Shruti Speak's

Has the giant online retailer Amazon managed, quite legally, to avoid paying any corporation tax at all to the UK in the past year? That is the eye-catching accusation in the Guardian, following a report in a trade publication, the Bookseller. Amazon will not confirm that it has managed to do this. The accusation hinges on the fact that since 2006, its UK business has been a subsidiary of its European headquarters in Luxembourg. As a result, anyone buying anything from Amazon in the UK makes a payment to the retailer in Luxembourg, with the profits taxed there rather than here. That is despite the fact that Amazon employs hundreds of staff in the UK, at several large depots, selling tens of millions of items each year to millions of UK customers. "Amazon EU serves tens of millions of customers and sellers throughout Europe from multiple consumer websites in a number of languages, dispatching products to all 27 countries in the EU," Amazon said. "We have a...

Today the search for the world’s best customers routinely takes retailers across international borders, and many American merchants are finding big spenders in new markets. The stakes are high:  JP Morgan  estimates that global e-commerce will grow by 20 percent this year, to $680 billion worldwide.  Much of this growth will come from “power shoppers,” elite consumers who annually outspend 90% of their peers. Power shoppers place bigger orders, they come back sooner, and they buy more frequently. For merchants selling internationally through FiftyOne Global Ecommerce, cross-border power shoppers accounted for more than 40 percent of 2010 sales, and more than half in many countries. Power shoppers were easier to find in some places than others, though, and their spending patterns were remarkably different around the world. Where they Live Canada produced the most cross-border power shoppers (37 percent of the worldwide total), followed by Europe (26 percent...

The first ball in the Indian e-commerce game has been bowled. But was it a no ball? While believers celebrate each new round of investment poured into e-commerce startups, cynics are crying hoarse that the boom will pretty soon go bust. In a free-wheeling chat with ET, Rajan Anandan, head of Internet giant Google's India operations -- quite obviously a believer -- makes a spirited argument endorsing the view that e-commerce is booming in India. Once again. To build his argument, Anandan takes a trip down memory lane and points out that the world's largest online retailer Amazon.com went public in 1997 when there were merely 50 million internet users worldwide. India crossed 100 million users last year despite poor internet penetration and sluggish internet speed. It is a big number, says Anandan because it makes India the third largest internet market in the world by number of users. "Our estimates are that on an average, these 100 million spend about 16 hours a we...

E-commerce - the term sounds nearly old-fashioned by now. Aren't we all doing our shopping online? Well, no. E-commerce is still puny. By some estimates it makes up a mere 5% of all retail. But it is growing rapidly. Some of the data points are startling: The Chinese online market place Taobao, for example, sells 800 items a second . German car maker Volkswagen deals with its suppliers online, in a business-to-business market that turns over 2bn euros a year. E-commerce 1.0 was all about discovering the web and setting up the first online shops. They were imitations of the offline world, with virtual shelves providing breadth and depth of product. Version 2.0 saw these websites transformed into clever multimedia portals that tried to engage users. They were not just about "pull" , where shoppers searched for a specific product and bought it, they were also "push" - convincing customers to snap up that special deal, to follow an impulse, says Ms de R...

With E-Commerce providing a perfect launchpad, companies are taking no chances in trying their hand in this arena as well. The use of online marketing has led to the elimination of many intermediaries, who would have otherwise led to the rise in the price of the goods provided by the companies. Due to this elimination, companies now could directly interact with its customers and exchange ideas for innovation. A significant amount of cost is saved for the company and at the same time, by interacting with the consumers, companies get to know the kind of products required by them and are able to satisfy their needs in a much better way. Here, I would like to mention about Michael Dell, the founder of Dell Computers. At the age of 19, when he started selling computers from his college room, little did anyone realize that this business idea would prove to be a boon to many companies. Proving all skeptics wrong, Dell went on to become one of the largest PC makers in the w...