Articles by Mary Hillebrand

Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) is expanding into the online grocery market with an announcement this week that it has taken a "significant minority interest" in HomeGrocer.com Amazon agreed to pay the grocery delivery service $42.5 million (US$) for a 35 percent stake in the company. Amazon is the Internet's top book, music and video retailer, stocking ...

Microsoft co-founder and eclectic investor Paul Allen has put his money behind another venture purporting to have the key to a computing revolution. Backed by funds from Allen's Vulcan Ventures Inc., a new Bellevue, Washington company called Mercata, Inc. says its new site is not just another online shopping mall....

If the speed and ease of shopping online is not enough incentive for some consumers, ebates.com has a better offer: Cash back. The promotional tool made popular by Discover Card is now being implemented online. Ebates.com lures consumers to its site with the promise of up to 25 percent cash back on their online purchases....

The Internet continued its rapid infiltration of academia this week, with an announcement from the highly regarded Haas School of Business at the University of California-Berkeley that it is adding four new e-commerce classes to its curriculum Meanwhile on the opposite coast, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Business hono...

A new office of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is slated to open Friday to oversee Internet transactions, commerce and advertising, despite objections from major Internet players. Arguing other FTC divisions play the same consumer protectionist role in non-electronic commerce, the FTC says the new Internet office will simply keep a closer eye on whether online businesses are being honest in ads and other online statements...

Midlife isn't a time for crisis, it's a time for commerce. That is the approach Women First HealthCare, Inc. is taking to the aging of America's largest consumer group: female baby boomers With the launch of its new womenfirst.com site, the San Diego specialty health care company hopes to advance midlife women's interest in self preservation and im...

Online shopping center skymall.com has lined up a powerful friend to help drive sales in the fourth quarter holiday shopping season, announcing an alliance today with worldwide credit card company Visa, Inc The skymall.com site is a division of in-flight shopping catalog company SkyMall Inc., which reaches more than 410 million travelers per year b...

Do online shoppers browse the Internet by product category or by the product's place of origin? Another new company planning to establish a handful of online shopping sites is betting a significant number want goods and services from specific online "communities." Planet411.com plans to launch three online communities this summer based on Canada's ...

A San Mateo, California, Web site analysis company is putting five large e-commerce sites under the microscope this month to promote its quality of service measurement programs. Among others, Keynote Systems, Inc. plans to analyze fast-growing AutoWeb.com and 1-800-Flowers In addition, the company announced a new quality of service measurement prog...

A bill introduced late last week in the U.S. House of Representatives by Commerce Committee Chairman Thomas Bliley (R-Virginia.) could give the use of electronic signatures in e-commerce Congressional backing. The Electronic Signatures in the Global and National Commerce Act, or E-SIGN, would make very little substantive change in the way electronic commerce is currently conducted but would put into official language the U.S. government's support for promoting secure transactions over the Internet...

The e-commerce world is buzzing this week with the tremendous opportunity Mother's Day brings for retailers to make an extra online buck. But while many online sellers are adding incentives for buyers to visit their sites first, iGive.com offers a more benevolent approach -- get a gift for mom and support charitable organizations in one click of the mouse...

On the heels of China's decision to open its Internet doors with the launch of MeetChina.com last month, a California company is hoping to expand the e-commerce business for the rest of Asia with a series of Internet portals to be launched over the next 18 months. Unlike in China, where all commerce, electronic or otherwise, is heavily regulated by the Communist government, other countries in Asia--particularly India--are eager for the economic expansion that doing business over the Internet can bring...

For its first foray into Internet cross-marketing, TV and Internet shopping channel Shop At Home, Inc. is teaming with one of the biggest online search engines. Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO) and Shop At Home (Nasdaq: SATH) announced a one-year agreement to promote each other's Internet sites. It was also announced that Yahoo! will help Shop At Home launch its new www.collectibles.com site later this year...

Tandy Corp.'s Radio Shack could become the first major national electronics retail chain to put its wares online, when it launches an e-commerce business this fall. The largest consumer electronics retailer in the U.S. has formed a new division called radioshack.com, which will focus on selling TVs, stereos, computers, and other electronic equipment on a Web site of the same name...

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IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) is inviting e-commerce companies to take a field trip this summer to explore ways to improve their online businesses. The theme park for this new e-commerce adventure: a new 10,500 square-foot IBM Design Center under construction in Poughkeepsie, New York IBM calls the new facility a place "where customers can explore the lead...

NewChannel Inc., an e-commerce technology company, wants to put sales people back into e-commerce, and national shipping company Consolidated Freightways Inc. is ready to give it a try With NewChannel's new "targeted engagement" technology, companies engaging in e-commerce will be able to add personal interaction between online shoppers and sales r...