Spotlight Features

While the digital divide -- the rift between those with access to computers and the Internet and without -- continues to crumble in the United States, analysts generally agree that e-commerce is not seeing the benefits of that trend. Because income is a bigger factor than Web access when it comes...

At the onset of the busiest shopping season of the year, e-commerce in the United Kingdom got a big boost from the British government in the form of a media blitz designed to get shoppers "clicking with confidence." In contrast, few analysts expect the U.S. government's laissez-faire approach to ...

Experts told the E-Commerce Times that the Web is nearly a perfect medium for conducting marketing research. It is less costly and faster than traditional methods, such as mail and telephone surveys, and recent success stories have helped erase many lingering questions about the accuracy of Web-b...

The success that Dell Computer has had with its build-to-order (BTO) sales philosophy raises the question of whether that model could apply more widely to e-commerce. Analysts and observers told the E-Commerce Times that while some retailers might succeed using BTO with certain high-margin, high-...

Before long, business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce may become a misnomer, because opportunities for online innovation and value creation reside more within multipartner collaboration than in transaction processing, analysts say. The prospect of "automating the entire purchasing process seems dim ...

With global tensions and economic insecurity shadowing what is typically a season of generosity and cheer, the retail industry had reason to fear that this year's holiday shoppers would shy away from offline retailers, online retailers -- or both. However, e-commerce's difficult shift from a pure...

When it was the new thing, e-commerce seemed to be all about fun. Then when e-tailers began putting the emphasis on making a sale and surfers on finding value, fun went out the window. Still, not every Web merchant is ready to give up on the idea that they can put online shoppers in a buying mood...

Few segments of e-commerce have been more over-hyped, and more disappointing, than mobile commerce. Yankee Group mobile analyst Adam Zawel told the E-Commerce Times that companies have failed to convince consumers of the worth of m-commerce. "There needs to be a reason to make a purchase using yo...

Efforts to develop viable alternative electronic payment systems resemble Wright Brothers-era attempts to build a functioning airplane. Somehow, someway, e-commerce is determined to get a new electronic payment system off the ground. So despite infrequent success, the new ideas keep coming. And p...

The next phase of e-commerce may cast the World Wide Web in a backup role. Often mistakenly equated to the Internet, the Web's shortcomings as a commerce medium have analysts forecasting a new era of Internet commerce. "[The Web] will be augmented and changed, not obsolete," Jupiter Media Metrix ...