Welcome to the new edition of “This week’s news”, a selection of links to interesting articles and news from the worlds of blogs, commerce and e-commerce.

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Some weeks ago it was announced that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos personally has acquired the Washington Post. Now, another e-commerce billionaire is getting serious about journalism: Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, plans to launch a new online media outlet, focusing on independent, investigative journalism. One of the first members of his team is Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald, who is widely known for having helped the Whistleblower Edward Snowden to leak his stories.

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Speaking about Jeff Bezos and Amazon: Bloomberg Businessweek’s Brad Stone is about to publish a book titled “The everything store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon”, describing in detail how the e-commerce giant became one of the most powerful companies in the world, and how Bezos made all this happen. Businessweek has published a (lengthy) excerpt from the book describing how Bezos forced diapers.com to sell to Amazon.

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The US startup Square, run by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, has become known for its smartphone credit card dongles and payment processing tools available for small and medium retailers. Now users in the U.S. can use the newly launched Square Cash service to send money to each other in the most simple way: by email.

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WordPress is a great blogging system. But it also can be used to set up a neat online store. Practical Ecommerce shows 4 popular e-commerce plugins for WordPress: WooCommerce, WP e-Commerce, Jigoshop and Cart66 Lite.

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To make a living with blogging – that’s a dream of many. Swedish blogger Emma Sundh has managed to do that. For the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter she explains what’s needed to turn a blog into a part- or even full-time business. Here is the Swedish version and here one automatically translated into English.

Welcome to the new edition of “This week’s news”, a selection of links to interesting articles and news from the worlds of blogs, commerce and e-commerce.

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Having to enter credit card details into online forms on e-commerce sites involves always security risks. Now the three big card giants Visa, MasterCard and American Express plan to get rid of those numbers all together, at least for online customers. Instead of the numbers digital tokens would be processed, making payments more secure. Currently a framework and standard is being developed.

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Meanwhile, mobile payments are finding increasing acceptance among online shoppers. According to global payments solution specialist Adyen, mobile-payment transactions have increased by 27 percent worldwide from May to August. And iOS devices accounted for nearly 3 out of 4 mobile transactions.

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Amazon is trying to compete with PayPal in getting online retailers to implement a button that allows their customers to pay for goods with Amazon. The “Login and Pay” button works similar to the ubiquitous PayPal buttons, making use of previously stored customer and payment details at Amazon. For retailers, the transaction fees are 2.9 percent + $0.30 per transaction or less, based on volume.

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The Seattle-based discount e-commerce site Zulily is the first deal site to go public since Groupon. It aims to generate about $100 million with the IPO.

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The famous US blog and journalism portal The Huffington Post, one of the first blog sites that became a big media entity, has launched a German version. As in its mother land, huffingtonpost.de will offer a mix of news written by professional journalists and of opinion pieces and blog posts by independent and community authors.

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Some people don’t want to blog. Other would like to but don’t really know how to start. And especially, where to start. Digital Trends has compiled a nice overview about the best free, freemium and premium blog services, describing who they are optimized for and what to expect.

Welcome to the new edition of “This week’s news”, a selection of links to interesting articles and news from the worlds of blogs, commerce and e-commerce.

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Showrooming is one of the side-effects of the rise of e-commerce. The terms refers to a scenario during which customers walk into local stores to choose products to buy, but then go online with their smartphone to get the items at lower prices from an e-commerce site. The local store becomes a “showroom”, losing out on revenue and risking its own existence.

A study released by Columbia Business School and the loyalty management company Aimia might be able to calm down concerned store managers a bit: According to the research, only 6 percent of people try to purchase products with their smartphones after having seen them in a store. Many use their smartphone instead to find reviews and customers feedback to make a qualified buying decision.

A possible conclusion could be that stores actually should encourage customers to find reviews about the products sold, or even enable them, by providing in-store web access. If they realize that other customers like the specific item, the likelihood for an in-store purchases increases.

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Ever visited a Chinese online shop and got a shock about the amount of clutter, colours, banners and massive link lists? It has to be that way: “Our consumers like a page that is very crowded, busy with a lot of links so they can open lots of windows at the same time”. That’s a quote from a Chinese e-commerce entrepreneur published in a CNN piece about the “mad, mad world of China e-commerce”. It’s a world where the rules of the West simply don’t apply – an important fact that every online shop that plans to expand to China has to keep in mind.

And the differences don’t stop with the customers’ expectations on the “shopping experience”. Logistics and the integration of social media into the buying process are following different patterns than in Europe and the U.S as well. And there is one more point to consider: Competition is extremely fierce. Or how CNN describes it: “In China, e-commerce is a bloodsport.

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There is a new blogging tool in town called Ghost. At least almost, because it gives limited access for now. Humbly billed “Just a Blogging Platform”, Ghost follows a minimalistic approach, removing many of the elements found at increasingly bloated content-management systems and blog services.

The founder, John O’Nolan, targets slightly more tech-savvy people with his free open source service, since users have to take care of hosting for themselves – at least for now.

Wired has a write-up about Ghost, its features and main differentiation points to competitors.