India ordered a large-scale investigation into Flipkart and Amazon India on Monday after a retail trade group alleged that the e-commerce giants were indulging in anti-competitive practices to gain foothold in the country. From a report: Competition Commission of India (CCI), the local antitrust body, noted four concerns including the arrangements between smartphone vendors and e-commerce platforms to sell certain handsets exclusively online, and e-commerce firms apparently giving preferential treatment to certain sellers, and said these allegations merit an investigation. The CCI also ordered Director General to investigate whether Amazon India and Walmart are offering deep discounts on their marketplaces and promoting their own private labels.

As Amazon and Walmart-owned Flipkart spend billions to make a dent in India's retail market and reel from recent regulatory hurdles, the two companies have stumbled upon a new challenge: Mukesh Ambani, Asia's richest man. From a report: Reliance Retail and Reliance Jio, two subsidiaries of Ambani's Reliance Industries, said they have soft-launched JioMart, their e-commerce venture that works closely with neighborhood stores, in parts of the state of Maharashtra -- Navi Mumbai, Kalyan and Thane. The e-commerce venture, which is being marketed as "Desh Ki Nayi Dukaan" (Hindi for new store of the country), currently offers a catalog of 50,000 grocery items and promises "free and express delivery." In an email to Reliance Jio users, the two aforementioned subsidiaries that are working together on the e-commerce venture said they plan to expand the service to many parts of India in coming months. The joint venture has also urged Jio subscribers to sign up to JioMart to access introductory offers. A Reliance spokesperson declined to share more. The soft launch this week comes months after Ambani, who runs Reliance Industries -- India's largest industrial house -- said that he wants to service tens of millions of retailers and store owners across the country. If there is anyone in India who is positioned to compete with heavily backed Amazon and Walmart, it's Ambani. Reliance Retail, which was founded in 2006, is the largest retailer in the country by revenue. It serves more than 3.5 million customers each week through its nearly 10,000 physical stores in more than 6,500 Indian cities and towns. Reliance Jio is the second largest telecom operator in India, with more than 360 million subscribers.

Airbnb will be breathing a sigh of relief today: Europe's top court has judged it to be an online platform which merely connects people looking for short term accommodation, rather than a full-blown estate agent. From a report: The ruling may make it harder for the 'home sharing' platform to be forced to comply with local property regulations -- at least under current regional rules governing ecommerce platforms. The judgement by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) today follows a complaint made by a French tourism association, AHTOP, which had argued Airbnb should hold a professional estate agent licence. And, that by not having one, the platform giant was in breach of a piece of French legislation known as the 'Hoguet Law.' However the court disagreed -- siding with Airbnb's argument that its business must be classified as an 'information society service' under EU Directive 2000/31 on electronic commerce.

Dumpster divers say it's easy to list discarded toys, electronics and books on Amazon. An investigation by the Wall Street Journal found that's an accurate assertion. From a report: Just about anyone can open a store on Amazon.com and sell just about anything. Just ask the dumpster divers. These are among the dedicated cadre of sellers on Amazon who say they sort through other people's rejects, including directly from the trash, clean them up and list them on Amazon.com's platform. Many post their hunting accounts on YouTube. They are an elusive lot. Many The Wall Street Journal contacted wouldn't give details about their listings, said they stopped selling dumpster finds or no longer listed them as new, didn't respond to inquiries or stopped communicating. Some said they feared Amazon would close their stores.

So the Journal set out to test whether these claims were true. Reporters went dumpster diving in several New Jersey towns and retrieved dozens of discards from the trash including a stencil set, scrapbook paper and a sealed jar of Trader Joe's lemon curd. The Journal set up a store on Amazon to see if it could list some of its salvaged goods for sale as new. It turned out to be easy. Amazon's stated rules didn't explicitly prohibit items salvaged from the trash when the Journal disclosed the existence of its store to the company last month. The rules required that most goods be new and noted that sellers could offer used books and electronics, among other things, if they identified them as such.

