Spotlight Features

Few people quibble over smart card functionality. The cards -- embedded with a memory chip that can store everything from bank balances to prescription information -- are expected to increase the level of trust in e-commerce transactions for credit card companies, Web merchants and online shoppers a...

Remember when people actually wondered if there would be a dot-com shakeout? Remember when you were Chicken Little if you displayed any anxiety about the New Economy? When the sky finally fell -- and fell hard -- you were not alone if you were caught by surprise. After all, most analysts and invest...

A latecomer to the dot-com stage, discount e-tail site BlueLight.com is dancing as gracefully as it can through its first holiday season, sidestepping technical glitches caused by the seasonal shopping boom while displaying a variety of marketing moves that are drawing in more shoppers. A report re...

Furniture.com. Garden.com. Mortgage.com. Pets.com. If any four e-tailers had reason to believe they could succeed by name alone, these four did. Instead, within a 16-day span, all four generically-named companies announced they were shutting down operations. The momentum of the dot-com shakeout ha...

Within the next month, a mess of online holiday sales figures will be released, to be scrutinized like tea leaves for signs of e-commerce's ultimate fate. However, no matter how those numbers read, 2001 is shaping up as a year where traditional storefront and catalog retailers firmly take control of...

A year ago at this time, the online toy market was wide open, with a broad range of e-tailers great and small vying for dominance in the space. Now, only two primary candidates remain, but neither the intensity of the competition, nor the stakes, have diminished. What is clear at this point is tha...

Religion may rival sex and politics as a taboo subject for dinner table conversations, but mentioning money and religion in the same breath can cause even more squirming. Nevertheless, the relationship between church and cash is an inescapable issue for both the tiny house of worship that survives o...

Did you know that the current U.S. moratorium on Internet taxation does not ban taxes on goods sold via the Internet?

One of the fundamental rules of e-commerce is that for every dire prediction, there is an equal and opposite upbeat outlook, and vice versa. So it was a high mark of distinction -- for a while -- that not since consumers began flocking to the Web had a phenomenon been reported with as much consisten...

Online businesses unmistakably want to augment their customer relations with everything from instant messaging to real-time online voice conversations, as studies, analysts and experience have convinced the industry that high-tech customer service is key for retaining customers.

On the Web, somewhere between the categories of financial information and pornography, is another key sector where people pay for access: online dating services. Rather than exchanging books or CDs for cash, these sites trade on the quite powerful desire of singles to connect.