E-Commerce

With the formation of the PCI Security Standards Council, multichannel merchants, online retailers, consultants, payment processors, and virtually every organization that touches online payments should find it much easier to comply with the PCI Data Security Standard. The newly formed council also w...

Four major media companies are reportedly in discussions about launching their own Web-based video sharing site to compete with Google's YouTube. CBS, Viacom, NBC Universal and News Corp. are said to have held discussions about creating a rival to the wildly popular video sharing site, which Google ...

For many online merchants, the holidays account for almost half their yearly sales. Small and medium-sized online merchants have a prime opportunity this gift-giving season to attract new customers and keep them coming back throughout the year. From browsing to buying, the Internet will play a large...

Online merchants may want to rethink their advertising strategies next year for the weekend following Thanksgiving in light of a report released this week by BlueLithium Labs. The San Jose, Calif. maker of online advertising solutions reported that "click-through" rates -- the rate at which consumer...

In search, 2006 was a year of launches, re-launches and major partnership deals. Microsoft launched its ad platform. Yahoo started rolling out its improved paid ad platform, Panama. Google partnered with AOL and MySpace and bought YouTube. The search engine once known as "Jeeves" booted the butler a...

Yahoo said Tuesday it would undertake a major corporate restructuring aimed at capturing more of the growth in online advertising, with two top executives leaving the company and a third taking on an expanded role. Chief Financial Officer Susan Decker will leave that post to become head of the newly...

With the holidays approaching, many traditional and e-only marketers hope that the Web tools and designs they developed during 2006 ring in record sales over the Internet. To summarize what improvements online sellers made over the past 12 months, the E-Commerce Times talked to Jim Wehmann, vice pre...

Afternic, the leading U.S.-based domain name reseller, has been purchased by NameMedia in a deal announced on Nov. 28. The acquisition is significant because of the traffic generated from the 1.8 million domain names listed for sale on Afternic's marketplace. The full terms of Afternic's sale have...

For all the hoopla over search engine marketing, there is another method that could dramatically increase conversion rates for e-commerce players: site search. Site search can be as much as three times more likely to convert site visitors to buyers, according to a WebSideStory study. Last year, site...

In a bid to grab market share in a growing specialty area, Ask.com launched a revamped local search offering Monday, saying it was the first to offer intuitive search for finding neighborhood businesses along with bundled tools such as mapping and extensive, locally focused content. With AskCity, IA...

Following on the phenomenal success of Apple's iPod, there is a second wave of companies looking to ride the digital music and media convergence waves -- assembling a mix of music artists, private label "indie" music producers, and the giants of the PC and consumer electronics industries. It is too ...

More than a third of shoppers who have a poor experience on a Web site abandon the site entirely, according to JupiterResearch, and 75 percent are likely not to shop on that site again. That's a loud and clear wake up call to e-tailers. Now that you are awake, it's time to find out exactly what "poo...

In a setback to Google's efforts to fend off a copyright infringement suit stemming from its ambitious plan to create digital copies of millions of books, rival search engine Yahoo has declined to provide information about its own book digitization efforts. Neither Yahoo nor Google would comment, bu...

From the apparently sudden arrival of Web-based video distribution options to the growing sophistication of TV-like advertising online and the social networking phenomenon, the Internet drew attention and dollars away from newspapers, TV and radio in 2006. This coming of age did not take place overn...

Wal-Mart said Tuesday it would launch a downloadable video service, a move that could hasten the demise of the traditional DVD and help catapult the retailer into the center of the video-on-demand marketplace. The discount retail giant unveiled plans to launch a download-on-demand test in February 2...