How is the boom in online shopping influencing how much good product just goes to waste? Adria Vasil, an environmental journalist and managing editor of Corporate Knights magazine, answers: It's pretty staggering. The increase of the volume of returns has exploded by 95 per cent over the last five years. And in Canada alone, we are returning $46 billion worth of goods every year. And you think, OK, what's the big deal? Well, the problem is that -- especially when we're returning online -- a lot of these products end up going in landfills.
Why? You're returning something that's new and fine?
It actually costs a lot of companies more money to put somebody on the product, to visually eyeball it and say, is this up to standard, is it up to code? Is this going to get us sued? Did somebody tamper with this box in some way? And is this returnable? And if it's clothing, it has to be re-pressed and put back in a nice packaging. And for a lot of companies, it's just not worth it. So they will literally just incinerate it, or send it to the dumpster.
Do you have an example of something that we might all be doing that could lead to this kind of a waste?
Have you ever bought any clothes online? Further reading: The Painful, Costly Journey of Returned Goods -- and How You End Up Purchasing Some of Them Again.

Consumers may think they're avoiding the crush this holiday season by shopping online, unaware that as they're trying to get through the digital doors, so too are hordes of bots. And they're throwing elbows. From a report: Up to 97 percent of all online traffic to retailer login pages this holiday shopping week comes from bots, largely operated by organized gangs of cybercriminals, according to estimates by cybersecurity firm Radware. The bots fill out online forms and navigate retail sites faster than a real person can, and try to swiftly purchase limited supply gifts before you've even filled up your cart. The items are then sold for a higher price on third-party sites. The cyber thieves also crack into accounts, drain accounts of rewards and other digital currency, conduct credit card fraud, and more, said Ron Winward, a Radware spokesman. "Website operators are seeing uptick in bot activity leading up to Cyber Monday from people trying out their bots," said Winward. "People are really competing with automated infrastructure and bots to get hot holiday items."

The way Google is indexing JavaScript content is "still a massive issue," reports Search Engine Journal: As much as 60% of the JavaScript content is indexed within the first 24 hours after indexing HTML. But there is also bad news. As much as 32% of the tested pages have unindexed JavaScript content after one month, due to a variety of reasons...

Indexing delays can cause Google to take a lot more time in discovering newly added pages on your news website... If it takes ages for Google to index your JS-dependent product description, your competitors will be taking the top positions for prominent queries....

We also checked a random sample of URLs from popular ecommerce and news websites. On average, JavaScript content is not indexed in Google in 25% of these websites' pages. This is one of the results of the two waves of indexing. The second wave is not guaranteed. Indexing JavaScript can fail due to many reasons, or may not happen at all....

If you are using JavaScript for generating important content, you have to implement it wisely and keep it under control.

As shopping takes off for the holiday season, so do phony reviews -- and pressure is mounting on major retailers to fight back. From a report: More than a third of online reviews on major websites, including those on Amazon.com, Walmart and Sephora, are fake, meaning they are generated by robots or people paid to write them, according to Fakespot, which identifies fraudulent reviews. The problem has become so pervasive that the Federal Trade Commission has started cracking down on violators, and lawmakers are pressing Amazon to do a better job of policing reviews on its website. This month Apple Inc. pulled all product reviews and ratings from its online store without explanation. Amazon, Walmart and Sephora dispute Fakespot's findings but say they are taking steps to make their reviews more reliable. In Amazon's case, it said it has spent more than $400 million to protect customers from review abuse and other fraud or misconduct in the past year, and that it prevented more than 13 million attempts last year to leave inauthentic reviews on its website. Further reading: When Is a Star Not Always a Star? When It's an Online Review.

