ToC

----

Amazon's Lovely Mortar
There are times when a warehouse can look awfully good. For Amazon.com, this is one of those times. That's because outfits like CDnow and Peapod are learning to their chagrin that the biggest problem in e-commerce is picking, packing and shipping the stuff at the lowest possible cost. But Amazon's Bezos has been a visionary in this area. Should Amazon spin off that distribution advantage?

• ClickZ
• http://gt.clickz.com/cgi-bin/gt/cz/ebr/ebr.html?article=1541 

Food.com delivers dinner to your door
Food.com is cooking up plans to offer takeout delivery over the Internet starting May 1, company executives said.

• CNET
• http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200-1722809.html?tag=st.ne.1430735..1007-200-1722809 

Lack Of Application Integration Hinders E-markets
Electronic marketplaces may be the next big thing, but companies seeking to tap this potentially lucrative channel are encountering an obstacle -- the yawning gulf between their own IT systems and those of the potential suppliers and customers they meet on exchanges.

• TechWeb
• http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20000404S0004 

Major Plastic Companies to Form Online Marketplace
Five major thermoplastics companies want to efficiently serve the $50 billion global market for plastics injection molders.

• The Industry Standard
• http://www.thestandard.com/article/display/0%2C1151%2C13753%2C00.html 

Mall Developers Fight Back
With investors fleeing Web merchants en masse, malls are vying to fill the gaps left by traditional and online retailers in areas like ordering and customer service.

• New York Times
• http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/04/cyber/commerce/10commerce.html 

Online Sales Transform Antiquarian Book Market
With financial resources totaling more than $60 million in venture capital, Alibris is a mix of Internet start-up and industry upstart, a two-year-old company with a cheeky national advertising campaign aimed at building a mighty brand on the spines of old books.

• New York Times
• http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/04/biztech/articles/15book.html 

Online computer products retailer Outpost.com launched a new, same-day delivery service in selected markets.

• Internet News
• http://www.internetnews.com/ec-news/article/0%2C2171%2C4_342831%2C00.html 

Priceline.com, the Web site that allows customers to name their own price for products, has extended its push into auto services nationwide, a company spokesman said.

• CNET
• http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200-1722838.html?tag=st.ne.1430735..1007-200-1722838 

Sony Pledges Online Music Sales Via Retailers
The music-publishing arm of Sony Corp., today demonstrated its interface for selling digital music online, technology it said would go live later this month with the help of some Web retailers.

• Computer User
• http://www.currents.net/newstoday/00/04/11/news15.html 

Walgreen to Join 11 Retailers in Exchange
Walgreen Co., the largest U.S. drugstore chain in terms of sales, said on Tuesday it is joining 11 other U.S. and international retailers to start a business-to-business online retail exchange.

• The Industry Standard
• http://www.thestandard.com/article/display/0%2C1151%2C13737%2C00.html 

• ZDNet
• http://cgi.zdnet.com/slink?28798:4326407 

Web shopping for the very impatient
Instant gratification is the way of the Web. Not only can you get just about anything online -- an e-mail account, a home loan, the answer to a pressing question about the Taft administration -- but you can get it in minutes. There is, however, one vast exception to the Web's no-wait policy: Online shopping can often be painfully slow.

• CNN
• http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/04/13/web.impatient.idg/index.html