Santa bringing some online retailers Christmas cheer
Dec. 23, 2001
By JIM BROOKS
A flurry of last-minute online holiday sales appear to be giving Web
retailers something to jingle in their Christmas stockings.
Despite the slowing economy, the recession and the fallen value of
online advertising, retailers who have persevered may finally be
seeing their online ventures start to pay off (or at least produce
some income).
Toy sales have been hot with most of the big retail chains, and
particularly so for the toy retailers Toys R Us and K-B Toys.
Sales at K-B Toys' Web sites, kbtoys.com and eToys.com, are both well
above budget, the company reported.
While sales of clothing has been lackluster for Walmart.com,
Target.com and other online merchants, toys have been big sellers --
particularly the video game consoles and educational toys like LeapFrog.
EBay -- not the first Web site that comes to mind when toy shopping
-- has done big business with toy listings, especially the
hard-to-find items. Harry Potter-related books and toys are hard to
find in many stores, but a search on eBay.com turned up more than
14,000 items -- including the most out-of-stock LEGO Hogwarts Castle.
For Amazon.com, the bookseller-turned-superstore, Santa may bring the
company's first profits.
Analysts predict strong Christmas sales will push the company's sales
for the last quarter of this year over the $1 billion mark -- its
largest quarterly sales figure ever.
BUG SAFETY. Warnings of the latest computer virus or worm are
becoming almost daily events for PC users. The cretins who make these
things continue to try and tie them into the latest season or
holiday, and Christmas has been no exception.
The latest worm, Reeezak, arrives as an e-mail attachment named
"Christmas.exe" with the subject line "Happy New Year."
Reeezak can disable certain keys on an infected computer's keyboard,
and delete the files in the Windows system directory, making the
computer inoperable.
Like so many other recent computer bugs, Reeezak e-mails itself to
the addresses in the infected computer's e-mail address book. Those
who receive the bug will see it as an e-mail from someone they know
and may click on the attachment, which will start the worm program's
infection of the recipient's computer.
Other names for the worm are W32.Zacker.C+mm and W32.Maldal.C+mm.
Another worm that is spreading via e-mail is called Shoho, or Welyah.
Shoho takes advantage of an old vulnerability in Internet Explorer
that has been patched. Shoho affects only users who haven't updated
their browser with the latest patches. But Shoho is destructive; it
attempts to delete a number of files in the Windows system directory.
The worm arrives in an e-mail with the subject line "Welcome to
Yahoo Mail."
The text of the message asks the user to open the attached message,
readme.txt, which is actually an executable file that contains the worm.
The easiest way to bring your Internet Explorer up to date is to
upgrade to IE 5.5 Service Pack 2 or to the latest version, IE 6.0,
and select full install.
Visit Microsoft's Web site for Internet Explorer,
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/, for more information on
downloading the latest browser updates for your computer.
HOLIDAY OVERLOAD. Last minute shopping took its toll last week
on the Hallmark.com.
Customers looking to send friends and family members a free
electronic greeting card were unable to visit the site to do so.
A message posted at the site stated simply "Our apologies. We
are currently experiencing heavy traffic on our site and are unable
to allow additional visits at this time."
A Hallmark spokesman said the Web site had experienced traffic more
than three times the usual holiday level. Part of the increase likely
stems from the move by American Greetings to start charging for
electronic greetings earlier this month. Former free e-card site Blue
Mountain requires users to pay an annual subscription.
The Hallmark Web site was up and running again last Saturday, so
outages have been sporadic. If you have trouble, a spokesman
suggested waiting a while and trying again. |
