E-Commerce

For those aspiring or already doing business as an e-tail merchant, there is no shortage of e-commerce software developers with shopping cart technology for start-ups and small to medium-sized businesses. The real difficulty may lie in choosing among them and then putting it to productive use. To ge...

They have been making their lists and checking them twice. As a result, consumers will soon learn which retailers have been naughty or nice in planning for their most important part of their year: the holiday rush. "So much of retailers' business rides on the holiday season that they want to be sure...

The New England Patriots NFL football team now has customer information from ticket reselling service StubHub. The team gained access to a reported 13,000 records of people who purchased, sold or bid on Patriots tickets on the site after taking StubHub to court. Massachusetts Superior Court Judge Al...

One quarter after delivering a rare earnings miss, Google promptly returned to form Thursday, trouncing analyst expectations with strong revenue and earnings growth for its third quarter. Google said profit rose 46 percent to $1.07 billion on a 57 percent rise in sales to $4.23 billion. It was the 1...

A group of heavy-hitting media and Internet players have hammered out a plan to thwart the uploading and Web publication of copyrighted material, particularly video clips. Key to the plan's effectiveness is technology that will determine if content being posted to Web sites, such as MySpace and Veoh...

The music industry switched gears last week in its legal campaign to squash piracy of its intellectual property and filed a lawsuit against Usenet.com which it calls "a haven for those seeking pirated content." In recent months, the industry, through its trade organization, the Recording Industry As...

A massive write-down in the value of its Skype Internet calling subsidiary sent eBay to its first quarterly loss in its nearly decade-long history as a public company, but the auction giant otherwise managed to beat expectations and boosted its outlook. eBay had warned it would take the hit on its S...

Millions of MySpacers will be able to jazz up their profile pages with streaming videos and select audio material from Sony BMG artists, MySpace announced Tuesday. The deal between the No. 1 social networking site and Sony, the second largest recording label, will make content from artists including...

Media company EW Scripps announced a plan to split into two separate public companies: one for national media efforts and the other for local and community brands. The proposed split, expected to be completed early next year, is designed to allow the two separated companies to bring "sharpened strat...

Many e-commerce sites are terrible, but they don't have to be that way, according to Jim Wehmann. Wehmann is vice president for strategic marketing services for Minneapolis-based Digital River. The company, founded in 1994, is well-known around the world for building and managing online businesses f...

Two men have been successfully prosecuted for sending out millions of unsolicited e-mail messages promoting pornographic Web sites, and reaping millions of dollars as a result. Jeffrey A. Kilbride of Venice, Calif., was sentenced to six years, and James R. Schaffer of Paradise Valley, Ariz., was sen...

Chinese Internet company Alibaba.com will try to raise as much as $1.33 billion in an initial public offering slated for next month, according to reports. In what promises to be the largest such offering in history by a Chinese technology firm, the business-to-business operator will reportedly sell ...

Bolstering its online portfolio of informative offerings, Discovery Channel owner Discovery Communications is buying HowStuffWorks.com and planning to merge content to create a sort of "video Wikipedia." Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but Silver Springs, Md.-based Discovery noted HowSt...

Many video providers, particularly in the television and movie spaces, made significant strides to provide their content via a growing number of on-demand channels, including the Internet, in 2005. For video providers, the decision to embrace on-demand distribution was born as a response to both the...

While many companies are focused on their business online, they tend to put up sites that turn off rather than turn on potential customers. Because there are so many potential options, a business needs to be careful about how it designs its e-commerce site. For instance, a visitor can't purchase wha...