E-Commerce

I sometimes think personalization is the best thing that happened to humankind in terms of marketing. As a consumer, I love getting suggestions on what to buy, especially when it's exactly what I need. Sometimes I feel as though I'm under constant surveillance, however, so I turn on my ad blockers, ...

Recent events have led to many people learning about a long-understood rhetorical tactic called "Gish galloping." Named after creationist Duane Gish, it is the technique of confronting an opponent with a rapid-fire series of arguments -- including half-truths, misrepresentations and outright lies. C...

More than half the world's population -- 3.8 billion people -- have access to the Internet and that may not be a good thing, at least for business, according to digital savant Mary Meeker's Internet Trends 2019 report. Global Internet user growth has slowed to 6 percent year over year, down from 7 p...

Microsoft whetted the appetite of power-hungry Xbox gamers at its E3 preview, with new details about its next-generation gaming console code-named "Project Scarlett." The new Xbox will have a custom-designed AMD processor based on the latest Zen 2 and Radeon RDNA technology. Along with that processo...

Fraudsters have been stealing online advertisers blind -- to the tune of $23 billion, based on a report from Cheq. Indirect economic and social costs might increase the total to $30 billion. Marketers have been wasting billions of dollars on digital ads that never reach buyers' eyes. Up to 30 percen...

Salesforce has announced an all-stock deal to acquire analytics powerhouse Tableau Software. Salesforce will pay 1.103 of its shares for one Tableau share. The deal is expected to finalize by the end of October, about a month before Dreamforce. A number of questions arise from this deal. For instanc...

Mark Zuckerberg recently said that the future of Facebook is private. Interestingly, connecting the dots between all the announcements made at Facebook's 2019 developers conference draws a bright picture of what the future looks like for brands, small e-commerce stores, and new businesses using the ...

E-commerce businesses can either operate purely online, or they may also have material shopfronts. There are many benefits to running an e-commerce business, whether you operate purely online or not. Online transactions allow you to expand your reach and service more customers. However, there are ch...

Apple dangled the next versions of iOS, macOS and watchOS before developers' eyes during the keynote event at its World Wide Developers Conference in San Jose, California. In this round of operating system upgrades, Apple seems focused on improvements. "They're polishing a number of aspects of the o...

Payment processing company Stripe has launched Chargeback Protection, a machine learning-based system to limit the impact of fraudulent credit card transactions on merchants. A chargeback is a demand by a credit card provider for a retailer to make good on a fraudulent or disputed transaction by rep...

Building and sustaining a brand has gotten more challenging. The global marketplace, empowered by the Internet, has delivered a raft of opportunities to businesses, but it also has opened the door for challenges. These challenges include increased competition as the result of a wider market, and inc...

The budding online cannabis industry has a long way to go before it delivers bumper crops. The market for both recreational and medicinal cannabis has been plowed and pre-seeded by the previous underground market and the impetus of state laws legalizing its use. Still, the cannabis industry is almos...

Amazon has been reworking relationships with several of its long-time wholesale suppliers in a bid to cut costs, according to a report. Thousands of small suppliers that sell less than $10 million annually on Amazon's platform would lose bulk orders, while big brands like Procter & Gamble and Le...

Apple has refreshed its iPod touch line of media players with a faster processor, greater storage capacity and improved communications features. The new iPod is built on Apple's A10 Fusion chip, the same processor used in the iPhone 7. According to Apple, the power upgrade delivers two times faster ...