Business

Brick-and-mortar pet superstore Petco announced Tuesday that it has acquired the assets of its e-tail affiliate Petopia for an undisclosed price. Petco said that it has no immediate plans to consolidate the e-commerce capabilities of Petopia into its own Petco site, which serves primarily as an onl...

Adding yet another dot-com shutdown to the ever-growing list, e-tailer Babygear.com has closed shop and filed for bankruptcy liquidation. A posting on the company's Web site says that the baby-products store is "unable to take orders, ship orders or issue credits," and urges customers to contact ...

Click Commerce, Inc. (Nasdaq: CKCM) advanced 3 3/16 to 22 5/16 Tuesday after the Chicago, Illinois-based company, which provides e-business applications and services, announced an alliance with Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT). Microsoft will provide Click Commerce with access to Microsoft enterpri...

Music and video retailer Tower Records has scored the latest victory for brick-and-click stores on the Net, edging out Internet heavyweight Amazon.com as the top online music seller in Forrester Research rankings released Tuesday. Forrester said that the first-place showing by Tower -- which has ai...

The main shopping site of Amazon.com suffered a 40-minute outage on Tuesday, the third and longest shutdown for the site since Thanksgiving. While Amazon has downplayed past outages, saying they would have "no measurable impact" on business, Morningstar.com analyst Patrick Dorsey told the E-Commer...

Americans spent $1.3 billion online during the week surrounding Thanksgiving, an increase of 140 percent over the same week in 1999, according to a survey released Tuesday by Goldman Sachs and PC Data. Goldman Sachs analyst Anthony Noto said that early indications point to holiday online sales dou...

To prevent the potential loss of over 5.2 million customers during the holiday season, Kmart-backed discount e-tailer BlueLight.com said Monday it is buying select assets from its defunct free Internet access provider, Spinway.com. As part of the acquisition, BlueLight will hire about 30 Spinway ...

Just two weeks after announcing changes in its executive team, controversial Web advertising giant DoubleClick (Nasdaq: DCLK) is laying off some 5 percent of its 2,100-person workforce. DoubleClick director of corporate communications Jennifer Blum would not confirm the number of employees being l...

U.S.-based online shoppers who buy products from other countries risk becoming ensnared in the intricate legalities that govern overseas purchases and importation, warned the U.S. Customs Service in an alert issued Monday. "Shopping on the Internet seems quick and easy, but buying gifts or other g...

Amid efforts to rebuild its stock value, CyberCash on Tuesday unveiled a new version of its online payment system aimed at the business-to-business (B2B) marketplace. CyberCash said several e-business companies, including YourAccounts.com, Oracle, IBM and Intershop, have agreed to integrate the co...

Defunct e-tailer Pets.com announced Monday that it has signed a non-binding letter of intent to sell its domain name and related trademarks to rival PetSmart.com. Along with the valuable Pets.com name, PetSmart will acquire various other URLs currently owned by Pets.com. Pets.com declined to say wh...

3Com Corp. (Nasdaq: COMS) was down 3 3/16 at 9 9/16 early Tuesday after the company became the latest high-tech company to predict a revenue shortfall for the coming quarter. The Santa Clara, California-based maker of networking equipment said revenue for the second quarter ended December 1st will...

Online privacy groups in the United States and the United Kingdom have asked government regulators, including the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), to investigate whether Amazon.com is deceiving customers and breaking privacy laws. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and Junkbusters...

Waffling on whether or not to support Napster? Maybe the news that Tony Bennett is a Napster man will change your mind -- or at least cause you to start lining up the musicians on both sides of the argument. For Napster: Bennett, Chuck D of Public Enemy, Ice-T, Don Henley, Bruce Springsteen and ...

Excite@Home (Nasdaq: ATHM) was up 1/4 at 6 1/8 early Tuesday after the provider of high-speed Internet access called off plans for a joint venture with the Chello Broadband unit of Dutch broadband provider United Group. The deal would have formed a new broadband subscriber company, Excite Chello, ...