E-Commerce

The Christmas shopping season may be officially over -- but online shopping continues to flourish with consumers still scrambling to buy iPods, XBox 360s, DVDs and baby cribs and strollers. Wait -- cribs and strollers? The Shopping.com Consumer Demand Index (CDI) for the period of December 26, 2005 ...

Many Web businesses do not provide a compelling customer experience; some sites are simply unusable, while others fail to provide content, goods and services that match their customers' needs and expectations. To make matters worse, most e-tailers do a poor job of effectively assessing their custome...

Shares of Yahoo took a hit Wednesday, a day after the portal and search company reported earnings that, while up sharply from a year ago, fell short of expectations. Some analysts wondered whether the overall strength of the Internet sector in the fourth quarter had been overstated in forecasts, whi...

Interest in surveys that purport to identify averages and norms is so great that the myths this type of research spawns are sometimes floated as sophisticated branding and marketing strategies. Cures are invented, fads are nurtured, styles are crushed and dogmas are erected as though mandated by som...

For many e-commerce companies, the temptation to revel in the success of the 2005 holiday season is a powerful one. Many sites saw strong double-digit growth, with more shoppers than ever buying more online than ever before, helping to extend the e-commerce shopping season later than in the past. It...

Google has agreed to acquire Newport Beach, Calif.-based dMarc, which develops digital applications for the radio broadcast industry, for US$102 million in cash. DMarc connects advertisers directly to radio stations through its automated advertising platform. Its technology is designed to simplify t...

Microsoft is establishing a research center called adLab that will develop new ways to provide even more detailed demographic data about consumers, as well as new marketing technologies, to online advertisers. AdLab, which is a joint effort of MSN's adCenter and Microsoft Research, is located at a s...

One twentieth of a second. That's about how long it takes for a Web site to make a first impression on an Internet user, according to researchers at a Canadian university, whose findings could have competitive impacts for businesses on the Web. Dr. Gitte Lindgaard and colleagues from Carleton Univer...

Setting the stage for a bruising battle for paid search supremacy with Google and others, Microsoft is putting the finishing touches on its MSN adCenter system, which will offer a self-service, targeted way to buy pay-per-click search advertising. Microsoft said its adCenter would be ready in the U....

Saying even its smaller business customers need more powerful search solutions, Google is broadening its menu of enterprise-search appliances to include two larger versions of the Google Mini. The day before the one-year anniversary of the launch of the Mini, Google's first search appliance designed...

Corporations are in need of quick and serious shock therapy to prod them out of the complacency of owning a few flashy Web sites. The exuberance that attended these early achievements fueled the false notion in many corporate boardrooms that their firms had become "the master players of global e-com...

Tucked away inside the wave of enthusiasm over the strong 2005 holiday shopping season -- which saw sales exceed forecasts while shoppers expanded their buying to new categories -- is a slight complication that could trip up some retailers hoping to turn those great sales into great profits. One of ...

Seeking to buy its way to a stronger position in the emerging video search and download marketplace, America Online said it would acquire video search firm Truveo, Inc. Terms of the deal -- AOL's fifth acquisition in a year -- were not disclosed. Truveo, which is privately held, was founded in Janua...

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who spent much of 2005 buying up Internet properties, may be poised to invest as much as US$1 billion into developing high-speed wireless Internet connectivity through the DirecTV division of News Corp. The DirecTV effort, which Murdoch said it would reveal in full in com...

North American advertisers spent US$5.75 billion on search engine marketing in 2005, a 44 percent increase over the previous year, according to a report released Monday by the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO). The report, based on a survey of 553 respondents and conducted by...