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Shopping Centers Today -> June 2004
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PATENTLY RIDICULOUS? Scores of online retailers have been hit by lawsuits claiming patent infringement of such everyday e-tail tools as virtual shopping carts and one-click purchasing, but a civil liberties group is hitting back. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org) is trying to persuade the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to rescind patents on these and other tools, calling them an impediment to free speech and innovation. |
| SURPRISE, SURPRISE Only a handful of taxpayers fessed up on a new line on their state tax returns about how much they’d bought online, according to the Associated Press. Many people interviewed by AP close to April’s income tax deadline said they weren’t even aware of line 56 on New York’s form, which asked them to declare such purchases. New York was one of 18 states that invited consumers to share the information this year. Hard-pressed states are losing millions of dollars in sales taxes to online purchases. ICSC is backing federal legislation designed to make it easier for states to collect. |
| ONLINE MALL Internet sales don’t always hurt shopping centers. Just 10 minutes after a retail real estate broker posted a California shopping center on an online properties-for-sale site, a buyer snapped it up. The broker, working for brokerage firm Sperry Van Ness, listed the center in Castro Valley on LoopNet.com (www.loopnet.com), where it was seen by Alan Sim, president of Kids Martial Arts, who bought it for $1.75 million. |
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| MEA CULPA Tower Records settled a federal complaint arising from a security breach that allowed intruders to hack into its Web site (www.towerrecords.com) to obtain the names, addresses and purchasing records of 5,225 customers over eight days in December 2002. No credit card data was seen, and no financial harm was done, the Federal Trade Commission says. Tower agreed to implement a new security program that will be audited every two years. |
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E-JEWELRY Online jewelry purchases in the United States grew from about $600 million in 2002 to more than $1 billion in 2003, representing a roughly 2 percent share of the $52 billion in annual jewelry sales, reports the Jewelry Industry Research Institute. J.C. Penney recently began selling engagement rings over the Internet, and now Amazon.com has launched an online jewelry store through which it promises to sell high-quality merchandise for around a 15 percent markup, compared with the mark-up of up to 100 percent that Amazon claims regular stores charge. |
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| IF YOU CAN’T BEAT ’EM ... Circuit City bought MusicNow, the online music downloading retailer, to offset the erosion of CD sales at the hands of other digital music services. |
Shopping Centers Today
 | Current Issue November 2008 |