Articles by Chet Dembeck

According to a new study by Forrester Research, Inc., many online merchants convert just two percent of their visitors into buyers. This is true, despite the fact more than 75 percent of the e-commerce marketers surveyed in the study have gone to great lengths to make their Web sites more user-friendly. Yet, Forrester found that 66 percent of virtual shopping carts were abandoned in 1998 due to complicated instructions or "hefty shipping-and-handling gotchas."

A decisive court victory last week for Bill Gates and company may -- or may not -- affect the outcome of Microsoft's government antitrust case, so argue legal pundits. But for the cynics of the world, there's little doubt but that it will After deliberating three days, a four-woman, four-man jury ruled in favor of Microsoft Corp. on all but one cou...

Despite Intel's disappointing second-quarter earnings, the world's No. 1 chipmaker has come back swinging -- still aggressively pursuing its e-commerce quest Last week, the Santa Clara, California company once again displayed the stubborn resilience of a champion prizefighter by shaking off what could have been a knockout punch and immediately scor...

OfficeMax, Inc., the number three office supply superstore, (NYSE: OMX) announced Friday that it launched international Web sites in Japan and Mexico. This expansion comes on the heels of the company's recent success in domestic U.S. e-commerce efforts Both sites use the native language of the host countries, and the Shaker Heights, Ohio retailer a...

Penetrating China's great walls and tapping into its huge marketplace has been the dream of Westerners since the days of Marco Polo. Perhaps this explains the investor buying frenzy that took place last week, when China.com made its debut on Wall Street The first day out, China.com's initial public offering soared from a modest $20 per share to a c...

Penguin Computing, a manufacturer of Linux-based hardware solutions, predicts that Linux will soon become the operating system of choice in developing countries -- but don't count Microsoft out Nick Thompson, Penguin's director of marketing and the author of a book comparing development in Ghana and Thailand, said Linux makes economic sense in coun...

Big players in the music industry must overcome "security paranoia" if they ever hope to profit from digital music as it enters the mainstream, according to a recent report by Jupiter Communications Jupiter's research showed that only 3 percent of online consumers will purchase downloaded music by 2003. This gives the music industry a window of opp...

Online grocer Webvan Group, Inc. fired a salvo across the shopping carts of the brick-and-mortar supermarket industry last week, when it announced that within two years it would be delivering Web ordered groceries free-of-charge in 26 major markets throughout the United States. Moreover, some analysts speculate the move could be the first step in the eventual restructuring of the $500 billion (US$) per year grocery business...

Last week, E-Commerce Industries, Inc. formed an alliance with United Stationers, Inc., the United States' largest wholesaler distributor of office goods, which could be the salvation of many smaller mom-and-pop office suppliers The privately held Fairfax, Virginia startup said the two companies have created Internet Office Solutions and Services.

Last week, Yahoo!, Inc. may have shown its critics that the company is not only capable of turning a profit, but also able to quell a customer revolt swiftly -- before it got out of hand Yahoo! said profits before charges for the second quarter ended June 30th rose to $28.3 million (US$), or 11 cents per share, from a year ago's profit before charg...

Toys "R" Us rocked the e-commerce world earlier this week when it announced that the hand-picked chief executive officer it had chosen to run its online operations wouldn't be coming on board after all In a news release the Paramus, New Jersey big-box retailer said that Bob Moog, "has been unable to extricate himself from his responsibilities as fo...

Last week, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. announced that it's preparing to ramp up its Internet efforts by cutting a deal with Books-A-Million Inc. to supply and deliver books for its online store. This action has resurrected the legion of analysts, who have been howling in unison for months, predicting that the giant retailer will soon pulverize Amazon.com into oblivion. But, I for one, don't think they're right -- even though I'm in the minority...

A Boston start-up called Verbind Inc. has developed one of the many new software products to help e-commerce sites predict their customers' actions By shadowing a site visitor's every move, then crunching the results, Verbind's LifeTime software program is supposed to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff -- or the buyer from the browser.

Last week, America Online Inc. took minority stake in low-priced personal-computer maker eMachines Inc. By doing so, the No. 1 online service may have just proved that Microsoft wasn't being disingenuous when it testified in court recently that it feared AOL would try to make Windows obsolete EMachines is a joint venture of South Korea's Trigem Com...

In a move that surely gained favor with Microsoft and drew disdain from Linux lovers, Intel Chief Executive Crag Barrett made a joint speech with Bill Gates at a Burlington, California meeting this week -- showcasing companies that are switching from Unix systems to Windows NT. The companies included Ford Motor Co., Enron Corp. and Sony Corp But so...

A greater than expected number of small and local businesses have turned to the Internet to sell their products and services -- causing some members of the traditional media to fear for the worst According to a study of fourteen major markets conducted by the Princeton, New Jersey-based Kelsey Group and San Francisco-based ConStat, seventeen percen...

Intel Corp.'s CEO Craig Barrett told reporters in Amsterdam last week that current forecasts projecting the growth of e-commerce were too low Barrett took issue with industry experts' predictions of a trillion dollars in U.S. e-commerce being generated over the next two years, as well as, the forecast of several billion for Western Europe during th...

Softbank Corp., Japan's No. 1 software distributor, said last week it will pump $1.6 billion (US$) in three venture capital funds that will only invest in Internet-related startups This comes only two years after Asia's financial crisis brought to a halt the Japanese operations of many U.S. high-tech companies. But today, the same companies are exp...

Michael Milken could be proving that the Internet, like the U.S. western frontier of the 1800's, is a place a person with a past can get a fresh start The former junk-bond king who went to prison for breaking security laws has begun a new business life by helping to finance UNext.com. The Internet startup plans to deliver graduate-level courses onl...

A panel of top high-tech executives met this week in London at the Wall Street Journal Europe's CEO Summit and critiqued some e-commerce powerhouses Amazon.com came under fire as Raymond Lane, president and chief operating officer of Oracle, took the time to criticize and give some advise to the online marketer.