Beth Cox

It’s turning out to be a merry little holiday shopping season indeed for most online merchants, and by one estimate, non-travel Internet sales on Saturday rang up to the tune of a 73 percent gain year over year. That’s particularly interesting because at-work shoppers with broadband access normally boost the Monday-through-Friday figures. According to Web […]

Following through on its plan to make the recently acquired PayPal service its main payment mechanism, online auction leader eBay has told its legions of users that the old Billpoint (eBay Payments) service will be phased out early next year. When it acquired PayPal last July for $1.5 billion, eBay said Billpoint would be phased […]

Attempts to perpetrate fraud against eBay users are being stepped up as online holiday shopping reaches its peak, and the auction leader recently warned its users about spoof e-mails designed to harvest password and account information. The problem is not at all new, but as the holidays have brought more inexperienced shoppers online, the criminal […]

Not to be outdone by rival search operation Ask Jeeves, Google has quietly launched a beta version of a new shopping search engine cleverly called Froogle, which the company says “makes it easy to find information about products for sale online.” The move follows a deal between PriceGrabber.com and Ask Jeeves earlier this week that […]

Online consumer spending racked up its first $2 billion week ever for the seven days ending Dec. 6, an all-time weekly spending record, according to measurement and analysis firm comScore Networks. And the Internet spending spree has continued into this week, as spending on Monday, Dec. 8, reached $367.05 million, making it the largest sales […]

In a deal that expands its reach in the crowded price-comparison field, PriceGrabber.com inked a deal with search operation Ask Jeeves to provide comparative shopping information. The Ask.com search engine launched a new shopping channel and e-commerce search operation, launching with nine categories: books, computers, electronics, movies, music, toys, software, video games and office products. […]

By Beth Cox Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo! has been steadily broadening its revenue stream with new business-oriented offerings — it launched a business email service in October of last year. The portal’s small business service itself was begun back in 1998. Site hosting was first offered in 1999 when the company rolled out a series of […]

Some operators of “associate sites” that link to Amazon.com are less than happy about the online retailing giant’s search BOTs , which they claim are “spidering” their sites excessively, taking up bandwidth, time and money. Seattle-based Amazon , which claims to be “the online affiliate marketing leader,” has long offered associate deals with smaller Web […]

The online music business just gets more competitive every day, so why not pre-load your service on new computers in an OEM deal? Gateway liked the idea so much that it’s teaming up with online music subscription service Pressplay to do just that in a deal that increases exposure for the music service and gives […]

In a bid to take its movie and video-on-demand operation global, CinemaNow is launching a worldwide network of Web sites with a variety of broadband partners “to provide localized VoD and subscription video-on-demand (SVoD) services.” The Marina del Rey, Calif.-based company, only three years old, said that its new PatchBay technology will serve as a […]

The online air fare wars and declining airline commissions are clearly having an effect as travel site Expedia.com issued a terse announcement saying that it has begun charging a $5 booking fee for most airline tickets purchased on its U.S. Web sites. Bellevue, Wash.-based Expedia said it’s too early to estimate what the impact of […]

Mailing giant Pitney Bowes has added another lawsuit to its stack of legal proceedings against Stamps.com, this one claiming that the online company’s NetStamps product infringes on several P-B patents. Launched last July with the blessing of the U.S. Postal Service, the NetStamps app is a form of e-postage that can be printed out and […]