e-commerce

eBay announced Tuesday that it's lowered listing fees for U.S. residents using the auction site to sell products, with new plans geared toward both frequent and infrequent sellers.

A new rate called "eBay Every Day" offers no up-front fee for the sellers of auction-style (rather than flat-rate sale) listings with a starting price of 99 cents or less. Once they've been sold, a fee of 9 percent is appended, with a maximum fee of $50; if the item doesn't sell, no fee is charged to the seller. An individual can do this for up … Read more

news analysis Following months of speculation, The New York Times announced Wednesday that it plans to begin charging for access to its Web site, with a flat fee required for frequent online readers of the legendary publication. This comes more than two years after the Times did away with TimesSelect, a subscription program that put much of its archives as well as popular opinion columns behind a pay wall.

The media, as usual, has jumped on the bandwagon of predictions, declarations of success, and premature doom-mongering. There's been a slow clap from Columbia Journalism Review's Ryan Chittum, as … Read more

Facebook is turning up the heat on becoming a big player in the online payments world, according to a couple of job postings for a new "Facebook Payment Operations" team that recently appeared on its site.

The social network is seeking a "Payment Operations Strategist" to "work cross-functionally with the Product and Engineering teams to design tools and systems to serve our hundreds of millions of users and our ever-growing base of advertisers," as well as a risk management specialist to be based in its Dublin, Ireland, office to handle billing, payment, and security … Read more

With toy store shelves and television commercials chock full of eye-popping video games and fancy tech playthings, it came as a surprise to many that some of the hottest toys this holiday season were inexpensive, relatively low-tech battery-powered hamsters imported from China called Zhu Zhu Pets. The fuzzy toy rodents manufactured by Cepia LLC, which came in models with names like "Num Nums" and "Mr. Squiggles," could barely stay on shelves for most of the end of 2009, and nobody really saw it coming.

For avid eBay sellers, it was the perfect recipe for profits--if they … Read more

Holiday shoppers brought good cheer to e-commerce retailers, spending $27 billion online from November 1 through December 24, a 5 percent jump over last year, ComScore reported Wednesday.

The period from Black Friday through Christmas Eve was also bright and merry as sales grew by around 3.5 percent, even after adjusting for an additional shopping day this year. Consumer electronics proved to be the hottest selling category, rising 20 percent. Larger retailers outpaced smaller vendors thanks in part to their use of free shipping and marketing via social-networking sites, said ComScore.

The growth in this year's online holiday … Read more

A blizzard that pelted much of the Eastern Seaboard with over a foot of snow also led to a spike in last-minute online holiday shopping last weekend, traffic firm ComScore said Tuesday.

Online shopping continues to eat up a bigger chunk of holiday retail each year, but this season, with roads snowbound and temperatures well below freezing in some of the most populous areas of the country at the tail end of the holiday season, it was even more than usual. (Several cities in the mid-Atlantic, like Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., pulled in more snow in a single snowfall … Read more

Looks like Facebook will be throwing another big "F8" developer conference in the spring, after taking 2009 off. According to a sparse post on the company's developer blog, the event will be held April 21 and 22 in San Francisco. No more details are currently available.

"F8 has always been about empowering a community of developers to hack, to build and to delight users," the post reads. "We're looking forward to continuing this tradition at our third F8 in San Francisco on April 21-22, 2010. Please save the date!"

This is a … Read more

This year's online holiday-shopping season has topped $19.9 billion so far--a 3 percent jump over the same period in 2008, according to ComScore.

Online sales were bolstered last week when consumers spent more than $800 million on two separate days, ComScore said. On Thursday, for example, consumers coughed up $852 million.

Monday has the potential to produce the best day of this year's holiday-shopping season, which started November 1 in ComScore's stats.

ComScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni said that Monday "represents our best opportunity to finally surpass that elusive $900 million spending threshold. The early part … Read more

Those who say that Twitter is nothing more than a place where people share inconsequential experiences in their lives might want to listen up. Dell told Bloomberg on Tuesday that it has earned an estimated $6.5 million in sales of PCs, accessories, and software, thanks to promotions on Twitter.

Dell's vice president for the company's online unit, Manish Mehta, told Bloomberg that over the past three months alone, the number of people who have started following Dell's tweets has risen 23 percent. The company's DellOutlet account, which is home to most of the vendor's … Read more