Business

Possibly indicating a consumer cooldown in the e-tail arena, online spending during the week following the Thanksgiving holiday topped out at about US$1.3 billion -- representing just a 50 percent increase over last year's figures for the same period -- according to a new study released Monday b...

Under the terms of an agreement announced Tuesday, Covisint principals Ford and General Motors will take a combined equity stake of US$1.2 billion in e-commerce infrastructure provider Commerce One (Nasdaq: CMRC). As part of the deal, Commerce One will share in revenues generated by the busines...

According to a study released Monday by business services firm Ernst & Young, Canadian consumers plan to spend 14 percent of their holiday shopping funds online -- a 100 percent increase over last year's level but still less than half as much as their American counterparts. Despite the lag, res...

The frenzy over locating Sony PlayStation 2 (PS2) video game consoles is fostering an online uproar, causing the police in the United States and Canada to work overtime to stop fraudulent Internet sales, while elsewhere Web retailers are putting in long hours resolving technical problems caused...

State investigators in New Jersey have subpoenaed records from Toysrus.com as part of an ongoing investigation into the online toy store's privacy practices, the Associated Press reported Monday. The Paramus, New Jersey-based brick-and-click toy retailer confirmed that investigators from the New J...

Here in the season of insane buying, it may be useful to point out that Americans are essentially a giving people. This generosity toward those less fortunate is a consistent national characteristic that the country should be proud of. Of course, where there are significant amounts of money, busine...

National Security Council top cyber-official Richard Clarke said Friday that the next president of the United States has to make Internet security a top priority if the country is to avoid potentially catastrophic events. "What are we prepared to do now to reduce the probability and to mitigat...

Driven by business-to-business (B2B) spending, e-commerce revenues could reach US$4 trillion by 2004, according to a new report from eMarketer. The eGlobal Report reveals that the B2B sector currently accounts for 79.2 percent of total e-commerce spending, but will grow to 87 percent of total ...

Forty-five percent of this holiday season's online shoppers are making their first purchases ever over the Internet, according to a survey released Monday by Active Research. The study suggests that "click-and-mortar" retailers will benefit the most from the influx of these newbies, as one third o...

Within the next month, a mess of online holiday sales figures will be released, to be scrutinized like tea leaves for signs of e-commerce's ultimate fate. However, no matter how those numbers read, 2001 is shaping up as a year where traditional storefront and catalog retailers firmly take control of...

Priceline.com has name recognition that only eBay and Amazon can rival. But while the other two companies have mixed in positive reports from time-to-time, even as they struggle against the downward flow of stock on the Nasdaq, Priceline hasn't been able to get our attention with much of anything bu...

Online pharmacy Drugstore.com continues to narrowly outpace niche competitor PlanetRX.com and retains the No. 1 spot among Internet health retailers, according to new rankings released by Forrester Research. Although researchers surveyed a number of e-tailers in the category, they concluded that th...

E-tail giant Amazon won top sales honors for November, when 3 million buyers passed through its virtual doors, according to figures released Thursday by PC Data Online. By comparison, Amazon had 1.5 million buyers in the previous month and 1.8 million buyers in November 1999. Amazon's nearest compe...

With an eye toward focusing on its core businesses, Priceline.com (Nasdaq: PCLN) said Thursday it has fired 48 workers, shelved plans to expand into Japan, and indefinitely postponed new product introductions. Priceline also postponed plans to expand its name-your-own-price model into other are...

Yahoo! Inc. fell Thursday for the second day in a row, reaching a 52-week low after yet another analyst expressed concern about the effect of slowing Internet advertising sales on the company. Yahoo! dropped 2 9/16 to 34 15/16 after W.R. Hambrecht analyst Derek Brown cut his investment rating on Ya...