seller

Frustrated after five years of less than stellar sales, the owner of an Italian eatery decided Craigslist and eBay would be the best place to sell off the business.

The amount of music that consumers purchased in the U.S. rose by 6 percent in 2007, according to The NPD Group.An increase in digital download revenues was not able to make up for the decline in CD sales, which resulted in a net 10 percent decline in music spending (from $44 to $40 per capita among Internet users).

Several times in the past, eBay sellers protested changes in site policies with boycotts. Though sellers received more attention this time, they had the same result in effecting a change: zero.

Research firm the NPD Group has released its U.S. retail sales figures for January 2008. Software sales for the month were up by 11 percent to $611 million, hardware sales dropped by a quarter to $378 million. Overall the industry was down 6 percent for the month managing to reach $1.18 billion compared to January 2007 sales of $1.25 billion.

The Hannah Montana concert film "Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert" has been a top online ticket seller.

Some people believe that the job of the seller is to communicate and offer value, or to differentiate their offering so buyers know how to choose one product over another. I've also heard it said that the products themselves create value.

The iPod Age is defined by a trick question. If a person buys digital content, do they really own it? So far the answers braved have been "yes and no," "um, maybe," "well, sometimes," and "only if the big money distributors don't get mad about it." Not about to take on that question, eBay recently took down a listing for a 60-gigabyte video iPod preloaded with 11,800 songs.

The technology empire prepares to take on Yahoo and Google in the search advertising market.