Articles by Stephen Caswell

Online Visa card provider NextCard, Inc. has lent some legitimacy to the often-maligned world of "electronic currency" by entering into a strategic partnership with Flooz.com, a company that provides "gift currency" that can now be used at more than 60 Internet stores NextCard, which claims to be the largest provider of credit cards on the Internet...

Leading Internet service provider (ISP) and e-commerce giant America Online has been slapped with a class action lawsuit on behalf of subscribers who installed the new AOL version 5.0 software and allegedly encountered a bug that prevented them from using other ISPs The lawsuit, filed January 31st in the U.S. District Court for Eastern Virginia, al...

Discover Financial Services announced today that it is now offering its cardholders the option to have images of their existing Discover cards placed on their computer desktops for online shopping and one-click access to account and purchasing information While rival Mastercard announced an identical technology last November, it is only now releasi...

X.com, a Palo Alto, California-based online bank, recently allowed customers who were setting up new accounts to specify the account number from which funds were being transferred. Unfortunately, X.com did not verify whether the person who was setting up the account had the right to transfer those funds This sort of security breach brings into seri...

One of the major messages from the holiday shopping season is that e-tailers must develop better customer service capabilities. Today, eFusion, Inc. -- a start-up company from Beaverton, Oregon -- introduced a new "push-to-talk" service that allows representatives at e-commerce firms to talk to shoppers in real time "This is a brand new service tha...

The message from consumers this holiday season is very clear. They expect e-tailers to beef up their customer service operations E-tailers are now scrambling to come up with the right solutions to satisfy customer service needs. While the most comprehensive solution is to provide live representatives who are available by chat or even Internet voice...

One of the major questions to arise from the planned merger between America Online and Time Warner is whether the new company will continue to support the position that cable companies be required to provide open access to the Internet Before the announcement, AOL was the outspoken leader in favor of a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) requir...

Yesterday, when we first heard the announcement about the pending merger between America Online and Time Warner, it was a stunner While cynical journalists are not often taken by surprise, the news virtually took our collective breath away -- and we were not alone. The deal made the entire industry pause and hold its breath.

While women now comprise 49 percent of online users, they still lag behind men in online shopping, according to the latest American Internet User Survey published by customer relationship management firm Cyber Dialogue Whereas 68 percent of men searched for products online in 1999 and 43 percent made purchases, only 54 percent of women looked for p...

Lost in the shadow of Wal-Mart's decision to move their online operations to Silicon Valley were major e-commerce announcements by two other brick-and-mortar mainstays $10 billion (US$) retailer Best Buy (NYSE: BBY) announced a major expansion of its Web site to include all of the electronics products that the company now sells and also unveiled a ...

It now appears inevitable that regulation is coming to e-commerce In the last week alone, the E-Commerce Times has run across four different issues that will involve some type of government regulation: Taxation, prescription drug regulation, potential FTC sanctions for violating mail order rules, and online insurance sales regulation.

According to a new study by InsightExpress, the online arm of market research giant NFO Worldwide, online shoppers may have spent as much as 33 percent of their holiday shopping budgets online The study was conducted completely online through a random survey of 300 adults across the United States on December 20th. According to the company, the surv...