He has a really interesting background as a product manager and now an entrepreneur. Tell me a bit about your background. Like many product managers, my background is fairly eclectic. That's where I learned I enjoyed interacting with customers and working with development teams to build and launch products. From there, I became the first non-founder employee at an e-commerce startup called BITSource, which was the first electronic software distributor delivering electronic volume software licenses to corporations. Visible networking is turning into a really great opportunity to get to know people better, get to meet new people, and have some interesting conversations.

Santa Barbara-based FastSpring , a developer of e-commerce software headed by Dan Engel, said today that it has released a new product which handles mail-in-rebates for online vendors. The firm said it will allow stores to offer mail-in rebates on their products, as well as related options such as instead offering consumers discounts on other products. Tags: fastspring software FastSpring is the latest venture of Dan Engel, who has previously been at Google, Picasa, and GoToMyPC. READ MORE>> ...Tags:

NewEgg explained that the store will offer everything from furniture to printer ink, toner, electronics, and paper products. Tags: newegg ecommerce retail office supplies paper commerc City of Industry-based Newegg.com is officially expanding its online store into office supplies, the firm said yesterday afternoon. The firm said the new site is focused on consumers and small business owners.

The firm attributed the boost in sales to its wide product range of HDTVs, as well as retail partners such as Costco Wholesale, Sam's Club, Walmart, Target, and others. Tags: vizio hdtv black friday retail commerce electronic Irvine-based HDTV maker VIZIO reported Tuesday that it sold over 280,000 of its HDTVs on Black Friday, or 40 percent more over its sales in 2008. Vizio is one of the largest makers of HDTVs. ...Tags:

City of Industry-based NewEgg , the Los Angeles area e-commerce firm, told its users today that it has added a new, same-day shipping option for customers who live near its three main distribution centers. The firm, which is a major retailer of computer accessories, electronics, and other products, also said users need to complete their offer by specific cut-off times to get same day shipping, with cutoff at 11am in California, and 12pm in New Jersey and Tennessee. According to NewEgg, the new service -- Newegg Local Express Delivery -- will allow users to receive eligible, in-stock items the same day they are ordered.

Los Angeles-based Stamps.com is furthering its focus on online stories, saying today that it has linked its product to the e-commerce payment systems for Amazon.com Pro Merchant, Yahoo Merchant, Google Checkout, and Paypal. According to Stamps.com, the firm's software now allows web store managers to process, manage, and ship orders from "virtually any" e-commerce source. The new additions come on top of an existing push by Stamps.com to cater to eBay merchants. Stamps.com recently started looking back into the eBay shipping market, saying in early October that it would

Aliso Viejo-based Buy.com , the online e-commerce retailer, said today that it will provide free web site hosting of e-commerce sites as part of a new, turnkey tool for developing affiliate e-commerce sites. According to Buy.com, its new StoreBuilder tool will allow its affiliates to easily create their own customized site featuring products from the retailer. Buy.com said the new tool is available in beta to a "select" number of its Commission Junction partners. The firm said it plans to roll the program out to all of its affiliates later this year.

think the biggest breakthrough for us came in 2003 or 2004 with the understanding that there was an open-source product called OS Commerce that had a large following — but the service providers on the market weren’t really sophisticated, and there weren’t that many of them. So I just spend a few hundred dollars in Google AdWords,  trying to get OS Commerce clients. Roy Rubin was a student trying to make extra money on the side when he founded Varien, the company that went on to launch Magento, an ecommerce platform that enables billions of dollars in online sales.

Somehow, as Luke Burgis raced to build his business, he ended up selling fitness bars, cereal, pet supplements and "sexual enhancement" products. mean, we were taking pretty much any product that you can think of and justifying it as some kind of wellness product. We offered a thousand products when we actually only stocked a few hundred. At the same time, he found himself running an online message board and a YouTube-like video site. Lack of focus is a big reason why Fit Fuel had to shut down.

For example, if you wanted to build an e-commerce site in 1996, it was really hard!  Any efficiencies In fact, thanks to Amazon Web Services, products can be launched without the developers ever having to purchase, lease, or touch servers.  Databases, They rapidly iterated their product and design Is your business’s success going to be based on execution or technology?  Or Or is it something in between?