Spotlight Features

As dot-com executives continue playing their version of musical chairs, the question many investors are asking now is: what happens when the music stops? Will these "new leaders" breathe new life into stagnant e-commerce companies, or will they simply be the new faces of failure? "I think it wi...

Pick up virtually any major media publication covering the dot-com shakeout of the past year and you're likely to come across a slight variation on the following theme: "the New Economy was a bust." But was the New Economy really a complete hoax? Many economists actually consider e-commerce to be...

Few things are more annoying than opening your inbox and finding dozens of solicitations for credit cards, weight loss products and other goods and services. Unfortunately, no national law exists outlawing or regulating spam. Instead, spam is regulated by "a patchwork of state laws of varying ...

While there might be more hand-wringing over dot-com layoffs than is truly warranted, e-commerce watchers have as much right to be concerned about recent job-cut trends as anyone in other segments of the high-tech sector. According to John Challenger, chief executive officer of job placement firm C...

What's in a name? Plenty, when it's an online name. At least that's been the conventional wisdom. But with many of the best-known e-commerce brand names -- from Pets.com to eToys and Furniture.com -- now resting in peace, and without the piles of money needed to fuel the type of name-building ...

Word of mouth is one of the strongest marketing mediums available -- so strong that some struggling dot-coms, desperate to save advertising dollars, are begging their customers to help spread the word about their products and services. "Word of mouth is very powerful in terms of buying power," F...

In the days when everyone believed that the future of the economy lay in cyberspace, many dot-coms unwittingly built financial houses of cards by investing substantially in their online brethren. Taking equity stakes in other dot-coms was "the cool thing to do a year ago, when everyone was livin...

The last time Amazon.com linked arms with a brick-and-mortar retailer struggling for an online foothold, the results were impressive. Amazon partnered with Toysrus.com and helped force onetime category thoroughbred eToys to drop out of the race for good. So now that Amazon has agreed to work w...

A channel surf across the e-business landscape reveals mixed signals when it comes to the success of TV network-backed Web sites. "Part of it is they don't sell; that's not what they do," IDC analyst Jonathan Gaw told the E-Commerce Times. "They are content-focused because that's their strong sui...

Gone are the days when visiting dusty warehouses and digging through bins of junk were the only ways to buy bargains from the government. Now a number of government agencies have gone high tech and are using Web sites like eBay to auction off surplus property, ranging from jalopies to jewelry. A...