Spotlight Features

Before the first month of the year was over, it was clear that 2001 was going to be different than other years in the short history of e-commerce. Amazon.com made a pledge to turn in pro forma operating profits by the end of the year. As often happens when bellwether companies speak, others soon ...

Though the heaviest casualties of the dot-com shakeout are in the past, experts say 2002 will be another year of consolidation for the e-commerce industry. A faster economic recovery may mean a higher number of e-commerce survivors left standing at year's end. At the same time, a prolonged recess...

Internet drugstores have had a tough time finding a cure for sluggish sales and weak consumer adoption rates in their sector. "Retailers like Rx.com and PlanetRx.com thought they could steal away some of the mail-order prescription business and be viewed from an insurance perspective as a mail-or...

While online merchants were forced to contend with costly Web site outages and misfires during the holidays of past years, the 2001 season is shaping up to be a relatively uneventful affair. "This fear factor has caused people to pay more attention to the right things," Forrester Research directo...

The Web and e-mail have brought unprecedented speed and efficiency to the dissemination of product and company awareness, but high-tech PR professionals still rely on traditional communications vehicles for tangible results. "The Internet has become the new water cooler -- a destination to hear g...

While the digital divide -- the rift between those with access to computers and the Internet and without -- continues to crumble in the United States, analysts generally agree that e-commerce is not seeing the benefits of that trend. Because income is a bigger factor than Web access when it comes...

At the onset of the busiest shopping season of the year, e-commerce in the United Kingdom got a big boost from the British government in the form of a media blitz designed to get shoppers "clicking with confidence." In contrast, few analysts expect the U.S. government's laissez-faire approach to ...

Experts told the E-Commerce Times that the Web is nearly a perfect medium for conducting marketing research. It is less costly and faster than traditional methods, such as mail and telephone surveys, and recent success stories have helped erase many lingering questions about the accuracy of Web-b...

The success that Dell Computer has had with its build-to-order (BTO) sales philosophy raises the question of whether that model could apply more widely to e-commerce. Analysts and observers told the E-Commerce Times that while some retailers might succeed using BTO with certain high-margin, high-...

Before long, business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce may become a misnomer, because opportunities for online innovation and value creation reside more within multipartner collaboration than in transaction processing, analysts say. The prospect of "automating the entire purchasing process seems dim ...

With global tensions and economic insecurity shadowing what is typically a season of generosity and cheer, the retail industry had reason to fear that this year's holiday shoppers would shy away from offline retailers, online retailers -- or both. However, e-commerce's difficult shift from a pure...

When it was the new thing, e-commerce seemed to be all about fun. Then when e-tailers began putting the emphasis on making a sale and surfers on finding value, fun went out the window. Still, not every Web merchant is ready to give up on the idea that they can put online shoppers in a buying mood...

Few segments of e-commerce have been more over-hyped, and more disappointing, than mobile commerce. Yankee Group mobile analyst Adam Zawel told the E-Commerce Times that companies have failed to convince consumers of the worth of m-commerce. "There needs to be a reason to make a purchase using yo...

Efforts to develop viable alternative electronic payment systems resemble Wright Brothers-era attempts to build a functioning airplane. Somehow, someway, e-commerce is determined to get a new electronic payment system off the ground. So despite infrequent success, the new ideas keep coming. And p...

The next phase of e-commerce may cast the World Wide Web in a backup role. Often mistakenly equated to the Internet, the Web's shortcomings as a commerce medium have analysts forecasting a new era of Internet commerce. "[The Web] will be augmented and changed, not obsolete," Jupiter Media Metrix ...