Amazon.com is preparing to open Amazon Go supermarkets and pop-up stores, an expansion of the company's cashierless ambitions that includes the possibility of licensing the technology to other retailers. From a report: The new store formats and licensing initiative could launch as soon as the first quarter of 2020, according to a person familiar with the project. Amazon is testing a supermarket equipped with Go technology in a 10,400-square-foot retail space in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood. The Go expansion is the e-commerce giant's latest attempt to compete in the $900 billion U.S. grocery industry and perhaps other areas of retail, as well. The company already operates the Whole Foods Market chain and last week confirmed plans to launch a separate supermarket brand, starting with a location in the upscale Woodland Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Those stores will have human cashiers. The previously unreported plan to expand Go revives Amazon's original vision of creating full-size grocery stores without checkout lines. Amazon opened the first Go convenience store at its Seattle headquarters almost two years ago and now operates 21 locations around the U.S. It's not clear how much money the company has lavished on the project, but some of the 1,000 or so people working on it were recently told their cumulative salaries have totaled more than $1 billion since the project got underway in 2012, the person said.

Amazon on Monday said it plans to open its first new brand of grocery store in California next year, as it amps up its ambitious push to become a bigger name in food. From a report: "Amazon is opening a grocery store in Woodland Hills in 2020," an Amazon spokesperson confirmed to CNET on Monday morning, soon after the company published four new jobs postings for the location. Woodland Hills is a neighborhood in Los Angeles. The store will be different from Amazon-owned Whole Foods, the company said. It didn't say whether it will open more of these locations, what its selection or pricing will be, or what the brand name is. But in the jobs postings, the company described the Woodland Hills location as "Amazon's first grocery store," suggesting that it will have the Amazon brand name and that the company could expand to multiple sites.

After 24 hours of frenzied buying and selling, and weeks of advertising and promotions before it, the Alibaba Group said today its sales hit another record high on Singles' Day, the biggest shopping day on the planet. From a report: The Chinese e-commerce giant said its 11th Singles' Day event sold goods worth 268 billion yuan, or $38.3 billion, easily exceeding last year's record $30.7 billion haul. Electronics gadgets and fashion items were among the most sold goods this year, company executives said in an interview. More than half a billion people from a number of countries participate in the event, which is China's equivalent to Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Except, Singles' Day is much larger. The five-day Black Friday clocked under $25 billion in sales last year. Alibaba Group said earlier today that it had netted its first $1 billion in sales this year in just 68 seconds. The shopping glitz hosted a number of celebrities including Taylor Swift and Asian pop icon GEM to generate buzz.

In a letter sent to federal lawmakers, an online merchant has accused Amazon.com of forcing him and other sellers to use the company's expensive logistics services, which in turn forces them to raise prices for consumers. From a report: The 62-page document, reviewed by Bloomberg, lays out an antitrust case that emphasizes harm to consumers -- the traditional basis for such cases in the U.S. Until now, antitrust experts have suggested that Amazon was not vulnerable to such an argument and that regulators would need to find another way to restrain the company's growing market power. The complaint, based on an analysis of thousands of Amazon transactions over several years involving more than 100 products, turns all of that thinking on its head. It accuses Amazon of "tying" its marketplace and logistics services together, an antitrust violation in which a company uses dominance in one market to give itself an advantage in another market where it's less established.

The letter refers to previous Supreme Court rulings on tying, including one against Kodak in 1992 that said the photocopier manufacturer violated antitrust laws by forcing customers who bought its machines to also use its parts and repair services. "When it comes to Amazon's dealings with third-party merchants, some of the conduct actually does lend itself to antitrust scrutiny," said Hal Singer, an antitrust expert and Georgetown University adjunct professor retained by the merchant to work on the analysis. "If you can connect the conduct to some measureable harm, in this case increased prices, that gets you into the antitrust ballpark."

After a 2013 factory collapse killed more than 1,100 people in Bangladesh, most of the biggest U.S. apparel retailers joined safety-monitoring groups that required them to stop selling clothing from factories that violated certain safety standards. Amazon didn't join. The Wall Street Journal reports: According to a Wall Street Journal investigation, the site today offers a steady stream of clothing from dozens of Bangladeshi factories that most leading retailers have said are too dangerous to allow into their supply chains. A yellow gingham toddler top embroidered with flowers was among those clothes, listed on Amazon for $4.99 by a New York City retailer. The Journal traced the top to a factory in Chittagong, Bangladesh, that has no fire alarms and where doors are of a type managers can lock and keep workers in. A laborer at the factory, 18-year-old Nasreen Begum, said she spends 12-hour days there stitching shirts with 300 others. "You're trapped inside until the time you complete the orders," she said.

