E-commerce News & Articles

How do you differentiate yourself in the small yet competitive "built for web designers to build a business on top of" niche of the hosted web cms market?

There's a lot of interest in Magento this week, and it's not because of the new X-Men movie (okay, that's Magneto, but you get the picture). eBay (news, site) has acquired the company, after first investing in it a year ago, and is using it, as well as a number of other e-commerce acquisitions recently, to create an e-commerce platform called X.Commerce.

 Google (news, site) held a press conference in New York today to announce its fledgling Near-Field Communication (NFC) services, heralding a new age of customer loyalty, deals and shop snooping.

Marketing professionals are increasingly turning to social media to run promotions and word-of-mouth campaigns. Effective campaigns usually require mechanisms for tracking ROI and reach, and one such tool that can be used for this type of social analytics is Spinback. The New York-based startup has recently been acquired by Facebook marketing solutions provider Buddy Media.

This week the battle for the hearts and pockets of SMBs between Microsoft and Google continues with Microsoft offering Bing marketing for SMBs and Google upgrading its Places. SAP offers businesses that want it a cheap way of doing e-commerce, while new research shows that many SMBs are not ready for web traffic spikes.

Electronic payment processors usually require several layers of security and authentication methods, and access to centralized servers. A shift to a cloud-based system can help improve transaction times and reduce the risk of exposing sensitive user data to theft or loss. With Akamai's (news, site) planned cloud-based e-payment service, token-based payments can reduce the security risk and improve performance of online payments, and will help reduce the cost of security compliance for businesses.

Packt Publishing (news, site) has released the names of the next set of winners in its annual Open Source Awards. This round includes the winner of the Open Source E-Commerce Applications category and the Open Source Graphics Software category. Packt will announce winners for the remaining three categories later this week.

Oracle (news, site) continues its charge to buy what it hasn’t already developed itself. This time, in its ninth acquisition of 2010, it has just agreed to buy e-commerce company ATG Technology for close to US$ 1 billion.

Bitrix (news, site) aims to shake up the website management market with a new push in usability and ergonomics to create a simpler way to work.

GX Software (news, site) is adding e-commerce capabilities to its web content management system, continuing its drive to provide a comprehensive web engagement management offering for customers.

In August we profiled the ways that online e-commerce video can engage users. To further study the impact and benefits of online video in e-commerce, SundaySky recently published the second in a series of research reports focused on the State of Video in e-commerce. The report covers the state of video in e-commerce websites, disclosing facts about the usage of video by top U.S. online retailers, including mobile and social strategies.

Bridgeline (news, site) updates iAPPS to version 4.5 with improved search and commerce features for better business.

While there are a number of new enhancements with the release of the most recent version of its web content management software Site Manager 9.0, Bitrix (news, site) has focused this time around on providing better security to underline its own claim that it is the most secure Web CMS on the market.

MIX09 is now over, but many of the sessions are still available to view. Of particular note are the ASP.NET MVC tutorials that will help you better understand this new development framework.

Phil Haack, a Senior Program Manager with the ASP.NET team who has been an integral part of the ASP.NET MVC Framework, did two of these sessions:

• ASP.NET MVC: America’s Next Top Model View Controller Framework: The building of a simple application that demonstrates some of the key capabilities of the MVC framework. You'll also see some new tooling features that should help you develop apps based on the MVC framework more easily.
• ASP.NET MVC Ninjas on Fire Black Belt Tips: Get some good tips and tricks on making the most of the MVC framework.

Phil indicates on his blog that he intends to offer these demos in blog format in the near future, so keep an eye out for those.

In addition to these sessions, Jared Eischen and John Stockton of Ascentium did a session on using MVC to build mobile device views of your website. And you'll find some sessions covering the future of ASP.NET. All sessions are available on a special website that contains many of MIX09 sessions.

Sessions are downloadable as PPT, Zune Video or Windows Media Video.

You can get ASP.NET MVC 1.0 using the Web Platform Installer, download a free eBook covering the first chapter of the Wrox book on the subject and find a newly updated MSDN section telling you everything you need to know about ASP.NET MVC.

It is clear that Microsoft is excited about this new framework and wants to ensure you have everything you need to get up to speed quickly.

Global Information Management Solution Provider SDL (news,site) has unveiled its Common Enterprise Application Framework (CEAF), a new platform for better managing global content across multinational companies.

The new product is designed to create greater efficiencies and interoperability among Global Information Management Applications (GIM) which manage content throughout the entire global information lifecycle – from authoring through content management to on-line and off-line publishing across world markets.