Business

Suddenly, the word no one would utter is on everyone's lips -- the R-word, that is. Predictions of soft landings have given way to outright claims that a recession is upon us, or at least poised like a tiger to pounce at any moment. Given the host of factors working against e-commerce, the questio...

Many e-tailers will not have the capabilities to meet growing customer service demands this holiday season, according to a report issued by Jupiter Research and the NPD Group. Sixty-two percent of consumers who shopped online in 1999 and contacted customer service had a negative impression of onli...

The bad news from Internet companies continues unabated, with recent days bringing more reports of layoffs and grim financial forecasts. Internet consulting firms Organic and Bigstep.com, as well as RealNames.com, a company that operates an Internet keyword system, are among the latest dot-coms to ...

eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) and General Motors (NYSE: GM) announced Thursday that they have signed a co-marketing agreement that will see the Internet auction site and the auto giant partner on both online and offline promotions. Rich Christensen, Director of Alliances and Acquisitions at GM, told the ...

Eight of the 10 fastest growing retail sites on the Web are run by traditional retailers, according to a report released Friday by Jupiter Media Metrix. The New York-based market research firm said that while pure-play e-tailers continue to hold onto the top four spots in its overall ranking, offli...

All of us who have watched a lifetime's worth of CNN (and CNN.com) over the past 36 days are rubbing our eyes and realizing that Christmas is just 10 days away. And guess what? Not only have we not finished our holiday shopping yet, many of us have yet to start. We will get the shopping done. The ...

Auction sites are dominating the 2000 online holiday shopping season, according to a report issued by Media Metrix. For the two weeks ended November 26th and December 3rd, Web auction giant eBay averaged 60 percent more unique daily visitors than the Internet's top retail site Amazon.com, the r...

Furniture.com. Garden.com. Mortgage.com. Pets.com. If any four e-tailers had reason to believe they could succeed by name alone, these four did. Instead, within a 16-day span, all four generically-named companies announced they were shutting down operations. The momentum of the dot-com shakeout ha...

In a bid to stop a "new wave" of software pirates, the Business Software Association (BSA) announced Wednesday a set of voluntary guidelines to help online auction houses curb sales of illegal software at their sites. The guidelines are necessary because "many of the people who used to sell softwar...

The number of online shoppers continued to boom during the second week in December, with brick-and-click operations seeing the most traffic to their Web sites, according to the latest survey from measurement firm Nielsen//NetRatings. Traditional retailers' Web sites have seen a 103 percent surge...

Register.com on Wednesday launched an online auction service allowing businesses and individuals to bid for any of the 20 million Internet domain names already in use. The service, dubbed the Afternic Virtual Broker, will act as a middleman between bidders and the current owners of all ".com," ".n

Despite the fact that high-speed Internet access has yet to take a firm hold with the vast majority of the wired public, measurement firm Nielsen//NetRatings reported Tuesday that streaming media consumption soared 65 percent over the past year. According to the report, a record 35 million online...

Despite reports of hard times in the business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce sector, executives remain confident about the outlook for online marketplaces, according to a survey released Tuesday by consulting firm Arthur Andersen. The survey, which builds on the findings of a similar poll Andersen ...

Online retailers sold US$222 million worth of products on December 11th, establishing a new single-day sales record, Web measurement firm BizRate.com said Tuesday. The Los Angeles-based comparison shopping service predicted that the combined sales total for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of this we...

It probably surprised no one sitting at a desk to hear that Nielsen//NetRatings reported that 46 percent of all online shopping is done from work. The recent study simply confirmed what many people knew first-hand. There are few places more convenient for Net shopping than work, where the connection...