ecommerce

Meez, a start-up that expanded last year from an avatar creation service into a full-out virtual world for teens, is touting some good news: it's been profitable since April and "every month is better than the last month," CEO John Cahill told CNET News.

Right now, Meez has about 13 million registered users, 3 million unique hits per month, and only 20 full-time employees plus about 10 contractors.

Where's the money coming from? Premium subscriptions, ads on the free version of the site, and virtual goods bought and sold with its internal "Coinz" currency--which … Read more

Well, we finally have a glimpse at "Square," the new mobile payments venture coming from Twitter co-founder and chairman Jack Dorsey. As expected, it's a little hardware add-on that can turn an iPhone into a credit card reader.

The funny part: Details about the small-business-oriented project have been on the Web for months. It was just that nobody had put two and two together until some eagle-eyed folks at Engadget realized that a URL on a screenshot of the "Square iPhone Payments Venture" first reported by Coolhunting matched a domain registered to Dorsey.

Dorsey, who … Read more

Your decaf caramel macchiatos and no-whip pumpkin spice lattes are going mobile.

In a double-shot launch (sorry), coffee giant Starbucks unveiled late Tuesday its first two iPhone apps. The first one, called MyStarbucks, is a no-brainer: you can use the phone's GPS capability to find nearby stores (previously, this was available via text message), search ingredient and calorie information for Starbucks beverages, study coffee bean varieties, and build virtual drinks to see what exactly would be in one if you ordered it.

But it's the second app, called Starbucks Card Mobile, that could be worth a double-take. The … Read more

Mobile payment start-up Zong is extending its product to include subscription-based services, the company announced Tuesday.

Gaming site OMGPOP and News Corp.-owned photo-sharing site Photobucket have signed on as launch partners.

So here's what this means: instead of entering credit card billing information, subscribers to OMGPOP and Photobucket can bill their subscriptions directly to their phone bills by entering their cell phone numbers and then responding to a confirmation code. Previously, the Zong service could only be used for one-at-a-time micropayments rather than subscription-based services.

With Zong's new development, which is currently available only on U.S. … Read more

With micropayments and transaction platforms a buzzworthy sector of the Web right now, it's no surprise that Google would want to get in on the game.

But Mountain View's pitch is a little bit different: the payment platform it plans to build, according to Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab, is geared toward newspapers that want to charge for digital content.

Google's plans are detailed in a document the company sent to the Newspaper Association for America. The document, a response to a query from the association, also requested more information pertaining to paid-content models.

"While currently … Read more

It's increasingly difficult to separate "open-source vendors" from "proprietary vendors," but Demandware, a proprietary software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor, is attempting to do so in an effort to stem the rising tide of Magento, an open-source e-commerce project. Demandware's criticism of Magento largely falls flat, however, because it uses outdated descriptions of open source.

Demandware walks through a litany of complaints about open source--requires too many developers! forces you to upgrade your software all by yourself! forking and fragmentation!--but none hit the mark. Why? Because each is only somewhat accurate of the state of open … Read more

PayPal suffered a global outage and slow performance Monday, but eBay said its online payment system is mostly back in working order.

"About an hour ago, PayPal started experiencing site issues that affected the ability to send and receive money. We have all hands on deck to get this fixed," said PayPal spokesman Anuj Nayar in a blog post about noon PDT. "We're really sorry for the inconvenience."

An update at 12:40 p.m. said the site was working again for most users.

Nayar said in an interview the outage was global and the … Read more

eBay wants to spin off telephony service Skype into a separate publicly traded company, but something's standing in the way: Skype's founders are threatening to take back some of the technology in the midst of a licensing dispute.

The auction giant's solution, according to a Bloomberg report on Thursday: Build a new one.

This was revealed in a 10-Q regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission; eBay is not commenting beyond the filing. You can decide whether "Frankenskype" or "Skypenstein" is a better name for the hypothetical creation.

Here's what has … Read more

PASADENA, Calif.--PayPal is just over a third of eBay's revenue at the moment, but the online payment service will ultimately be bigger than the company's flagship e-commerce site, its chief executive said Thursday.

"PayPal is a business that will be bigger than eBay," CEO John Donahoe said in a talk at the Fortune Brainstorm: Tech conference here. However, he said that shift will take four to six years.

Donahoe's comments came just as the company announced that it is opening up its PayPal platform to third-party developers. "There is this opportunity for an … Read more