Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

In theory, load times of 3 seconds or more should cost retailers half their customers. If that's true, E-tailers should be going out of business. Maybe it's time to dump those theories.Read more...

In a typical chain store, what happens when a customer discovers a problem, be it an incorrect price label or an out-of-stock or expired product? It's up to the customer to track down an associate. What happens then? Usually nothing, because it's quite unlikely it's the primary responsibility of that employee to deal with that problem.Read more...

It's time to evict Web and mobile app development, and pretty much any marketing initiative that isn't core to your business. Heresy? Certainly, pens Retail Columnist Todd Michaud. But it's necessary.Read more...

"The E-receipt problem is that the customer now has a valid receipt. I can't bring it in. I'm not checking it off and signing off on it. So the ability to use that fraudulently increases unless you have a true returns management system," Titus said.Read more...

The conceal part of that action is considered evidence of criminal intent. Now let's see you try and enforce that rule when you have in-aisle mobile checkout.Read more...

We have our early clues from the CIO of the $2.5-billion 481-store Guess chain, one of the first test sites for Google Wallet in "a couple of stores" in California since May. In total, how many customers have tried Google Wallet? Says CIO Michael Relich: "Five or six." Not 500 or 600 customers, mind you. Five or six. Read more...

But the Guess iPad trial is hardly being done to save costs. The flexibility of the tablets and sharp, customer-friendly graphics make the devices a much more effective way to show demos and to locate merchandise, check inventory and do anything else that a kiosk would normally do.Read more...

Almost all retail marketing efforts are based on the not-so-simple premise of getting people to purchase from them, either online or in person. The problem, pens Retail Columnist Todd Michaud, is likely a mesh of old-mentality thinking with a heavy dose of channel conflict.Read more...

But it is clear that Amazon is drooling over its vast CRM files and trying to figure out how much money it can make off them.Read more...

Age verification is something mail-order vendors have struggled with for years, and mostly given up on. But E-tailers can no longer use impossibility as an excuse. A recent federal law requires age-verification for tobacco sold online—and other age-controlled items can't be far behind.Read more...

As obvious as that seems (after all, how can a gift recipient review a gift until it's actually opened?), there may be a few more subtleties in when retailers can expect reviews—and what type of reviews they can expect.Read more...

As is our tradition, StorefrontBacktalk shuts down for the last two weeks in December, due to the fact that y’all are far too busy (a) supporting the biggest selling weeks of the year until December 25th, (b) supporting the biggest returns-and-exchanges week of the year after December 25th and (c) closing the quarterly books until December 31st on what everyone hopes will be a bigger year than 2010.

That means our next regular weekly issue will arrive on January 5th, 2012. In the meantime, everything else will still be live (the Web sites, our Kindle version, our Twitter tweets, our mobile sites, etc.). And we’ll, as always, send out breaking news alerts if circumstances merit. …

But Google also stores far too much customer information unencrypted on the phone—and if the phone is malware-infected or stolen, that data becomes far too easy for a thief to get at.Read more...

A message from our beloved business side: As the NRF Big Show happens next month, StorefrontBacktalk has a couple of last-minute slots for anyone wanting to communicate with NRF attendees. In mid-January, as our readers leave their postmortem holiday shopping meetings with the list of everything that went wrong, every feature management wants to add and a wishlist of products to make it all, it’s a nice time message.

We will also be adding several content channels next year—including several new weekly podcast series, more monthlies, events in addition to our usual weekly and monthly newsletters, and Web sites—and if your marketing people have any interest in getting involved, we now have new opportunities. Some of these new channels were specifically created to enable smaller vendors, with much more limited resources, into our community. If your marketers want to get your brand in the middle of these discussions, please drop us a note.…

Much of the concern may have little foundation, because Amazon has low-balled the incentives to such an extent that it's unclear if many consumers will even bother to try it.Read more...

But Legal Columnist Mark Rasch wants to be clear: Be ahead of the curve in tracking consumers, and do it before case law and legislation have a chance to play themselves out, and you could find yourself with legal headaches for years—potentially having to somehow remove all of that ill-gotten data from your systems.Read more...

There are some ironies in all this. One is that, with all the genuinely invasive customer-tracking technologies online and even in malls, the mobile signals used in this one really are anonymous to everyone but the mobile phone operators. Another is that if the system were actually targeting individual customers and the data were used by store associates, it might actually be more palatable to shoppers. After all, when location data is anonymously collected, it feels creepy. But when an associate knows you've already been to Wet Seal and Nordstrom, that just means she knows your tastes and can serve you better—or at least it feels that way.Read more...

