by Geoffrey A. Fowler, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
E-commerce reduces the environmental impact of shopping by using about a third less energy than traditional retail–but only if you skip the express airmail.
A study out Tuesday by the Carnegie Mellon Green Design Institute offers a scientifically rigorous estimate of e-commerce’s green benefits. E-commerce not only uses less energy, but its carbon footprint is also a third smaller than bricks-and-mortar retail, the scientists found.
With nearly 2,000 “friends” on Facebook, I should be a regular visitor to the site. I am not. Instead, I prefer to use Facebook’s mobile application on my iPhone to send messages, update my status, upload photos taken on the go and sometime even scroll through the news feed to see what my friends are up to. We are at the cusp of a new era in which the mobile and the wired web converge.
by Geoffrey A. Fowler, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
The recession is taking a serious toll on American retail, but e-commerce could emerge as a winner.
According to a new report by Forrester Research, e-commerce sales (beyond travel) are likely to grow 11 percent to $156 billion in 2009. That marks a slowdown from 13 percent growth last year and 18 percent in 2007. The major factor contributing to the pace shift is, of course, declining consumer confidence.
by Eric Savitz, Blogger and Columnist, Barron's, Tech Trader Daily
The Street is suddenly concerned about pressure on gross margins at Amazon.com. The issue came up in two Street research notes this morning; while in the real world it takes three data points to declare a trend, I’ll settle for two.
by Christopher Lawton, Consumer Technology Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
No retail category had a great Christmas, but e-commerce players have some reason to gloat over their brick-and-mortar counterparts: In certain key holiday categories, online sales outperformed offline retail sales, according to market research firm comScore.
by Tiernan Ray, Blogger, Barron's, Tech Trader Daily
There are plenty of “roundups” and tallies of shopping to choose from at this point in the new year, but the more you read them, the less appealing the headlines are. Last week came word from research firm comScore, which tracks Web users’ activity, that sales from Nov. 1 through Dec. 21–in other words, through the last weekend before Christmas–had fallen one percent.
by Tiernan Ray, Blogger, Barron's, Tech Trader Daily
ComScore last night published its statistics of U.S. visits to shopping Web sites from home and work, and found that Apple and Amazon had the biggest jump in unique visitors for the period from Nov. 1 to Dec. 23. (Dec. 23 is selected by comScore as the last day shoppers could buy online with hopes of getting deliveries in time for Christmas.)
by Tiernan Ray, Blogger, Barron's, Tech Trader Daily
A report put out today by Sanford Bernstein analyst Jeffrey Lindsey claims the same disparity in growth between the U.S. and the rest of the world exists in e-commerce as exists in economic growth overall.
In the wake of Microsoft’s aborted courtship of Yahoo and Jerry “Oh, did you increase your offer?” Yang, there’s bound to be a lot of scrutiny about what’s next for Yahoo.
If tax-hungry politicians get their way, the days of ordering items over the Internet and not paying sales tax may become just a fond memory. Right now, if a California resident orders something from Seattle-based Amazon.com, for instance, he or she won’t be charged sales tax at the time of purchase. That’s because Amazon doesn’t have offices in the state of California. Pro-tax politicians want to change this by allowing California to force Amazon to collect and submit sales taxes–and they may have found an ally in a U.S. Congress that’s controlled by Democrats.
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