Depending on whom you ask, U.S. online shopping is either in unprecedented decline–or one of the only bright spots in American retail.
On Thursday, comScore reported that U.S. online spending in the third quarter slipped two percent to $29.6 billion versus last year.
EBay Inc.’s PayPal plans to unveil a new system that makes it easier for software developers to integrate the online payments system right into their programs–as the company takes new steps to protect its turf.
With the new open software, called Paypal X, users won’t have to type their username and password into a separate PayPal Web site in order to complete a payment.
Earlier this week, we told you about a project by real-estate site Zillow.com to use their data to figure out which are the best neighborhoods to hit on the trick-or-treat circuit.
Initially, Zillow’s Trick or Treat Index was only available for Seattle and Los Angeles. But after being inundated by blog interest and requests for additional data, Zillow added lists of the top candy-harvesting neighborhoods in San Francisco, Chicago and Boston.
We already have a ton of passwords to remember. Now Amazon.com wants us to remember something new–PayPhrase–which has already sparked an online pile on.
The program, which Amazon announced Wednesday, is supposed to replace ordinary login and password combinations with a phrase and PIN combination that are linked to a specific account and shipping address.
Geeks and ghouls rejoice: the Internet has come up with a way to boost your Halloween haul.
The folks at Zillow.com have created their first Trick or Treat Housing Index, which draws on the site’s real estate data to determine the top-five neighborhoods in Seattle and Los Angeles to maximize candy intake this Saturday.
Amazon.com has ended a trial program to sell wine online, the company confirmed.
The wine sales pilot, which the e-commerce giant launched last year, was intended to sell wine from California’s Napa Valley and other U.S. regions.
Thomas Dart, the Illinois sheriff who took on Craigslist, has lost his legal battle with the online classifieds site. But he vows not to give up.
“It wasn’t a publicity stunt,” said Dart of the suit he filed in March to shut down the “erotic services” section of Craigslist, which he said catered to prostitution.
A new electronic book reader is expected Tuesday from book seller Barnes & Noble Inc. that will challenge readers from Amazon.com Inc. and Sony Corp. with a color touch-screen and $259 price, according to a planned ad for the device.
The Web can be a mean-spirited place. But when it comes to online reviews, the Internet is a village where the books are strong, YouTube clips are good-looking and the dog food is above average.
One of the Web’s little secrets is that when consumers write online reviews, they tend to leave positive ratings: The average grade for things online is about 4.3 stars out of five.
Amazon.com, which wants to be the Internet’s general store, is adding one more category to the range of private label products it sells online: electronics accessories.
The “Amazon Basics” line launched on Saturday with products like audio-video cables and blank DVDs–all sourced and designed by the e-commerce company.
Amazon.com Inc. is quietly expanding its private-label business in a bid to diversify away from its online bookstore roots and become more like a general retailer.
The latest sign: The Seattle-based e-commerce giant–known for high-tech innovations like one-click checkout and the Kindle e-reader–last month received a U.S. design patent for a wooden chopping block.
There are growing signs of tension between some of the players behind the $2 billion deal to sell eBay’s Skype to a group of investors.
On Friday, Joost, the U.K. Internet video company, said that by shareholder vote it had removed Michelangelo Volpi from its board of directors and from his position as chairman of the company. Volpi, a former high-level Cisco executive, stepped down from Joost’s CEO position in July, and is now a general partner at investment firm Index Ventures.
Tech CEOs spend a lot of time taking questions in front of the camera. Lately, eBay’s top boss John Donahoe has been spending some time behind one.
Amid a turnaround effort at eBay’s online marketplace, he has been meeting with the company’s merchants and taping the conversations with a Flip camcorder.
Amazon took a lot of heat in July when it wirelessly deleted copies of two George Orwell titles from the Kindle e-readers of some customers. CEO Jeff Bezos eventually apologized for the incident, calling it “stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles.”
Blue Nile Inc. is expected to unveil a major overhaul of its Web site Tuesday as the online jeweler tries to broaden its appeal, especially to women. But like other e-commerce sites retooling to combat slowing growth, it faces the tricky task of trying to make improvements without losing core customers.
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