After too much math, Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners estimates that Facebook earns between $28 million and $42 million allowing its users to buy icons as gifts for each other. Lightspeed came up with the revenue numbers by watching how much users spent on the icons for a week and then multiplying that…
Luxer-than-thou retailer J. Crew has mostly avoided the economic pinch, since its customers barely notice that they're paying $4 a gallon for gas. Instead, the retailer has been laid low by buggy software, reports the Business Technology blog. One outraged customer, shown here, was billed $9,208.50 and shipped…
Woe be unto Netflix if my parents don't get the latest installemnt of Foyle's War. In an email sent out to customers and a notice posted to the site, the DVD-by-mail company says it is having problems with its shipping system affecting around a third of the company's customers. It has now persisted for two days. So…
eBay, having failed to catch on in the heavily-wired nation of South Korea, is in talks with Korean site Gmarket. A few days ago, Gmarket announced Q2 sales of nearly $1 billion, which generated $35 million in revenue. Yahoo bought 10 percent of the company in 2006 for approximately $60 million. [NYT]
Luxury goods-maker Tiffany — you know, the one which sells the gays their wedding rings — is appealing a federal district court's decision clearing eBay of responsibility for counterfeit product listings. The jewelry company sends eBay 135,000 takedown notices a year, and wishes eBay would do more of the work for…
Checkout by Amazon and Amazon Simple Pay are two different levels of PayPal-like services Amazon.com quietly launched on Tuesday. No press release, no front-door promo. Simple Pay works a lot like PayPal — customers at another e-commerce site can use it as an alternative to entering a credit card number. Checkout by…
Finally realizing the dreams of advertising professionals since the 1950s, Amazon.com and Tivo announced new features to closely integrate shopping with TV watching. Viewers of talk shows — where pitching movies, music, or books vaguely masquerades as entertainment — will now have an opportunity to buy exactly what's…
At first we found lifecasting the most depressing thing around; now, the practice of living your life attached to a camera seems depressingly popular, Silicon Alley Insider reports. Justin.tv has reached 1 million registered users. The site still has no business model, but CEO Michael Seibel says the company is…
Facebook will not launch a payments system for its platform application developers at the upcoming F8 conference. Inside Facebook says though Facebook engineers are working on a system, it just won't be ready in time — even though Facebook began asking developers to participate in a payments beta test last December. …
eBay's second-quarter net income rose 22 percent to $460 million, as PayPal and other newer businesses led broad-based growth. The total value of all goods sold on the site in the quarter was $15.7 billion, up 8 percent from a year ago — which suggests that the sustained whining of smaller sellers who are displeased…
"In a long-awaited decision in a four-year-old trademark lawsuit against eBay brought by the jeweler Tiffany and Company, Judge Richard Sullivan of the Federal District Court in Manhattan ruled Monday that the online retailer does not bear a legal responsibility to prevent its users from selling counterfeit items…
Facebook has a Craigslist-like marketplace where users can buy and sell things. Or, at least, for now it does. Product manager Jared Morgenstern launched the marketplace in May 2007, but Facebook hasn't updated marketplace listings since the middle of last month. AllFacebook's Nick O'Neill wonders if that means…
When online shoe retailer Zappos isn't paying newly trained employees to leave the company, it's replacing them entirely. Robots developed by Kiva Systems zip around a Zappos warehouse picking up items and deliver them to their meatbag underlings for packing, and then move the packages to another small group of…
On eBay, some merchants are now more equal than others. eBay signed up Buy.com to sell on the site with a special deal: no listing fees, a perk which has allowed Buy.com to litter the site with junk listings like a single AA battery — an offering that makes no economic sense under the rules that apply to other eBay…
While the occassional videoblogger might put up sponsorships for sale through eBay's auction site, networks and radio stations weren't so interested, so eBay is cutting its few deals with cable networks loose and ending its partnerships with Bid4Spots in brokering AM and FM ads. Which is a shame, because I was…
Amazon.com's new, new thing is straight from the 1980s: a home-shopping network. Live on your TV! Amazon today announced an investment in the Talk Market, which the flacks call "a user-generated TV Shopping Channel" because businesses can upload and edit commercials on the site. [PR Newswire]
Through higher fees and other changes, eBay is trying to push auctioneers off its site, as consumers favor fixed-price purchases. [BusinessWeek]
Texas isn't the only state going after Amazon.com for abusing the Supreme Court decision that requires mail-order retailers to collect sales taxes only on purchases in states where the company has a significant physical presence. In Pennsylvania, which is about to become host to a new Amazon distribution center, a…
A Vancouver couple listed their week-old newborn for sale on Craigslist for $10,000, prompting a horrified user to call the police. When the cops arrived, they found the tyke breastfeeding and the parents claimed it was a hoax. Which didn't stop the authorities from confiscating the baby. Susan MacTavish Best issued…
Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos may not be a sexless monk, but what about owners of the Kindle e-book reader? Hoping to ignite the flame of consumer desire across America, Amazon has set up a page for people to "See a Kindle in Your City."
