Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

But, argues Franchisee Columnist Todd Michaud, this situation gets even more challenging because the person who had the implementation role before you could have stacked the deck against you. It is much easier to say "yes" to a request for something different than it is to say "no." In most cases, these requests will genuinely move the business in the right direction. But that's a double whammy: It means your predecessor may have created a field of variance landmines that you must painfully discover on your own.Read more...

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison was the best paid executive with any public company over the last decade, pulling in $1.84 billion in compensation, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Concerned about all of the license fees you’ve paid Oracle over the years? Fear not. It’s been put to good use. You’ll be pleased to know that you helped financed several extra aircraft for Ellison. What to get the man who already owns Air Force fighter jets and an America’s Cup yacht? Oh, CIOs, you’ve given him so much already.…

Loyalty cards are usually a way of tracking customer preferences and pitching new purchases—that is, they’re all about CRM. But Tesco, the world’s third-largest retailer,is stretching the concept in a new direction. The U.K. grocer is testing a ride-sharing program that lets Tesco loyalty cardholders sign up online to share car trips to three North London stores. What’s interesting is that Tesco’s ride-sharing Web site doesn’t just push rides to Tesco. It also encourages riders to use the service for commuting, getting kids to school and going to sporting events and shows.

Those activities aren’t likely to directly increase Tesco’s sales. But carpoolers who decide they like the service will have Tesco’s name in front of them every time they book a ride through the system, which is run by a non-profit organization called Liftshare. Still, as an online marketing effort, the Web site for setting up rides is oddly low-key: Customers can’t even click on the Tesco logo to go to Tesco’s own site.…

"Our plan is to integrate the barcode scanning capability into all of our applications and to evolve (to support) every kind of code, all of the various forms and shapes of barcodes," said eBay Mobile VP Steve Yankovich.Read more...

The first allows consumers to easily impersonate other users—and thereby access their rewards, which means the stores are not attracting the consumer they wanted to attract—and the second defeats users' efforts to go into a confidential mod,e where their whereabouts are not supposed to be distributed.Read more...

But therein lies a delicious Catch-22: Once consumers use a technology four or five times, they typically master it and can then proceed effortlessly. The first one or two times, of course, will likely be rough.Read more...

Starting this week, each StorefrontBacktalk article has two new features. First, in response to many reader requests, we have now added a print function for each article. Just click on the Print icon (right across from the article’s date) to generate a web page formatted for printing, without page breaks, sidebars or reader comments.

Second, we now automatically add a URL to any content that you copy and paste from an article. Yes, it’s a feature: Instead of copying an entire article to send to someone, now you can copy just the most relevant part and paste it into a message; the URL for the full article is included at no extra charge. Tipping, of course, is always encouraged.…

This effort replaced an earlier rewards program where cardholders were given 10 percent off, but the savings could only be used for a subsequent shopping trip. In short, when the discounts were cut in half—from 10 percent to five percent—purchases sharply increased. That's how powerful a difference there exists in consumers' minds between "give it to me now" and "give it to me later."Read more...

Microsoft was rather vague about the reason it's backing off ("After a couple of years of trying, we did not see the broad adoption that we had hoped for," blogged Bing Senior VP Yusuf Mehdi), but there has been a compelling suggestion that the program was simply being gamed by clever consumers.Read more...

When someone sends someone else a gift card, why not first send an E-mail alerting the recipient to the card's imminent arrival and have that E-mail include a password to activate the card after it arrives?Read more...

But which of several approaches each chain will use has yet to be determined, according to the CEO of the vendor (Shopkick) providing the software.Read more...

But what Sam's Club discovered is that it quickly became its own direct revenue stream.Read more...

The big challenge with trying to answer those questions is that the established social sites are moving targets. Facebook, for example, on Wednesday (May 26) announced it will be offering tighter controls over consumer information. Where will this option lead six months from now? Your operation may put in a huge amount of cash to develop a spectacular site on Facebook, only to later learn that the site won't permit you to track user activity--even in your page clicking on your products. Facebook might prohibit you from knowing anything someone does in your site short of making a purchase.Read more...

Then customers, who are used to the niceties of that sales associate interaction or the tactile feedback from inside a high-end clothing store, show no interest and developers are baffled. That's where a bunch of Amazon Kindle developers find themselves today.Read more...

"As far as we are concerned, signature is a waste of time. It has to be PIN or nothing," Jamie Henry, Wal-Mart's director of payment services, told attendees of a panel discussion held Wednesday at a Smart Card Alliance event in Scottsdale, Ariz.Read more...

Traditionally, in-store digital signage has been used for the mass-broadcast of commercials set by the chain and, sometimes, tweaked regionally. But why not make the content truly unique to a store, dictated by local weather, sporting events or near-time POS activity?, asks Michael Hiatt, who ran Wal-Mart's in-store media program until last year.Read more...

The trial is using Sprint CDMA for data connectivity, which made it easier for Wal-Mart to do the tests. Sprint CDMA didn't require any of the test systems to interact with the chain's LAN, thereby bypassing questions such as "Do I want to put in a separate WiFi network in the stores? With this, all we have to worry about is power," said one person involved in the trial.Read more...

The upshot: The search giant has now decided to end its entire WiFi survey. And that's exactly the wrong lesson to learn from an incident like this.Read more...

While the co-owner of this family-owned scoop shop said he likes the RFID technology, he's fonder of the push nature of his current flavor updater--where he tells his customers what he has--rather than the pull nature of a system in which his customers tell him what they want. When does customer feedback become too much?Read more...

The trend to use loyalty card data for product recalls is nothing new. Much of the motivation stems from a lawsuit against Kroger a half-dozen years ago, where a Kroger's customer ate beef contaminated with Mad Cow disease even though the chain supposedly had more than enough time to have alerted her before she consumed the tainted product.Read more...

A key provision of the proposed bill (nerdy detail: This is a draft of the legislation circulated for comment. It has yet to even be officially introduced) is to restrict information given to a retailer from being distributed to an outside business, such as a marketing firm that sends spam or junkmail. That's politically safe territory. But the wording is sufficiently vague to raise other concerns.Read more...

Our tale is about an interesting startup called Blippy. (Note: A very prominent co-founder of Blippy's is Philip Kaplan, the Pud of F*cked Companies fame. Yes, that makes one of the deepest ironies in Silicon Valley coming up the street right now.)Read more...

In our increasingly strange new world of social networking and mobile commerce, a whole range of unexpected places will need to deal with PCI DSS. This week's example is Blippy, the social exhibitionism site that last week posted more than just some members' purchases online. It also posted their payment card numbers for the world to see.Read more...

The incident raises questions about the credibility of customer comments, in addition to all the difficulties today of doing much of anything anonymously.Read more...

On Friday (April 23), the 723-store Barnes & Noble book chain added yet another layer: A mobile device that acts very differently when it happens to be inside one of the book chain's stores.Read more...