The Journal found other apparel on Amazon made in Bangladeshi factories whose owners have refused to fix safety problems identified by two safety-monitoring groups, such as crumbling buildings, broken alarms, and missing sprinklers and fire barriers. U.S. retailers such as Walmart, Target, Costco Wholesale and Gap have agreed to honor bans imposed by those two groups, to have their supply chains inspected and to disclose to the groups the factories that supply them. The Journal found clothing including pants, sweaters, clerical robes, fishnet body stockings and other items, that originate from blacklisted factories and end up on Amazon.

harrymcc writes: Go to Amazon, Walmart.com, and eBay, and you can find an array of companies selling laser cutters and engravers for a few hundred dollars -- dramatically less than you'll pay for a brand name such as Glowforge. But these budget models lack the safety features required to keep lasers safe, and may even have ignored the required FDA paperwork to put them on the market. Over at Fast Company, Glenn Fleishman wrote about the dangers of these devices. When alerted of specific models, the ecommerce sites removed them -- but many others remain for sale.

Huawei is now selling the Matebook 13, Matebook 14, and Matebook X Pro to consumers in China with Deepin Linux preinstalled. "Deepin is a Chinese-domestic distribution, with their own desktop environment -- appropriately also called Deepin," notes TechRepublic. From the report: Huawei is passing along the savings to consumers as well, with the Matebook 13 and 14 models receiving a 300 yuan ($42 USD) price cut, though the Linux version of the MateBook X Pro is listed at 600 yuan ($84) higher. This pricing should be considered tentative, as the products are listed on VMALL, Huawei's ecommerce marketplace in China, though only allow users to be notified when they are in stock. It is possible that Huawei may lose the ability to purchase Windows licenses from Microsoft due to their placement on the "entity list," restricting companies dealing in U.S.-origin technology from conducting business with Huawei, constituting an effective blacklisting by the U.S. government. Sales of Linux laptops to consumers -- by Huawei, and in general -- could result in better driver support for fingerprint readers and other hardware with inconsistent Linux support. Huawei has yet to announce any Linux versions available in the West.

Amazon wants its third-party sellers to make better use of their unsold or unwanted products that often get dumped -- by giving them away to charity. From a report: Amazon is launching a new donations program, called Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) Donations, for third-party sellers that store their inventory in Amazon's warehouses in the U.S. and UK, CNBC has learned. Starting on September 1, the donation program will become the default option for all sellers when they choose to dispose of their unsold or unwanted products stored in Amazon warehouses across those two countries. Sellers can opt out of the program, if they want. The donations will be distributed to a network of U.S. nonprofits through a group called Good360 and UK charities such as Newlife and Barnardo's. After this story was published, Amazon announced the program via a blog post on Wednesday afternoon. [...] Recent reports found that Amazon routinely discards unsold inventory, with one French TV documentary estimating Amazon to have destroyed over 3 million products in France last year. Further reading: The Painful, Costly Journey of Returned Goods -- and How You End Up Purchasing Some of Them Again.

Amazon has set up 14 Amazon Go stores in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and Seattle. They do not have any cash registers so once customers have scanned a screen from a special app on their phone at the entrance, they just grab their items and walk out the door, while Amazon magically charges their credit card. By all accounts, the company intends to open more of these stores in the months and years ahead. Bloomberg Businessweek reports today the kind of investment Amazon has made into these stores -- it is the ecommerce firm's most ambitious research project to date -- but despite that, how these stores are just like 7-Eleven stores, but with more complexity and cost.

