Technology, E-commerce | featured news

Online sales are soaring. State budget deficits are growing. And tax-free Internet sales are once again in the spotlight. Congress is considering bills that would “level the playing field” by allowing states to require all online merchants doing business in that state to collect sales tax. Web retailers have largely had a free ride since a 1992 Supreme Court ruling that only merchants with a physical presence in a state are responsible for collecting sales tax.

Recently ousted Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson has landed a new job leading ShopRunner, an online service that provides two-day shipping from a variety of Internet retailers... ShopRunner began as part of GSI Commerce, which eBay bought for $2.4 billion last year. After that deal closed, eBay spun off ShopRunner into another company but still retains a 30 percent stake in the service.

To meet online competition, shopping malls are signing tenants that offer dining, hairstyling, craft-making and other things the Internet can’t provide.

A former manager at China’s largest e-commerce company, Alibaba Group, has been arrested by Chinese police under suspicion of accepting bribes from businesses owners, the company said Thursday.

Facebook is gearing up for a huge social commerce push. The developer who recently discovered that the social network is testing a “Want” button, which would allow you to add products to a virtual wish list, has found a series of new coding for actions that would allow users to share product purchases, charitable donations or items purchased within Facebook games to profile pages and Timeline.

Pinterest, which allows users to share photographs, recipes and other media on custom "pinboards," raised $100 million in a funding round led by the Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten.

Amazon has set a torrid hiring pace in recent months, accelerating a rate of employee acquisitions that was already well ahead of most large corporations.

Yahoo Inc could be weeks away from selling 15 to 25 percent of Alibaba Group's stock back to China's largest e-commerce company, in a deal designed to eliminate complexities that had scuttled the parties' previous negotiations, a person familiar with the matter said.

Amazon.com Inc unveiled a new effort to develop original comedy and children's TV shows to distribute over the company's video streaming service.

Amazon.com Inc's quarterly earnings beat Wall Street's most bullish expectations as the world's largest Internet retailer brought costs under control and saw early success selling more digital products through its new Kindle Fire tablet, sending its shares up almost 15 percent.