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ONLINE OUTLET

Not all the surplus merchandise from retailers and manufacturers is going to their factory stores. Increasingly, a lot of it is ending up on eBay. The online auction company has successfully courted KitchenAid, Kodak, Sears and several other big-name companies, offering them significant savings on overhead and marketing costs. Sears even has a link on its Web site to its merchandise on eBay.

FANCY BOOKWORK

Amazon.com grabbed the headlines in January after reporting its first-ever quarterly profit. But this might have more to do with a shift in its accounting procedures than with its fortunes, according to a report in TheStreet.com. Amazon moved its revenue reports for Borders.com, the online site for the Borders book chain that it manages, to the books, music and video section of its ledger, considerably boosting the numbers for this side of its business, the report said. Previously, Amazon, which has received considerable criticism in the past over the way it discloses information to investors, listed its Borders revenue under third-party services.

 

 

MALL TOGETHER NOW

A Norfolk, Va., organization dedicated to helping local minority-owned companies has formed an online “mall” of more than 200 local retail businesses. The organization is called Minority Economic Development through Assisted Lending (Medal). Visitors to the site, medalmall.tripod.com, can obtain such information as the merchants’ addresses, hours of business and special offers.

 

GOING TO THE DOGS

Tesco.com, the British-based supermarket giant’s Internet delivery service, last winter tested huskies for the delivery of food in snowy northeast Scotland. “It wasn’t without problems,” John Church, Tesco’s press manager, acknowledged to SCT, explaining that the dogs couldn’t carry too much and that, despite the weather, there were “refrigeration issues.” With more than 1 million users, Tesco.com is considered the world’s most successful Internet grocery model.

 

INTERNET HIGHWAY RAGE

Credit card fraud isn’t the only criminal hazard facing online merchants and their customers. An employee of an Internet grocery business in Australia, GreenGrocer.com.au, angry at his boss, deleted vital files on his employer’s computer, disabling the site and causing more than $100,000 worth of damage, reported Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph. A judge gave the man an 18-month suspended sentence and ordered him to take a course in anger management.

 

U.S. TO EC: NO VAT

While the shopping center industry is lobbying the U.S. government to implement tax collection on Internet sales, the U.S. government is fighting another Internet tax. The European Commission is set to impose a tax on U.S. and other non-European online merchants, claiming that they enjoy an unfair advantage over domestic electronic retailers, who have to pay value-added tax. The United States argues that this would place an unfair burden on non-EC companies because they would be forced to levy a range of different charges, depending on where their customers live. The levy paid by European merchants, on the other hand, is set by the location of the company.

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