E-Commerce Blog

Yahoo was quite the chooser last spring when Microsoft offered to buy it — the Yahoo board held out for a higher price. Now it’s looking more and more like the beggar. Its relationship with Google is pretty much finished before it even had a chance to begin, and it appears Yahoo is reaching the end of its rope. Used to be that Google was all hard-headed about going through with an ad revenue sharing partnership with Yahoo, regardless of what the Department of Justice had to say about it.

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Choosers Can Be Beggars; Bloodied Hands Applaud Amazon

The Internet has opened up information sharing in unprecedented and ever-expanding ways. This new world is great for creativity and communication, but it’s also brought intellectual property rights into question. It’s vital that online retailers understand intellectual property law so that they don’t find themselves infringing on others’ rights and possibly facing lawsuits and fines. “IP enforcement and the allocation of resources for that has really skyrocketed in the last decade,” said Eric Syverson, an Internet attorney specializing in intellectual property.

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Intellectual Property Pointers for Enterprising E-Tailers

Online auctioneer and retailer eBay has banned the sale of ivory products on its Web site to help protect African and Asian elephants. The policy goes into effect in December, and eBay will begin enforcing it in January. The decision to ban ivory items outright from its site is eBay’s second attempt to fight the trade of such merchandise in the last year. In 2007, the company banned the cross-border sales of ivory products, but that move apparently had little effect.

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eBay Slams Door on Ivory Traders

Internet phone company Vonage has secured $220.3 million in credit in a deal that Wall Street sees as crucial to the struggling company’s survival. Proceeds will go toward paying off $253 million in debt on Vonage’s books. The $220 million deal, led by Silver Point Finance, comes at a time of unprecedented turmoil on Wall Street and the tightest credit markets in decades. Silver Point primarily invests in companies under some sort of financial duress.

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Vonage Defies Gravity to Win Funding Prize

Online auction house and retailer eBay announced a profitable third quarter on Thursday but warned an already-volatile Wall Street that continued weakness in consumer spending would hurt sales throughout the rest of the year. The company reported Q3 earnings of $492.2 million, compared to a loss of $935.6 million during the same period a year ago.
The bad news was a disclosure that its year-over-year gross merchandise value — the total sum of all transactions on the site — dropped for the first time in the e-commerce pioneer’s history.

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Bleak Forecast Pours Cold Water on eBay’s Q3 Profit News