Articles by Keith Regan

Though they attract a large percentage of the online buying audience, e-tail giants like Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) and eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) do not necessarily compete directly against other e-tailers, according to a new report from Nielsen//NetRatings The report argues that even though the two mammoth sites reach one-fourth of the online population, e-t...

In a business traditionally built on partnerships and cooperation, Dell Computer (Nasdaq: DELL) seems bent on making more enemies than friends of late In July, Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) terminated a four-year reseller agreement with Dell that reportedly brought HP as much as US$100 million per year in revenue. The companies, which have long been ...

Six months after Buy.com took a page from Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) by forming an e-commerce outsourcing division, the company has landed its first customer, online movie ticketing site Fandango. United Commerce Service (UCS), as the Buy.com spinoff is known, will create a co-branded Buy.com site for Fandango that will enable the ticketing firm to...

In a last-ditch effort at an image makeover last year, urban delivery service Kozmo.com changed its name to plain old Kozmo. The move did not work -- within a few months, Kozmo was no more -- but it highlighted the prevailing mood of that time. Even true dot-coms were distancing themselves from the Internet label. Now, though, as e-commerce enjoys...

It is widely known that Google has become a dominant player in the search engine space. Founded in September 1998, the company is at least three years younger than most of its competitors but already has surpassed its rivals in terms of popularity. Google regularly draws enough visitors to rank it among the top five most-visited sites on the Web, ...

Use of the Internet to conduct business-to-business (B2B) transactions grew substantially in the second quarter, possibly signaling the early stages of economic recovery, according to a report from Forrester Research and the Institute for Supply Management (ISM). Emphasizing that a single quarter does not constitute a long-term trend, ISM spokespe...

For a while, dot-com death watches were all the rage. Then even those got a bit stale. After all, how many times can you whistle with astonishment at how much venture capital a company burned through in a short time? The shakeout is in neutral, still gliding downhill but at a much slower rate than the breakneck pace it kept throughout 2001. Occasi...

Amazon.com has sued partner Expedia, claiming the travel site has not lived up to its end of a deal struck almost exactly a year ago between the two online companies. According to Amazon, Expedia failed to make payments called for under terms of the deal, which stipulated that Amazon would receive up to US$16 million from the online travel company...

E-commerce players often seem to be playing a game of follow the leader, especially when it comes to site design and operations. And while Amazon.com and eBay have enough imitators to keep them flattered indefinitely, other outstanding e-commerce sites also have their share of admirers. These sites score high marks for a variety of reasons and have helped set the standard for e-commerce of the future.

Pushing into yet another product category, Amazon.com has signed a multiyear partnership with office supply giant Office Depot. The deal adds office supplies to Amazon's ever-expanding roster of product offerings, which now includes books, music, videos and DVDs, kitchen products, electronics and, thanks to recent deals inked with Target, apparel ...

At long last, everybody's favorite German media conglomerate, Bertelsmann, has swallowed hard and admitted that it bit off a lot more than it could chew on the Internet Bertelsmann has decided to put a couple of its online properties, notably its BOL.com bookselling site, up for sale. So line up if you want to buy a money-losing online operation wi...

EBay Real Estate said its "land marketplace" has met with strong demand, with 15,000 parcels of property sold since the offering debuted last year. According to eBay, a parcel of land is sold through its site every 45 minutes. However, several months after eBay held the first-ever live auction of a home on its site, the company continues to be lim...

Every code-hogging, patent suit-filing corporation that thinks it has cornered the world on smarts got a reminder this week that it's not always smart to not share your toys The reminder came from Japan, where Sony said it will stop making the Betamax video player, ending its nearly 30-year effort to win market share by hogging all the glory for it...

Though they seem to be everywhere on the Internet, pop-up advertisements are used by less than 10 percent of all companies that advertise online, according to a report from Nielsen//NetRatings Between January and July of 2002, companies bought 11.3 billion pop-up ad impressions, but that figure represents just 2 percent of the overall online ad mar...

Two new reports have predicted several more years of sustained growth for e-commerce, as well as a strong 2002 holiday season, as online shoppers search for bargains in a languishing economy. Audience measurement firm Nielsen//NetRatings said that while the upcoming season will resemble 2001 in many ways, e-tailers will have additional opportuniti...

If it is true that you get what you pay for, is free Internet access really worth nothing? Companies often say that their free Internet access, Web hosting or e-mail services are designed as entry-level offerings that allow reluctant Web consumers to dip their toes into the online pool before taking a full-fledged plunge. But while most of the once...

It's one of those stories that everyone loves to tell. EBay, as the legend goes, became a billion-dollar global powerhouse after starting off as a place where Pierre Omidyar's wife could sell and buy Pez dispensers A great story. And, as you no doubt know by now, not true. It could have been, but it was merely the fabrication of a public relations ...

EBay has said it will pay US$65 million to buy out Ecorp's share of a joint venture that established eBay's online auction presence in Australia and New Zealand nearly three years ago The buyout, which will require the stamp of approval from Australia's Foreign Investment Review Board, will have no impact on eBay earnings projections for this year ...

Well, that pretty much does it. Amazon has to be done slashing its free-shipping threshold. Going from US$99 to $49 made sense, and the move from $49 to $25 is logical, too. But thats the end of the road. From here, all that remains is the final, inevitable step: Amazon has to go all the way and just call it free shipping already....

Internet companies disclosed plans to cut 1,193 jobs in August, fewer than in July but enough to mark the second straight month in which dot-com layoffs exceeded 1,000, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. "Is it a trend? It's too early to tell," CEO John A. Challenger told the E-Commerce Times. "There is certainly the pote...