The current issue of The Nation turns its focus to Amazon: The Amazon Effect by Steve Wasserman, How Germany Keeps Amazon at Bay and Literary Culture Alive by Michael Naumann, Search Gets Lost by Anthony Grafton, and finally Ten Reasons to Avoid Doing Business With Amazon.com.
posted by Toekneesan on Jun 1, 2012 - 45 comments

Real world implementation of the buy-bot from xkcd. Follow it on Twitter!
posted by Artw on Nov 9, 2010 - 33 comments

Using the Web to buy a carton of milk in Nunavut. Satellite Internet in Nunavut (Canada’s newest territory – the White Stripes played there) is slow and has such draconian bandwidth caps (2GB a month) that nobody downloads audio or video. But they use it for every kind of online banking and E-commerce in a territory with barely any retail stores. [more inside]
posted by joeclark on Nov 13, 2008 - 15 comments

Scott McCloud and Clay Shirky are trading ideas on Micropayemnts again. Clay Says user-pays schemes can't simply be restored through minor tinkering with payment systems, because they don't address the cause of that change -- a huge increase the power and reach of the individual creator.. Scott Says micropayments, well, BitPass are here to stay this time.
As a content producer I like the idea, but as a content consumer I'm just not sure yet.
If mefi went Micro, would you pay?
posted by Blake on Sep 13, 2003 - 28 comments

A small company with an obscure patent is suing e-commerce site owners. If you sell something on the web, you may be next. It's hard to tell if they have any legitimate claims or if they're simply extorting money from the people they threaten.
posted by mathowie on Oct 24, 2002 - 26 comments

Escrew Service. Worried about getting scammed on an Internet auction? "Just use an escrow service," is the customary advice. Not so fast. The latest auction scam is an elaborate swindle involving creation of fake escrow services, complete with convincing Web sites like www.escrow-is.com
posted by srboisvert on Jul 9, 2002 - 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