Alibaba suspends public trading to buy back its stock from Yahoo

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has suspended public trading of its shares in Hong Kong as it prepares to buy back its 40 percent stake held by Yahoo.

The transaction is said to be worth between $10 billion and $11.5 billion.

In a filing with the Hong Kong stock exchange, Alibaba representatives said the company would be releasing a statement today that would be “potentially price sensitive.”

Late last year, Alibaba began rounding up the financing … Continue Reading

Groupon acquires e-commerce ‘big data’ startup Adku

Group deals company Groupon has acquired e-commerce data firm Adku for an undisclosed price, the startup announced today.

Adku provides a service that attempts to “optimize” a person’s shopping experience by providing product suggestions on sites like Zappos, eBay, and Amazon. It does this by using various data about each shopper such as location and hot news trends.

The startup was founded by three former Google engineers and has remained in stealth-mode since it launched … Continue Reading

Alice.com scores $3M to deliver household goods to your door

Alice.com, an e-commerce platform exclusively for household goods, announced today it has received $3.6 million in funding from private Spanish investors.

Alice.com is a platform that lets companies sell toilet paper, laundry detergent and everything else your house needs directly to you. Companies such as Proctor & Gamble, BIC, and 3M partner with Alice.com to sell their products on the site and can offer lower prices than they can at retail. Alice.com also offers auto-shipments … Continue Reading

Emerging social network Pinterest driving big traffic to retailers (infographic)

Emerging social network Pinterest, an addictive site that lets people spotlight products and items they like, is helping drive increasing amounts of traffic to retailers, according to a new infographic by Monetate.

Pinterest, which attracted nearly 11 million unique visitors in mid-December, is now one of the top 10 social networking sites. It’s one of the rare cases of a social network generating strong word-of-mouth interest without much help from the tech community. The site … Continue Reading

Choose your own sale with LuxeYard, launching today

Flash sale and daily deals sites have gained a lot of popularity in the last year with Groupon, Gilt, and Fab.com bringing consumers discounted products and services.

LuxeYard, a new flash sale site focused on luxury home furnishings and decor, delivers a fresh feature to the daily deal market: it lets its customers request which items they want offered at a discount. The site launched Monday evening with $3.5 million in funding from private investors.… Continue Reading

PayPal payments coming to a non-virtual store near you

Not content with having conquered online payments, PayPal is expanding into real-world stores. The online e-commerce company has decided to expand by allowing shoppers to pay with its service in more than 2,000 brick-and-mortar stores by March.

Partnering with The Home Depot, PayPal tested its state-of-the-art Touchstone technology in over 51 store locations. Customers are able to pay by just entering their mobile number and PIN or swiping a PayPal credit card at checkout.

“We’ve … Continue Reading

Zappos user accounts get hacked — but your credit card info is safe

Zappos customers got more from the online shoe retailer this month than a pair of winter boots. They all received a bit of a shock on Sunday when CEO Tony Hsieh revealed that the company suffered a security breach on one of its Kentucky servers.

It appears the hacker was able to get access to data such as customer names, home addresses, and last four digits of customer credit cards (which can be found on … Continue Reading

Virtual shopping with Bodymetrics will show how outfits fit on your body

Bodymetrics used the technology in Microsoft’s Kinect motion-sensing system for the Xbox 360 for a virtual shopping application.

If it works, it could enhance the experience of shopping for clothing online, which has become at $30 billion market. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the London-based company showed how it lets you scan your body at home using a 3D capture camera from PrimeSense.

That gives the system — a computer or, in … Continue Reading

Amazon may miss projected quarterly sales by $300M

Amazon stock stumbled today when a Goldman Sachs analyst estimated the company’s quarterly sales at $17.9 billion rather than the earlier estimate of $18.2 billion.

AMZN, which was trading on the NASDAQ as high as $178 earlier this week, briefly dropped to $167 this morning as analyst Heather Bellini’s note was made public.

As of this writing, AMZN has returned to trading at $173.26. Bellini named a price target — the price at which current … Continue Reading

Amazon acquires the talented team at shopping startup Quorus

Amazon has bought Quorus, a shopping startup focusing on bringing social interactions and conversations into e-commerce. The deal seems to have been completed in November 2011.

