States struggle to collect taxes from e-commerce
Lawmakers in New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Hawaii have all introduced legislation in the past month that requires e-commerce companies to collect sales tax if they have marketing affiliates based in those states. This week, Hawaii governor Linda Lingle vetoed her state’s bill. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger promised to do the same.
Affiliates are website operators who get a commission for routing buyers from their own site to, say, Amazon. Last Sunday, Amazon notified its affiliates… Continue Reading
Omniture acquires Mercado assets for $6.5M
Omniture, a web analytics company, announced that it will spend $6.5 million on intellectual property and business assets from Mercado, a Pleasanton, Calif. company specializing in website search and optimization tools.
Omniture, which has already integrated Mercado technology into some of its products, says the acquisition will allow it to offer more site search options to its retail clients, which include big name shopping site Overstock.com. Along with these advantages, the Orem, Utah-based firm will also… Continue Reading
The new behavior advertising upstarts: Aggregate Knowledge and Wunderloop
The eye-opening performances claimed by new behavioral advertising start-ups Aggregate Knowledge and Wunderloop are sure to grab the attention from online retailers and publishers.
Take the little announcement by the nine-month-old Menlo Park company Aggregate Knowledge yesterday at DEMO: It drove more than 20 percent of all of the holiday purchases at major discount retail site Overstock.com. Considering that the annual revenue of Overstock is in the range of $700-800 million, our rough estimate is that Aggregate… Continue Reading