The U.S. Postal Service is in fact working on an “e-post office box,” as I suggested last month. This article has few details about the proposed service (the explanation of how it will work is a little confused and the article doesn’t say when it will be available) but it does indicate the service will target businesses as well as consumers, and will include bill presentment and payment features.
Postal Service delivers online
Online merchants may be throwing away 25% of their business this holiday season, an Andersen report suggests. In the study, Andersen employees made 480 orders on 100 different e-commerce sites this month — and only 350 of those were completed. Web site crashes, buggy forms, and other problems familiar to Web surfers blocked transactions in the rest of the cases. If anything, the Andersen study problem *underestimates* the sales lost due to poor Web sites, since it doesn’t account for the times when would-be customers give up out of frustration, before the e-commerce site even has a site to crash.
Web bugs crash zip of online buying
Online sales are pretty much on track, merchants report in a new IDC study:
Most Web merchants to meet sales forecasts (12/20/1999)
In a survey of the top 100 e-commerce sites, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) discovered that many of these sites aren’t adequately safeguarding the privacy of their customers. 18 of the 100 surveyed sites had no privacy policy at all, and many of the posted policies were confusing or inconsistent. What’s more, 87 of the sites use cookies to track their customers — not a bad thing in itself, but when there’s no privacy policy explaining how the cookies are being used, that’s cause for concern.
Top Web sites compromise consumer privacy
In the biggest domain sale yet, eCompanies bought the URL “business.com” for $7.5 million. Are they insane? Can an address really be worth that much? In a word: Yes. But let’s see what eCompanies can make of it.
It’s a bit more than a week old, but if you missed this Thanksgiving week story on Amazon’s beleagered customer service staff, you’re missing part of the total Amazon picture: Not every member of the Net economy is a dot com millionaire.
Washingtonpost.com: At Amazon.com, Service Workers Without a Smile
Maybe there’s no such thing as a free PC any more?
EMachines Will Purchase Free-PC; Pioneer Will Lose Its Independence
