E-Commerce

Online auction house and retailer eBay announced a profitable third quarter on Thursday but warned an already-volatile Wall Street that continued weakness in consumer spending would hurt sales throughout the rest of the year. The company reported Q3 earnings of $492.2 million, compared to a loss of ...

Gartner has released a list of the top 10 technologies that will dominate the landscape for the next three years. The release comes at a jittery time for technology stocks and early stage startups alike, with all the major market indexes on a downward spiral. The list also comes just one day after t...

Among dreamy startups and salty e-commerce veterans alike, Zappos.com appears to be the golden grail -- certainly one blessed, at least, with heavenly rewards. "Zappos is the Amazon of the shoe business, and its model is extremely difficult to mimic," Gene Alvarez, vice president of research at Gart...

The Federal Trade Commission has essentially shut down the largest spam operation in the world, freezing the assets of two of its accused ringleaders. Lance Atkinson, a New Zealand citizen living in Australia, and Jody Smith of Texas, deceptively marketed a variety of products through spam messages,...

Search engine giants Google and Yahoo are in talks with the U.S. Department of Justice in the hopes of alleviating regulators' antitrust concerns regarding their pending online ad sharing deal. Reports that the three sides were meeting first surfaced early Tuesday. Antitrust issues have been raised ...

The new film "Flash of Genius" may be based on a 1960s case of patent infringement, but its David-vs.-Goliath story involving independent inventors going up against monolithic corporations continues to spin off sequels well into the 21st Century, says a Minneapolis-based patent attorney. And while t...

MySpace has launched a new online display advertising tool for small businesses and individuals called "MyAds." The service is similar to the Beverly Hills, Calif.-based social network's ad platform for large businesses, HyperTargeting, which made its debut in November 2007. Like HyperTargeting, MyA...

The Internet often has the effect of eliminating the middle man and enabling consumers to complete tasks directly. While these changes have occurred swiftly in some markets, they have been evolving more slowly in the legal profession. In fact, the process of finding legal advice is quite similar to ...

The retail marketplace has become intensely competitive, as retailers increasingly compete across traditional segment boundaries, brands expand their direct-to-consumer channels, and consumers exercise their growing power to seek out the best value for their dollar. In addition, consumer expectation...

There's big money in counterfeiting name-brand goods. Sales of knockoff products over the Internet climbed to nearly $120 billion in 2007, up from $84 billion the previous year, estimated MarkMonitor, an online protection firm that works with eBay and other online auction houses to shut counterfeite...

Yahoo is getting into the analytics game with the launch of a new traffic measuring tool. Yahoo Web Analytics builds on the IndexTools system acquired by the company in April. The rebranded platform is currently available in beta mode only to registered Yahoo Small Business customers and a small sub...

Google is expanding its market-making ad platform to reach online gamers, a 200-million-strong constituency, with the introduction of a beta program, AdSense for Games. As part of the AdSense platform, it operates much as one would expect: Game producers can display video ads, image ads or text ads ...

Search engine giant Google has taken yet another step in its effort to monetize YouTube, the online video portal it acquired for $1.65 billion about two years ago. Now, YouTube users can click on advertisement links leading them to products offered for sale at online outlets like Apple's iTunes stor...

Google's new Web browser, Chrome, is key to the company's push to connect its myriad Web offerings and become an integrated online service provider. That said, writing it off a month after its release -- based partly on figures that show a decline in downloads -- seems more Schadenfreude than sober ...

Woopra, a new Web-tracking and analysis service designed by iFusion Labs, began quietly enough. iFusion Labs CEO John Pozadzides, along with his partners, Elie Khoury and Jad Younan, launched the site at Word Camp, a convention for bloggers, in March 2008, offering memberships to 200 attendees. The ...