E-Commerce

Verizon is finally snapping out of the doldrums it has been stuck in for the last several years. It seems to be on a comeback trail, thanks to its new advertising campaign. Having followed the company for decades, I've noticed how all of a sudden, it is blowing its own horn again. This is what it sh...

Figuring out the year ahead in CRM is tricky and getting more so. Making predictions has been more challenging for the last several years. We've seen an array of new technologies take root and blossom, but managers have had trouble figuring out how to adopt them. Those innovations have fueled a lot ...

The Walt Disney Company's recent decision to purchase major assets of 21st Century Fox in a transaction valued at $52 billion underscores the huge potential for distributing information and entertainment via the Internet. The deal will allow the company to improve its direct-to-consumer offerings, D...

Moves that allowed major e-commerce players to jockey for position both off and on the Internet made headlines in 2017. "The year was a triumph for market leaders," said Mike Comstock, a senior adviser at GrandCanals. "Leading companies like Amazon, Target and Walmart just got stronger, as they have...

One thing the latest holiday sales season made crystal clear is that mobile commerce is on the rise. On Cyber Monday -- which set an all-time-high overall sales record of $6.6 billion -- mobile shopping totaled 47.4 percent of visits to retailers' websites, according to Adobe. However, etailers coul...

This holiday selling season may have been a good one for retailers, but every silver lining has a cloud. In this case, one shadow will be cast by chargeback fraud, which can occur when shoppers request credit card chargebacks from the issuing bank instead of from the merchant. "Merchants bleed $227 ...

For many online shoppers, shipping has become a pivotal issue, and one of the worst things an etailer can do is allow a shipment to be late. On-time arrival is such a high expectation that many shoppers find late delivery worse than other notoriously disagreeable things, a recent survey of online sh...

B2B ad spending will increase 13 percent in 2018 to hit $4.6 billion from this year's estimated $4.07 billion, eMarketer has predicted. However, its proportion of all U.S. digital ad spending will remain unchanged at 4.9 percent, which implies growth in other digital ad spend areas as well. Desktops...

Sixty percent of the digital marketing professionals who responded to a recent survey reported difficulty in reaching their target audiences with messaging and content. Only 19 percent of those surveyed were "very familiar" with how automation could help drive marketing campaigns, according to the r...

The FCC on Thursday voted 3-2 to repeal Obama-era Net neutrality rules that prevented Internet service providers from blocking, throttling or otherwise giving preferential treatment to customers. Backers of the repeal characterized it as promoting greater technological innovation and freedom to cond...

A group of 21 leading technology pioneers this week penned an open letter to key congressional leaders asking them to pressure FCC Chairman Ajit Pai to cancel Thursday's planned vote to repeal Net neutrality. The process is severely flawed, they argued, and a rules repeal poses an imminent threat to...

Nanopay has unveiled a new platform that will let companies process business-to-business payments between bank accounts across borders. The platform is currently in private beta. It will become generally available in February, initially enabling cross-border payments between Canada and the United St...

The latest price increases have come as Bitcoin increasingly has been recognized as a legitimate form of currency. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission last week announced that it would allow the trading of Bitcoin derivatives on the CME Group and CBOE Global Market exchanges.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's long-brewing plan to repeal Net neutrality has the broadband, telecom and entertainment worlds at loggerheads. The commission's expected Dec. 14 vote could result in a complete rewrite of the script for the Internet's competitive landscape and consumer protection models. The ...