Articles by Elizabeth Blakey

Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) said Friday that it is removing pornographic material from its shopping, auction and classified sections, namely adult-related videos and DVDs being sold by merchants on the giant portal. The announcement came three days after Yahoo! confirmed that it was venturing further into the tainted but extremely lucrative world of onl...

Egghead.com (Nasdaq: EGGS) is slashing its workforce yet again. In a bid to survive in a slumping economy, Egghead.com said Friday that it has given pink slips to 21 workers in the company's Menlo Park, California offices and to 157 workers in its Vancouver, Washington facility.

Alternative payment methods, such as prepaid value cards and Web currency, are being used online, but according to analysts and merchants alike, they'll never dethrone the king of the dot-com world: the credit card Yankee Group analyst Christine Loeber told the E-Commerce Times that alternative payment methods are "not gathering much steam."

Northwest Airlines and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines said Wednesday that effective March 1st, they will no longer pay commissions on Internet ticket sales in the United States and Canada. In response, the online travel company Travelocity (Nasdaq: TVLY) said that it would begin charging $10 service fees on tickets for Northwest Airlines and KLM.

Analysts disagree on whether Tuesday's downbeat economic news, including a reported drop in consumer confidence to its lowest level in nearly five years, is likely to drag down e-commerce spending levels The Conference Board (TCB) reported that its Consumer Confidence Index fell in February for the fifth consecutive month and now stands at 106.8, i...

Oasis, a consortium including IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems, announced Thursday that it will start to integrate a competing e-commerce standard being developed by Microsoft The consortium, which is working under the auspices of the United Nations to develop a standard for e-business transactions, said that "efforts are now underway to i...

Film fans are finding that buying their movie tickets via the Internet is an increasingly attractive option, especially when the movie is as red-hot as box office hit "Hannibal." "We sold three times as many movie tickets online [during] Hannibal's opening weekend than we had the week before," AOL Moviefone spokesperson Jay Jay Nesheim told the E-C...

This weekend is your virtual last chance to use the Web to send chocolates in time for Valentine's Day. Because there's quite a variety of chocolate shops on the Net, the E-Commerce Times has taken a bite out of the issue for you, testing both the sites and the sweets. Romantic consumers and e-tailers alike can take to heart what we've learned fro...

Talk about losing the big game A year ago, approximately 20 dot-com companies -- including half a dozen e-commerce startups -- paid US$2.2 million for 30 seconds of advertising time during television's most watched sporting event, the Super Bowl....

Does the decision by Internet giant Yahoo! to start charging its users auction listing fees mark the beginning of the end for free Internet services and content? Starting Wednesday, Yahoo! began assessing fees of up to US$2.25 for auction listings, based on the starting and reserve prices of the items offered. The change is one of several steps Yah...

The recent service outages at Amazon.com, eBay, and other e-commerce sites frustrated shoppers, lowered company revenues and raised media eyebrows. For e-commerce firms, downtimes are the worst of times However, some companies are fighting back by questioning why the Net is being held to higher standards than the rest of society. After all, every y...

Troubled toy e-tailer eToys (Nasdaq: ETYS) moved to the dot-com critical list Thursday, announcing that approximately 70 percent of the company's 1,000 employees have been informed that their jobs are being eliminated eToys said the layoffs were effective immediately for about 380 employees. The remaining number, approximately 320, will leave their...

Few people quibble over smart card functionality. The cards -- embedded with a memory chip that can store everything from bank balances to prescription information -- can be used for online shopping, network security access and even decoding paid-for digital content such as music and movies....

A latecomer to the dot-com stage, discount e-tail site BlueLight.com is dancing as gracefully as it can through its first holiday season, sidestepping technical glitches caused by the seasonal shopping boom while displaying a variety of marketing moves that are drawing in more shoppers A report released Friday by Jupiter Media Metrix listed BlueLig...

A year ago at this time, the online toy market was wide open, with a broad range of e-tailers great and small vying for dominance in the space Now, only two primary candidates remain, but neither the intensity of the competition, nor the stakes, have diminished.

On the Web, somewhere between the categories of financial information and pornography, is another key sector where people pay for access: online dating services. Rather than exchanging books or CDs for cash, these sites trade on the quite powerful desire of singles to connect.

In the following exclusive interview with Bobbi Burns, director of the "eSun" initiative at Sun Microsystems, the E-Commerce Times explores how the multi-billion dollar (US$) company is using its online store as an integral part of its overall marketing strategy ...

Naively believing that the Internet should remain "free," more than one observer has argued that the Web should not be subject to the laws of individual countries around the world In the high-profile case against Yahoo! over the illegal auctions of Nazi memorabilia in France, for example, many people are saying that Yahoo! is in the right.

Internet auctions have become a place for businesses of all sizes to make money -- to the tune of nearly $55 billion (US$) in sales a year. Still, the leading auction sites have retained something of their original flair as a place for passionate collectors of odds and ends to exchange prized possessions. Of course, with that spirit of "anything goes" comes the lunatic fringe.

At the beginning of the summer, billionaire Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal jumped into the Internet stock game with a king-size splash On May 16th, the 43 year-old prince purchased a $50 million (US$) stake in each of six companies: Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN), eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY), DoubleClick (Nasdaq: DCLK), Infospace (Nasdaq: INSP), Internet Capital G...