The acquisition, which may be a talent grab, brings Quorus co-founders Michael Dougherty (pictured) and Sameer Rayachoti into the Amazon fold.

Currently, all Quorus employees are now working at Amazon, we’ve learned from an anonymous source with close ties to the deal.

While the team can’t comment on what … Continue Reading

What recession? Holiday shopping online finishes at a record $35.3B

Online holiday shopping for 2011 finished at an all-time high of $35.3 billion, up 15 percent from last year’s sales figures.

According to comScore, which tracked online consumer spending between November 1 and the week beginning December 25, year-over-year sales figures for online retailers were higher for every single week for the final 56 holiday shopping days of 2011.

“Holiday e-commerce spending has remained strong throughout the season,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni in a … Continue Reading

Phishing e-mail targets new Apple customers, steals billing information

Just got a new Macbook, iPad or other Apple gizmo for Christmas? A new e-mail scam is targeting you.

Cyber criminals are sending around a very official looking e-mail asking Apple users to update billing information, according to Intego, an anti-virus software company focused on Macs. The company says that the phishing scam, or scam that parades itself as a legitimate source and then steals information, targets new Apple users who are just setting up … Continue Reading

U.S. sees its heaviest online shopping week in history

The U.S. saw its heaviest week in online shopping ever, with consumers spending $6.3 billion in the week ended Dec. 18, up 14 percent from a year ago.

Market research firm comScore said that e-commerce spending to date for the first 48 days of the holiday season hit $32 billion, up 15 percent from the corresponding days last year. With two weeks to go, it’s already clear this will be the busiest holiday shopping season … Continue Reading

Sales tax doesn’t change online shopping behavior (study)

Taxing online purchases would do little if anything to change consumer behavior and would not return shoppers to “main street” shops, according to a new Forrester report.

Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru writes that eight percent of survey respondents would change their shopping behavior and about 25 percent would change retailers because of taxes. The report, published today, is titled “What You Need to Know About the Online Sales Tax Debate.”

E-commerce continues to soar in … Continue Reading

FindTheBest upgrades with even more visual comparisons of almost everything

FindTheBest, an information site that lets shoppers compare everything from apartments to dogs to venture capitalists, is unveiling a new design.

The new look, created by design firm KKLD, aims to cut through the sometimes cluttered and text-heavy datasets that are FindTheBest’s bread and butter.

“Like any product, you keep adding new features and new features and it winds up looking like Frankenstein over time,” said founder Kevin O’Connor in an interview at VentureBeat’s offices. … Continue Reading

Luxury deals site MarkaVIP pries open the door for Arab e-commerce

The frontiers of e-commerce are wide open, and the countries of the Arab world could be the next online consumer hotspot.

Luxury deals site MarkaVIP is focused on expanding e-commerce into Arab countries, and its growth has been steady and encouraging. The company today raised a $5 million in Series A funding from Lumia Capital and Invus Financial Advisors to turbocharge its expansion plans.

“It’s an exciting region, and it’s a company we really feel … Continue Reading

Poshmark sees your closet as the next big e-commerce store, launches with $3.5M

Any good spring cleaner enjoys weeding out a load of clothes, shoes and bags that still have life in them, but are just taking up closet space. Poshmark launched today with $3.5 million in funding to let anyone sell their old items.

Founder Manish Chandra, who also founded Kaboodle, explained that when he entered his closet, he saw bags of unopened items, barely used handbags and nice shoes collecting dust, and he realized closets all … Continue Reading

Holiday e-commerce spending grows 15 percent to $20B

U.S. online holiday spending hit $19.6 billion in the first 34 days of the November-December shopping season, up 15 percent from a year ago.

Market research firm comScore said the most recent week saw three days eclipse $1 billion in spending each, led by the record-setting Cyber Monday at $1.25 billion.

Growth slowed somewhat in the later part of the work week, but strengthened on the weekend, with sales up 17 percent. For the week … Continue Reading

Holiday e-commerce season gets off to a record start

U.S. shoppers are spending a lot of money after a record-setting Cyber Monday, according to data from the first week of sales after the season kick-off.

Market research firm comScore said Sunday that shoppers spent $6 billion on Monday through Friday last week. Typically, about 40 percent of spending happens in the last two months of the year.

“Cyber Monday kicked the week off with a bang as consumers opened their wallets to the tune … Continue Reading