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DVD rental site Netflix.com has filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for permission to raise up to US$115 million in an initial public offering, making it the second dot-com to hop on the IPO bandwagon this week. But Morningstar.com IPO analyst George Nichols told the E-Commerce...

Despite all the upheaval that has taken place to date, it has not gotten easier for a consumer to navigate the e-commerce landscape. Most sites within a sector present amazingly similar interfaces. And the current state of confusion fuels the likelihood that traditional retailers will win the day...

Just over a year ago, B2B e-commerce was all the rage. As it turned out, moving the buyer-supplier relationship onto the Web was not as easy as it initially seemed. But just because B2B fell short of the hype does not mean it is dead. "It seems like it failed now, but a lot of innovation is happe...

An e-business standards consortium is working to specify rules for using XML (extensible markup language) in biometrics for e-commerce and other applications. Biometrics, which verifies identity based on human characteristics like DNA, fingerprints, iris scans and hand geometry, has entered the p...

E-tailer Amazon.com said its free shipping offer is showing "pleasant" results and is helping to boost average order size, though the company likely will report higher shipping costs in coming quarters as a result of the deal. "I've generally been pretty impressed over the years with Amazon's abi...

If e-commerce were a mad dash to the finish line, pure-plays would have taken the gold medal. But it has turned into a marathon -- and as dot-com startups gasp for breath, traditional retailers are steadily passing them like the tortoise that whipped the hare. "There was a certain amount of waiti...

In response to Sabre Holdings corporation's bid to buy all outstanding shares of Travelocity.com for US$23 per share, analysts said Sabre likely would rob Travelocity of the management autonomy it has enjoyed to date. Given the low offer terms, there is little incentive for Travelocity to proceed ...

It shouldn't surprise me anymore, but I'm still shocked whenever I run across an e-commerce naysayer. These are people who wonder how long it will be until Amazon folds and who still use words like "fad" to describe business-to-consumer e-commerce. But even if these doubters are off the wall, sma...

EBay continues to stand out as one of the few clear-cut successes in the online world. Experts said several factors have put the company on top of the dot-com heap.

The online shopping population in the United States will double from 66 million to 132 million by 2006, according to a new report released by Jupiter Media Metrix. In addition, the average Web shopper will be older and less affluent than today's younger, wealthier Internet buyers. "They will be mo...

Grocery chain Albertson's has announced it will offer its online shopping service in Portland, Oregon, setting up a head-to-head battle with fellow brick-and-mortar grocer Safeway, which began service there in mid-January. Analysts said the move is a sign that a second wave of online grocery sale...

Many lessons can be learned from the merchants that hawk the best-selling products in e-commerce. Among other things, experts said, top sellers offer goods that are easy to ship; they successfully separate the product from the buying process; and they allow comparison shopping across multiple cha...

More than US$700 million in online sales was lost to fraud in 2001, according to a new report released by GartnerG2. Those losses represented 1.14 percent of annual online sales of $61.8 billion and were 19 times higher than fraud losses resulting from offline sales, the report said. "Fraudsters ...

Dot-com job losses dipped below 1,000 in February, falling to their lowest level in nearly two years, according to a new report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas. But the drop may mean that the Internet sector has few jobs left to lose, according to John Challenger, the outplacement firm's CE...

The "last mile" to consumers' doorsteps is arguably the most critical phase of online commerce. For a long time, e-tailers faced one shipping hurdle after another -- and often fell flat on their faces. While many companies recently have mended egregious deficiencies in their shipping operations, ...