e-commerce

Visitors to e-commerce sites spent $846 million on Monday, an increase of 15 percent over the same day a year ago, according to ComScore.

Monday, referred to as Cyber Monday by online retailers, capped off a successful Thanksgiving holiday weekend for the industry, which overall saw spending jump 13 percent.

It's a welcome relief for an industry that was mostly bracing for the worst.

"Consumers are clearly responding positively to retailers' aggressive online discounts," ComScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni said in a statement. "With Cyber Monday promotions beginning in earnest over the Thanksgiving weekend, consumers have finally … Read more

It wasn't a blockbuster, but Black Friday wasn't a bust, either.

ComScore on Sunday reported that online, nontravel retail sales on the Friday after Thanksgiving, traditionally a big day for consumer spending, reached $534 million. That's up from the same day a year ago, but just barely--online retail sales rose just 1 percent, from $531 million.

On Saturday, comparison-shopping site PriceGrabber.com said that Web shopping traffic on Black Friday was up 11 percent. The Nintendo Wii was the most popular item, according to both PriceGrabber and eBay.

Sales on Thanksgiving Day itself rose 6 percent to $… Read more

Amazon has enlisted a half dozen of its most dedicated (addicted?) reviewers to act as holiday gift experts this season. They'll be responsible for providing gift picks, tips, and other advice regarding their favorite products available on the mega-retail site.

Putting a "real people" face on holiday shopping is key for Amazon in a season full of thin wallets and nervous spenders: research firm eMarketer just lowered its projections for online holiday shopping. Many of the tips provided by Amazon's reviewers, for obvious reasons, deal with cost-cutting recession strategies.

Amazon has offered customer reviews since 1995, … Read more

A new economic team is heading to Washington and while it's still hard to gauge what the new administration will do vis a vis high tech, President-elect Barack Obama may have sent a message with the appointment of an Internet commerce expert.

Today's stories:

Lycos Europe to close portal, end Web hosting

Getting schooled in formation flying

Ares rocket development updates posted to iTunes

Obama taps Internet commerce expert

Update at 10:30 a.m. PST, with information from IDC holiday spending report.

The Grinch has made off with Christmas.

In yet another sign that e-commerce is taking a hit over the holidays, online sales growth projections for the critical November-December holiday shopping season were cut by more than half Tuesday in a survey released by digital marketing and media research firm eMarketer.

Online sales are expected to grow a mere 4 percent year over year to $30.3 billion during the two-month period, versus eMarketer's previous projection in May of 10.1 percent growth, or $32.1 … Read more

Green may be the new black as far as consumer electronics companies are concerned. But Greenpeace is not so impressed with their efforts to date. In a new report, the group charges that electronics manufacturers are failing to make sufficiently bold moves to cut energy usage. CNET News' Martin LaMonica has the story.

Listen now: Download today's podcast

Today's stories:

Is the video game industry recession-proof?

Trial ending in MySpace suicide case

The dark side of Galileo

Greenpeace rates electronics makers' green claims

Consumer spending on e-commerce sites grew just 1 percent during October compared with the same month a year ago, according to ComScore.

In fact, last month was the worst growth month for online retail spending since ComScore began keeping track in 2001.

Rising prices and unemployment rates, and the psychological impact of the chaos of the financial markets are to blame, according to ComScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni.

But the dip in spending can't be too much of a shock to those who watch ComScore's monthly reports carefully. The preceding six months featured declining growth rates--April saw 15 percent … Read more

Girly blog company Sugar Inc. has announced a new affiliate marketing program for bloggers, based on ShopStyle, the social-shopping and product-search site that it acquired last year. It's called ShopSense.

Here's how it works: if style, culture, or shopping bloggers write about a given product that's in the ShopStyle directory, they can add a ShopStyle widget so that readers can actually buy the product or can use the ShopStyle API to further customize the app. The blogger gets a cut of the revenue.

Sugar started as a content company, with an inaugural celebrity gossip brand called PopSugar, … Read more

People in English-speaking countries are targeted for identity fraud at twice the rate of many Europeans, according to a new study released by PayPal on Wednesday.

Ten percent of online shoppers in the U.S., the U.K. and Canada--not-surprisingly, places with high percentages of e-commerce transactions--reported being victims of identity fraud, compared with only 5 percent in France, Germany and Spain, the study conducted by Ipsos found.

The Germans had the lowest rate of identity fraud of the countries, with 3 percent reporting problems.

Meanwhile, the Germans were also found to be more cautious with their passwords. Only about … Read more