Spotlight Features

Faced with intense pressure to grow their businesses quickly, e-commerce executives have been forced to make countless critical decisions -- sometimes at odds with what had once been unassailable Old Economy practices. With online enterprises confronted by as many tests as ever, the E-Commerce Ti...

Despite the dot-com downturn, there is still room for small offline retailers on the Web and good reasons for them to be there, according to industry analysts. Gartner research director David Schehr told the E-Commerce Times that the real value of the Web to small retailers is its ability to pro...

How many times have you stopped just short of completing an online order because you were not sure of a product's size, color or overall look? If you're like most online consumers, the answer is probably: many, many times. And e-tailers know it. As a possible solution, many e-tailers are turning ...

To date, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has only gone after spam in cases in which deceptive advertising was being prosecuted. Unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE) itself, regardless of its contents, has not been a target. Some experts think that should change. "The issue is crystal clea...

While the Internet is proving to be a valuable tool for homebuyers, offering information about prices, neighborhoods and mortgage options, the Web is unlikely to replace the local real-estate agent anytime in the near future, analysts say. Real estate brokers and agents, however, have to keep pac...

In Part 1 of this primer for small offline businesses that want to go online, we saw how much planning is involved in making the move, from selecting the inventory that will be sold, to choosing which companies will design and host the site. In Part 2, we learn that setting up an e-tail outlet a...

Setting up an e-tail outlet is a natural progression for small offline retailers, according to experts, but in order to succeed, retailers need to plan, plan, plan. For starters, Gartner research director David Schehr told the E-Commerce Times, retailers need to carefully evaluate whether they ar...

Is the strip-mall travel agent going to go the way of the dinosaur? With the surge of travelers turning to Internet sites to purchase their airline tickets, many are asking about the long-term viability of traditional travel agents, and even predicting their eventual demise. "The agent who can ge...

Want to see the future of online advertising? Among other things, it looks just like something you would find on your TV set. "We're already seeing (online) ads look more like TV commercials, and that's only going to continue," Denise Garcia, research director for media at GartnerG2, told the E-...

Can we conclude that as long as e-tailers carefully manage consumer expectations, and leverage technology and delivery partnerships, they can rest easy about their logistics processes? Not quite. Managing logistics costs continues to be a major hurdle for e-tailers, and is often the key reason th...

Nielsen//NetRatings recently estimated that the number of online users grew 16 percent from July 2000 to July 2001, with nearly 60 percent of Americans now online. The Internet, NetRatings said, is "now reaching the latter half of mainstream America," with late adopters helping to push Web use to...

When Buy.com announced that its ability to accept credit cards -- and therefore its viability as a business -- was in doubt, the admission shed new light on some important but often overlooked partners for many e-tailers: credit card processors. With the help of its founder and soon-to-be-owner S...

The back-to-school shopping season might not be the biggest quake on the e-commerce Richter scale -- holiday gift-giving tends to rock the e-tail world more. Even so, the return to the classroom provides a welcome excuse for e-tailers to convince consumers to shake off the summer doldrums and sta...

The bad news for more than 40,000 dot-com workers came when their employers told them they were no longer needed. For some, the worse news might be the reception they get on the job market -- or the adjustment in expectations and work habits they have to make in order to find new employment. "W...

If you live in an area where online grocery service does not exist, you might need to be more patient than ever. In the new age of online delivery, Net grocery providers have become extremely cautious not only about what cities they will venture into, but even which neighborhoods within a given c...