From the report: From a technological perspective, the Go stores are a marvel -- a succinct demonstration of Amazon's capacity to devote vast resources toward applying the state of the art in artificial intelligence to an everyday problem. They also illustrate the company's tendency to pursue technology for technology's sake (see: the Fire Phone), resulting in a store that offers all the selection of a 7-Eleven, but with more complexity and cost. Scores of cameras pointed at all angles hang from the ceilings to track shoppers as they wander the aisles, while precise scales embedded in the shelves tabulate products down to the gram to figure out which ones have been picked up. Behind the scenes, sophisticated image recognition algorithms decide who took what -- with Amazon workers in offices available to review footage to ensure shoppers are accurately charged. Each store also has a local staff on hand to help people download the Go app, restock shelves, and, in locations with a liquor section, check IDs.

Will all this work be worth it? Some Go stores seem almost deserted except for the lunchtime rush. Employees familiar with Amazon's internal projections say the outlets in Chicago, in particular, are falling short of expectations, and the company has had to resort to raffles and giveaways of tote bags and other branded goodies. Yet, as the turbulent history of the project suggests, the Go store isn't so much the culmination of the company's efforts but something closer to an ongoing experiment. And the potential prize -- a big piece of the $12 trillion grocery industry -- is one that Amazon, with its limitless resources and appetite for risk, may be in the best position to claim.

Viber, the chat and messaging app acquired by Japanese ecommerce titan Rakuten for $900 million five years ago, is introducing a new subscription service that lets users pay to have a local phone number that anyone can call. From a report: Founded in 2010, Viber has grown to claim more than 1 billion "registered users" globally, though the company doesn't reveal how many of those are active on the platform. As with similar messaging apps such as WhatsApp, users sign up to Viber using their own mobile phone number, which allows them to easily connect with other friends and contacts who have joined Viber. With Viber Local Number, which has been in closed beta until now, users can pay $4.99 per month to access a local telephone number for anyone outside of Viber to call or text (SMS).

For the caller, it costs whatever their network rates are for calling a local number, while the Viber user doesn't pay anything extra beyond their monthly subscription. There are caveats with the service for now, though: Viber users can't call out using their local number, and they can't respond to text messages using their local number. So if someone messages you on your special Viber number asking a question, you won't be able to respond. The company told VentureBeat that it plans to make the number function bidirectionally in the future.

itwbennett writes: The popular e-commerce platform Magento has released 37 security issues affecting both the commercial and open-source versions, four of which are critical. "Of those, one SQL injection flaw is of particular concern for researchers because it can be exploited without authentication," writes Lucian Constantine for CSO. Researchers from Web security firm Sucuri "have already reverse-engineered the patch [for that flaw] and created a working proof-of-concept exploit for internal testing," says Constantin. "The SQL vulnerability is very easy to exploit, and we encourage every Magento site owner to update to these recently patched versions to protect their ecommerce websites," the researchers warn in a blog post. "Unauthenticated attacks, like the one seen in this particular SQL Injection vulnerability, are very serious because they can be automated -- making it easy for hackers to mount successful, widespread attacks against vulnerable websites," the Sucuri researchers warned. "The number of active installs, the ease of exploitation, and the effects of a successful attack are what makes this vulnerability particularly dangerous." Since the researchers were able to create a working proof-of-concept exploit, it's only a matter of time until hackers discover a way to use the exploit to plant payment card skimmers on sites that have yet to install the new patch.

UPDATE: Onilab, an official Magento development partner, has a blog post explaining how you can update your store to the latest version of Magento.

itwbennett writes: The popular e-commerce platform Magento has released 37 security issues affecting both the commercial and open-source versions, four of which are critical. 'Of those, one SQL injection flaw is of particular concern for researchers because it can be exploited without authentication,' writes Lucian Constantine for CSO. Researchers from Web security firm Sucuri 'have already reverse-engineered the patch [for that flaw] and created a working proof-of-concept exploit for internal testing' says Constantin. 'The SQL vulnerability is very easy to exploit, and we encourage every Magento site owner to update to these recently patched versions to protect their ecommerce websites,' the researchers warn in a blog post.