart.com US$50,000 to destroy its customer database, including personal information about shoppers, shopping preferences and browser histories. If the offer, set to be ...

Shoppers spent US$878 million online in the week after Christmas, helping to push total sales during the holiday season to $10.7 billion, according to a study released Tuesday by Goldman Sachs and PC Data Online. Sales for the last week in December increased 60 percent over the $542 million spent d...

In December, the job placement firm of Challenger, Gray and Christmas released a report saying that Internet job losses had increased for seven straight months, and that more than 40,000 dot-com jobs had disappeared in a 12-month period. The sheer number of layoffs have gotten most of the attention...

Adding more figures to what has become a blur of holiday projections and pronouncements, a preliminary report released Monday by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Shop.org shows that online revenues for the 2000 holiday season were up 76 percent over the previous year. Revenues did not rise as ...

Although an increasing number of Internet users have turned to the Web to make sense of wild stock market swings in recent months, many consumer investors have grown dissatisfied with financial services sites, according to a report released Tuesday by Gartner Group-owned research firm cPulse. B...

Internet-based home delivery service Kozmo.com joined the long list of e-commerce companies to announce layoffs Monday, announcing that it will cut 120 workers and cease services in two U.S. cities. "Like any retailer, Kozmo is continually evaluating our strategy," spokeswoman Stephanie Cohen G...

Online sales for health and beauty products e-tailer Drugstore.com in the fourth quarter of 2000 totaled more than US$35 million, approximately a 90 percent increase over sales in the same quarter of 1999, the company announced Monday. Morningstar.com analyst David Kathman told the E-Commerce Times...

MVP.com announced Monday that it has laid off 36 more employees as part of a restructuring plan the online sports e-tailer began in December, when it laid off 79 people. MVP.com spokesperson Paula Davis told the E-Commerce Times that the layoffs were across all departments and all levels. The spor...

Despite the economic downturn and a generally gloomy outlook for the dot-world, companies around the globe will increase their spending on business-to-business (B2B) e-marketplaces from US$2.6 billion in 2000 to $137.2 billion by 2005, according to new data from Jupiter Research. Spending in N...

Internet brokerage firm Ameritrade Holding Corp. (Nasdaq: AMTD) announced Monday that it has cut more than 230 full-time employees from its payroll, or roughly 9 percent of the firm's more than 2,500 workers. In addition, Ameritrade said that 100 temporary employees will be let go. "We took this...