10 out of 13 million tracks available for purchase online didn't sell a single copy. Jut how Long can that Tail be, after all? Is the length of the tail mentioned in the article down to piracy or the state of the music industry as a whole? Is it possible to make a profit or break even on a niche website based on sales alone, and not on advertising revenue?
posted by Grrlscout on Dec 23, 2008 - 56 comments

The founders of Webshots.com sold out to Excite@home in '99 for $82.5M, they just bought it back--for $2.4M. $6.7B Excite.com goes for $10M and Blue Mountain Greetings ($780M) goes for $35M. A billion here, a billion there and pretty soon we're talking more than pocket change.
posted by m@ on Jan 8, 2002 - 12 comments

Is E-Commerce dead, past its prime, or just resting? This journal special issue has some interesting thoughts about the future of E-Commerce. I especially liked the paper by Peffers. The conventional wisdom at this point is that B2C E-Commerce is viable only for certain types of products or contexts. Others (e.g. Andy Grove, Michael Porter) seem to think that in the future, all commerce will be E-Commerce and will be integrated with physical companies. Then there is the M-Commerce angle- e.g. DoCoMo. What do you make of all of this? How will we be shopping and communicating in the future?
posted by SandeepKrishnamurthy on Dec 11, 2001 - 13 comments

The Cluetrain Manifesto gives real insight into the future of commerce on the net. Anyone with a stake in the online business scene should study this document.
posted by fbeach on May 21, 2001 - 9 comments

Tupperware type parties promote e-shopping
Does this method make it easier for newbies to get comfortable with e-commerice? Will the dot.coms go for this method along with other advertising methods?
posted by shackbar on Mar 27, 2001 - 2 comments

One million credit card numbers stolen! News at 11! The FBI has gone public with a rather dry account of a huge organized attack on ecommerce sites, exploiting security flaws in NT which Microsoft fixed and offered patches for nearly two years ago.
posted by Steven Den Beste on Mar 9, 2001 - 5 comments

A former Boo.com employee describes some of the challenges they faced . Multiple currencies, multiple languages, on-the-fly tax calculation, integration with multiple fullfillment partners, no development plan, and ignorance of technology issues on the front end. Blech.
posted by Calebos on May 23, 2000 - 10 comments

Observe a startup. Some startups use a combination of openness and secrecy and while they're getting their act together. REMO (a quirky independent retailer who used to run a popular shop font in my hometown of Sydney) is letting the whole world see everything while they make the transformation to a web-only up-market general store for the whole world.
posted by grestall on Mar 29, 2000 - 5 comments