E-Commerce

Only weeks after its triumphant initial public offering, it appears daily deal trailblazer Groupon has fallen out of investors' good graces. Its stock price has plunged 15 percent, with shares hovering near their IPO average of $20 or so per unit. In the months leading up to its IPO, Groupon experie...

The flash mob dance by the world's most powerful groups of agencies against ICANN's new gTLD domain name program must not be taken lightly. After all, these global bodies represent the real manipulaters of emotions. They influence our taste, habits and behavior -- like type of cereal, length of skir...

More than 200 labels held by content distributor ST Holdings have decamped Spotify, Simfy, Rdio and Napster recently over concerns the digital music streaming services' business models are detrimental to sales. Most of the labels involved are relatively small. ST Holdings was bowing to pressure from...

The existing model for daily deals is broken. The biggest issue: It's simply not making merchants money. In just a few quick years, daily deals have shifted the concept of local marketing from traditional advertising to blanket discounts aimed at driving first-time customers en masse. While the new...

It looks like the Kindle Fire is a loss leader for Amazon product sales. IHS iSuppli tore apart a Kindle Fire to assess the cost of the tablet's bill of materials. The research firm announced on Friday that the Fire's BOM adds up to $185.60. The cost drifts up to $201.70 when manufacturing services ...

Yelp filed for an initial public offering Thursday, joining a cadre of social websites that have either made the leap into public trading recently or are aiming for it in the near future. In going public, Yelp hopes to raise as much as $100 million. The San Francisco-based company has gained popular...

In an effort to compete in the digital music market against giants Apple and Amazon, Google debuted its online music store Wednesday, where users can purchase and stream songs through the search giant's Android market. It also opened its free online music locker service to all users. Google Music w...

The TV world may soon go the way of the phone and the music industry: a complete deconstruction thanks to the Internet. The next step may come from Sony. The company is experimenting with an online TV service, according to a recent report. Sony has reportedly reached out to several large media compa...

Tech heavyweights such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and Zynga are lining up in opposition to a copyright enforcement bill that will be the subject of a hearing in the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee on Wednesday: the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. The companies sent a letter to key me...

For U.S.-based retailers, running a successful global e-commerce business takes the right balance of strong local marketing and effective operations. While it is essential that retailers cater to local customer experience expectations, it is also critically important to abide by local laws and regu...

Citigroup has reached an agreement to sell its music label, EMI Group, in two parts for a total of $4.1 billion. Universal Music Group has announced it is buying EMI's recorded music division for $1.9 billion. Sony/ATV, according to news reports, has nabbed -- or is poised to nab shortly -- EMI's pu...

Google has acquired a startup called Apture that provides a new type of search functionality beneficial to publishers -- or anyone, that is, who hates to see Web users leave a page's content to search out related information. Apture has developed technology that displays links to related information...

Rumblefish and APM Music are teaming up to offer an online catalog of popular music and soundtracks to consumers looking to legally add sound to personal video content such as YouTube videos, slideshows or presentations. The partnership, announced Thursday, combines Rumblefish's experience with soci...

A bipartisan trio of Senators has introduced a bill that gives states the authority to collect online sales taxes. The measure, cosponsored by Senators Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., Dick Durbin, (D-Ill., and Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., carves out an exception for small businesses, one of the main objections to t...

AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo are joining forces to sell unused online ads to each other, a position designed to combat the growing market dominance of Google and Facebook. The partnership will allow the companies to buy and sell each other's online inventory of ads. The companies are interested in uppin...