The reason this idea has such potential is the chain is using the mobile device solely as a tool, where both JCPenney and the app quickly get out of the way and let the recipient and the gift-giver truly communicate. From a CRM perspective, it's clever for JCPenney because they set it up to force the system to call the gift-giver back to record the message. Therefore, the chain can gather lots of mobile numbers for later messaging use and, depending on future tracking purposes, perhaps much more through in-store interactions. The first step, though, is to collect those numbers and this is a wonderfully innocuous way to start.Read more...

But this new kiosk out of Europe may just take the record (although that live crab-dispensing kiosk is pretty hard to beat). It makes pizza—from scratch. This thing shows customers its realtime process of kneading dough, forming the round, adding tomato sauce and toppings and then baking it—all in three minutes. A kiosk that creates and delivers a fresh pizza may not play well in every retailer environment, but it's worth a shot. Honestly, Nordstrom, would a pizza kiosk in your aisles really kill you?Read more...

By using the phone's signals, the store could track that customer and could know exactly when that customer is approaching the exit and alert the greeter/loss-prevention associate to the approach. No need to verify the receipt, no need to stop the customer at all (unless the greeter sees something beyond the purchased items, but that's always been the case). There are clearly hurdles to this approach. But it's one of the few that addresses most of the current in-aisle mobile payment headaches.Read more...

It never really made much sense that Wal-Mart would go all the way to Australia for a mobile-receipts startup—that's hardly a new idea. But a box that plugs into a POS, so it's easy to experiment on a store-by-store basis with everything from mobile receipts and coupons to plug-and-play CRM, inventory and analytics systems, sounds like it's worth the trip. And that could explain why Wal-Mart worked so hard to make most details about Grabble disappear.Read more...

Why not use ZIP codes (IP address locations are typically too inaccurate and/or cover too wide an area to be practical for a prom no-duplicates strategy) and a high school pull-down menu (with a behind-the-scenes list of each school's primary ZIP codes) to flag likely repeats? This approach pushes this idea beyond high-school proms and could be used to flag apparel conflicts at any type of event or formal function. Weddings? Theater? This could even be helpful beyond events. What about giving an option to indicate the name of an employer? Depending on the size of the employer, it might be nice to know if that business suit you've been eyeing has already been purchased by anyone else within that company.Read more...

Given the dominance of the key U.S. holiday next week (we mean Thanksgiving, not Black Friday), StorefrontBacktalk‘s weekly newsletter won’t publish on November 24. Everything else will still be live (the Web sites, our Kindle version, our Twitter tweets, our mobile sites, etc.), but we need a little time off to burn some turkey and over-season some stuffing.

Speaking of which, we want to tap into the knowledge of our audience with a question that has nothing to do with retail technology. One of us here at StorefrontBacktalk is going to try something new for Thanksgiving: Cooking the turkey on a gas grill. The problem is that, well, it’s me. And my Weber grill seems to have two temperature settings: 750 degrees Fahrenheit and OFF. To be precise, it has tons of settings, but those two numbers seem to be the only heat levels the beast is capable of delivering and maintaining. In a short duration grilling (say 5 to 8 minutes), it’s easy to compensate. But when dinner for a dozen people needs to cook for five hours, I’m open to any tricks to get the temperature to get down to 325 degrees and to stay there. Any suggestions? If you do have any suggestions, please E-mail me at Help Evan To Not Turn His Entree Into Sawdust Held Together By Static Electricity.…

Here, it is illegal to intercept the contents of a cell phone call or to force a cell phone provider to pony up information about a user without—at a minimum—a court order based upon a certification by a law enforcement or other official that the information is relevant to an ongoing criminal (or sometimes intelligence) case, writes Legal Columnist—and former federal prosecutor—Mark Rasch. The federal pen register law makes it a crime to "install or use a pen register or trap and trace device" without such a court order, unless you are a "provider of electronic or wire communication service" and your use of the pen register is for certain limited purposes. There is little doubt that neither a mobile nor a mall operator would be considered a "provider of electronic communication services."Read more...

Costco, Kmart and Kroger took the top dishonors, with each chain responding to zero of the complaints lodged against it during the review period (five working days in September). Wal-Mart ignored 41 percent of all legitimate complaints, Macy's ignored 35 percent of its complaints, Bloomingdale's ignored 20 percent, Nordstrom ignored 20 percent, Sears ignored 11 percent and Safeway ignored only five percent.Read more...