Buy.com sold for $250m

Rakuten, a company that runs the largest Japanese e-commerce site, has agreed to purchase Buy.com for a quarter of a billion dollars, reports Gadgetell.

The purchase was made with the intention of making Rakuten's marketplace a viable competitor with e-commerce giants eBay and Amazon. Since the site's inception in 2000, Buy.com has grown to over 14 million customers worldwide.

Buy.com is the largest seller on eBay, selling half of its products directly, while the other half are sold through e-commerce businesses using their online store.

Consumer packaged goods giant Procter & Gamble has teamed up with partner PFSweb, an e-commerce platform, to unveil an online shopping site to sell its products directly to US consumers, states DMNews.

The site, known as the eStore, features a variety of P&G products from brands such as Tide, Pampers, Olay, CoverGirl and Febreze. It opened on 20 May.

P&G's beauty external relations spokesperson, Aja Silvas, says the company went in this direction as it recognised “e-commerce is the fastest growing channel for many of P&G's brands. Industry statistics for CPG show sales consistently growing 20% to 25% every year.”

Global e-commerce solutions provider Digital River has recently enhanced its service with several optimisations related to its administrative technologies, says Softpedia.

Improvements include designing a more user-friendly reporting dashboard and analytic tools, increasing the site optimisation capabilities, and creating a comprehensive event calendar for tracking and organising marketing initiatives.

Digital River's CEO, Joel Ronning, says these changes would help the company reinforce its position among competitors in terms of 'flexibility, scalability and manageability', by opening up towards its users and presenting them with administrative solutions.