Spotlight Features

When Furniture.com folded one year ago, many saw the end of online retailing for furniture. And six months earlier, when Boo.com became the first truly high-profile example of the e-commerce shakeout, serious questions were raised about whether consumers would ever buy clothes online in significa...

As Web merchants head into the holiday season, e-tail marketers are looking at a whole bunch of skittish and penny-pinching consumers -- and trying to figure out how to get them to purchase gifts online. "To combat sluggish consumer spending, online retailers will be forced to come up with innova...

Looking to raise money for a small online business? Experts say that in today's difficult economic environment, some basic tenets for securing financial backing remain -- but other rules have changed, and it is as important as ever to be abreast of those changes. For example, Gartner Group analyst...

Experts say that strategic and operational preparations by an e-commerce company for 2002 should have been set in motion well before today. With all the uncertainty ahead, analysts told the E-Commerce Times that the best defense for e-businesses is to get their own houses in order -- to shape up ...

'Tis the season for online shopping forecasts. A survey of this season's predictions reveals that most of the major research firms are actually fairly close in their forecasts, but with some important distinctions. "I would focus less on the absolute numbers and more on the growth," Jupiter Media...

Today's e-tailers are laser-focused on expediting the purchasing process, so designers must justify their work in terms of usefulness first -- and aesthetics second. That is not to say interactive and multimedia Web design solutions are inherently counterproductive. "It has to do with a greater a...

Everybody knows there is a clog in the e-commerce IPO pipeline, but who knows which firms will step forward with an initial public offering after the clog clears? Market watchers say it is never too early to peer up the IPO pipeline and start to identify the firms most likely to take a run at goi...

While EBay remains first and foremost an auctioneer, its fixed-price push is helping the company solidify its position as an open, online marketplace -- while at the same time positioning it for a challenge to Amazon.com in the third-party e-tail market. Forrester analyst Carrie Johnson told the ...

In the "real world," the opportunities for a new startup or even a small, established business to link up with some of the world's largest companies are few and far between. But on the Web, teaming up the big boys and small fry is the order of the day. Gartner analyst Robert Anderson told the E-C...

Despite concerns from federal officials that taxes will stifle growth of the Internet economy, industry and government observers told the E-Commerce Times that an end to a moratorium on certain Internet taxes will not mean the extinction of e-commerce. Gartner Dataquest principal analyst Ron Cowl...

Many companies are beginning to throw in the towel when it comes to getting adolescents to make a purchase online. However, it might be too soon for e-tailers to surrender to the teen e-commerce problem. What follows is an exploration of the attempts companies can make to cap the generation gap a...

It's one of the oldest forms of communication, but word-of-mouth remains a potent marketing force in the digital age. E-commerce experts say that pass-it-along marketing -- also known as viral marketing -- is a highly effective way to create online buzz for new products and services. Analysts tol...

Want to write a plan for an e-business that will impress post-shakeout investors? Start with a business that makes money, experts say, and then explore how the Web can help your business succeed. "Treat your e-business like any business startup," Al Napier, a professor of e-business and entrepre...

Hard times have come to the e-commerce software industry -- and they've come with a vengeance. "Everyone's suffering right now," Aberdeen Group analyst David Alschuler told the E-Commerce Times. "It's affecting every vendor. But really the ones with smaller market shares and less liquidity are go...

It's no secret that mis-targeted, misspent brand advertising dollars have gotten e-tailers into plenty of financial hot water over the past few years. However, there is at least one target audience for whom a large, consistent dose of brand marketing makes perfect sense. In fact, when it comes to...