Spotlight Features

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...

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...

These days, just about every business -- from the corner store to Wal-Mart -- has a Web presence. While the Internet's vast expanse provides companies with the ability to reach more potential customers, it also pits them against more competitors than ever before. As a result, it has become increasin...

Ask an IT executive to define service-oriented architecture, and there's a good chance you'll get at least some kind of a reasonable answer. Ask that executive's functional peers the same question, and the answer might not be so clear. SOA has become a hot topic in the IT world, and many view it as ...

With all the games people play with Internet company names, it's quite possible that someday no one will be able to spell anything correctly ever again. Perhaps it's already happening. Ever wonder how many times gross misspellings like "Del.icio.us" or "Flickr" show up on eighth-grade spelling tests...

One might argue that China and the Internet are both like high-speed trains. Both are growing at an extremely rapid pace, and both are apparently unstoppable global economic forces that are reshaping the economic landscape. Unfortunately, one might also argue that they are on a collision course. "Wh...

When Fox Interactive Media reported its first annual profit earlier this year, a message was sent to naysayers everywhere about the future of online advertising. Growth in advertising and search revenue at MySpace was largely responsible for the unit's profitability, and the result was a figurative ...

The fact that the name "Google" is often used interchangeably with the verb "search" today speaks volumes about the current state of the search market. "Right now it's Google's game to lose," Kevin Lee, executive chairman and cofounder of search marketing company Didit, told the E-Commerce Times. "T...

Retailers and the entertainment industry have been a combined force for years. Designers jump at the chance to drape their latest fashions across celebrity shoulders in an effort to reach the consumer. Until recently, however, that viewer would be hard pressed to actually locate that slinky little b...

Dubious pharmacies abound on the Internet, and they're posing a threat to both pharmaceutical companies and consumers. That's the main finding in brand-protector MarkMonitor's summer edition of its Brandjacking Index, released this week. "The data shows brandjackers are profoundly exploiting brands,...

The Internet is beginning to overtake TV as the preferred medium of consumers around the globe, according to a new survey sponsored by IBM. In the survey of more than 2,400 households in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan and Australia, the IBM Institute for Business Value found that ...

How to draw the advertising industry into the secondary market for domain names is preoccupying the domain name industry this year. Domain industry convocations have been grappling with the issue, seeing it as providing an opportunity for the secondary market to scale up and achieve sustained profit...

Small to medium-sized e-commerce companies can go a long way toward marketing themselves online by doing some simple search-engine optimization and taking the time to foster some inbound links to their site. Both can be done without an advanced degree in computer science, and both can cost little or...

One of the hard realizations that most new e-commerce companies must make sooner or later is that simply creating a Web site does not mean customers will visit it. Sure, there are hundreds of millions of potential customers online, but there are also billions of other Web sites competing for their a...

While Apple's iPhone clearly is aimed squarely at the consumer market, that hasn't stopped business users from coveting it as well -- and putting it to work. Independent software vendors are jumping in, making integration solutions and applications that work with the iPhone. NetSuite, for example, h...