Les Jones

E-commerce > Tuesday E-Commerce Report #1

Welcome to the first edition of what I hope will be a long tradition, the Tuesday E-commerce Report.

Monsters of E-commerce

eBay changed their user ID rules in response to the spam and fraudulent emails many users received. Email addresses are no longer allowed as user IDs. eBay users like yours truly who had an email address for a user ID had their user IDs changed last week.

Microsoft will drop Internet Explorer's support for embedding usernames and passwords in URLs using the username:password@domain syntax. The move is a security measure to confront the problem of spoofed URLs.

Yahoo! has dropped Google from its search results. Yahoo!'s search results will be powered by Inktomi, which Yahoo! purchased last year.

Soverain Software is suing Amazon for infringing on its e-commerce-related patents. Oh, the irony. And the platinumy, too.

U.S. Census Bureau E-Commerce Retail Sales Report

Every quarter the U.S. Census tallies U.S. e-commerce sales in the retail sector, which excludes travel agencies, financial services, manufacturers, or wholesalers. E-commerce sales for Q4 2003 were $17.2 billion, an increase of 25.1 percent from Q4 2002.

Those numbers are pretty big, and e-commerce continues to grow year on end, but how much bigger can it get? To get an idea, compare e-commerce sales to total retail sales. E-commerce currently accounts for only 1.9% of U.S. retail sales. That leaves plenty of room for growth in the e-commerce sector as more homes get Internet access, and more consumers learn to shop online.

Incidentally, the reports's FAQ clearly spells out what they mean by e-commerce: "E-commerce sales are sales of goods and services where an order is placed by the buyer or price and terms of sale are negotiated over the Internet, an extranet, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) network, or other online system. Payment may or may not be made online." That's not a bad definition at all.

The Periodicals Department

The February edition of The Broadband Report looks at Internet connectivity in the U.S. 56K and slower modems still account for 57% of Internet-connected homes. Any consumer site has to be usable at low bandwidth. (LesJones.com has been terrible for 56K users, but I'm making improvements. The home page of the e-commerce site I manage by day is a svelte 32K including HTML, stylesheets, JavaScript, and 14 images.)

Jakob Nielsen: Targeted Email Newsletters Show Continued Strength - "E-newsletters that are informative, convenient, and timely are often preferred over other media. However, a new study found that only 11% of newsletters were read thoroughly, so layout and content scannability are paramount."

Jakob Nielsen: Risks of Quantitative Studies - "Number fetishism leads usability studies astray by focusing on statistical analyses that are often false, biased, misleading, or overly narrow. Better to emphasize insights and qualitative research."

Clay Shirky has a cogent analysis of Voice over IP.

Danny Sullivan serves up the February edition of The Search Engine Report.