E-commerce, Online Auction | featured news

EBay is scrapping its complex, tiered set of "final value fees," calculated as a percentage of an item's sale price, and introducing flat-rate fees based on product categories.

Michael Rubin is lucky. And he’s also damned good. Lucky, because eBay approached him last year with a $2.4 billion offer to buy his moneylosing GSI Commerce–which provides Web design, customer service and shipping to big-brand retailers–a 51% premium over the share price. Damned, because Rubin has always played so loose and fast that he’s nearly brought on his own ruin–and stoked the wrath of shareholders. Good, because he has an uncanny eye for undervalued assets and a lifelong talent for turning them into gold.

Dateline: Dungeon and Dragons — if you're looking for a spell to aid you on your next adventure, traveler, then you're sorely out of luck. The great and powerful internet auction house eBay has henceforth banned all sales of wizardly enchantments and magic spells, even if you have a vacuum cleaner's worth of gold to offer.

Alibaba Group announced a major restructuring of its key Taobao unit, splitting the popular Chinese e-commerce platform into three separate companies focused on different market segments.

EBay Inc., owner of the largest e- commerce market, agreed to buy GSI Commerce Inc. for about $2.4 billion to add interactive marketing services.

Shares in eBay jump almost 8% after the online auction site's Paypal unit said its revenues would double by 2013.

After a three year investigation and countless complaints, a south Florida man will spend 5 1/2 years behind bars for running one of the largest eBay scams in the history of eBay. The details of the massive operation include, hundreds of auction accounts, multiple identities and constantly changing PO Boxes.