Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

The researchers found that 57 percent of the retailers they categorize as "laggards" in terms of adopting price localization cited their technology infrastructures as being a "gating factor" preventing them from delivering differentiated pricing. Forty-seven percent of the companies RSR labels "winners," those with average sales growth of three percent, told RSR that technology was impeding their localized pricing desires. "It's the entire technology infrastructure, particularly the integration bus," said RSR Managing Partner Paula Rosenblum.Read more...

Regardless of what Best Buy ends up doing, in today's rock-bottom economy, with its mergers and bankruptcies, the retail concept of data ownership is getting quite a workout. For example, CompUSA closed its doors but has now reemerged in a very different form in Florida. And there's no telling where the petabytes (exabytes?) of customer information now controlled by Circuit City will wind up. From a privacy perspective, there are even scarier possibilities than someone's music or computer purchases falling into the wrong hands.Read more...

Earlier this month, CSPI published an "Open Letter to Food Retailers" in which it praises retailers such as Costco and Wegman's that mined their loyalty card data to find out, and make phone calls to, customers who bought recalled peanut-based products. Read more...

The change in heart, driven by new CEO Ron Marshall, will almost immediately force Border's E-Commerce team to halt additional investments. Although the move certainly reflects a new top management strategy that does not see E-Commerce making much money for the company anytime soon—a regrettably realistic assessment—it also is part of a pragmatic strategy of pouring every possible resource into the brick-and-mortars while simultaneously implementing chain-wide—and very deep--budget cuts.Read more...

These systems illustrate the advances being made in face recognition for retail applications as the technology evolves from the realm of discussion to the reality of the store, sidewalk and mall corridor. For retailers, the goal is targeting advertising to those consumers most likely to be engaged. But the effort is running headlong into some sticky ethical questions involving personal privacy. What will happen if face-recognition-powered digital signs and kiosks are able to learn the identities of shoppers merely by scanning their faces and matching those images against known consumer images? Read more...

In a new report, the Pew Internet and American Life Project says said 38 percent of teens reported they bought something online in 2008. A similar study conducted by Pew in 2005 found that 41 percent of teens were involved in online shopping. Is it a trend? Will it carry forward to when the youngsters grow up?Read more...

This tactic is hardly new, as many chains—including Price Chopper and Wegmans—have been doing this for at least a year and several very large retailers are exploring it. But Costco is the largest retailer to have launched it on such a large scale.Read more...

Among the changes are a centralized search box, new categories and comments that are much more easily accessible.Read more...

When we recently heard of one such startup, an Atlanta company called Transaction Tree, whose products allow retailers to offer E-mailed receipts instead of receipts printed on paper, we wondered how that would work. Who hasn't been the victim of lost, sent-to-the-wrong-address or spam-bucket-swallowed E-mails? Read more...

VDC is now slashing its RFID projections for this year by a billion dollars, with growth rates “no more than 9.2 percent over 2008 levels.”

The new figures, according to RFID Update, are attributed entirely to the economy. “There is still going to be growth. It is going to slow significantly, but there isn’t going to be a contraction,” said Drew Nathanson, VDC’s director of research operations.…

The common refrain was not how new retail technology can boost revenue but how it can slow the ongoing bleeding. Despite the absence of any single regal retail rollout, the more than 100 products and services introduced at the show did tend to cluster in groups. And those groups—not coincidentally—reflected today's difficult economic climate.Read more...

Microsoft will use the show to roll out its version of smartphone-readable 2-D barcodes. Redmond's approach with "Microsoft Tag" brings multiple colors into those barcodes, which allows them to be 50 percent smaller but still more easily and reliably read than today's 2-D barcodes, said Kevin Kerr, Microsoft's worldwide retail technology strategist. Other rollouts will include virtual makeup mirrors, virtual customized music creation and wireless debit devices.Read more...

A financial report on the troubles found last year with major department stores places the blame for the revenue drop not on the economy but on chains that are “increasingly out of touch.” As detailed in this comprehensive Media Post story, the Cavallino Capital report found that only 6 percent of consumers did most of their shopping in stores like Macy’s, JC Penney or Dillard’s this year, compared with 15 percent in 2000.

“The problem is that these stores have relied too heavily on the things shoppers care least about, like coupons, loyalty programs, delayed payments and contests,” said Cavallino Chairman John Rittenhouse. “And they’ve neglected the basic rules, the things consumers say always matter, like having the merchandise they expect in stock, having helpful people staffing the store and a customer-friendly return policy.”…

The science and technology of it is really not that far-fetched. The fact that so many consumers—especially younger consumers—today share so many of their thoughts and private moments in so many public settings alone would allow even a casual observer to learn quite a bit about someone. But it gets far worse.Read more...

The details of how he did it aside, the concept is interesting in potential future retail uses, assuming that the per-tag price can be brought down low enough. For a grocery store's greeting card section, what if the store—and its suppliers—could know which cards were picked up and which ones were opened?Read more...

Even better, it was happening at a time that rumors—many of them false—were making consumers hesitant to buy gift cards from their rivals. Amazon could have made a good argument that consumers would be more comfortable buying from Amazon. So with such a wonderful plan, what would possess Amazon to put a statement that, at the most charitable, could be described as a phrasing so deceptive that even a New Jersey or Illinois politician would find it too over the top? Read more...

But as is Amazon's tendency, its experiment is a little bolder and more daring.The concept is interesting, but we're having a difficult time coming up with a viable ROI for it. If it's intended to actually generate revenue for Amazon above and beyond revenue that they would have likely already received, it's much more problematic. Read more...

One of the most challenging aspects of apparel E-Commerce is that sizing can be so, well, psychotic. A specific size can vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, if not with different garments from the same manufacturer. Read more...

According to a probable cause document, the defendants' lack of discretion may have done them in. Best Buy regional loss prevention officer Steve Castillo "noticed a strange pattern of purchase activity," according to the federal filing. How strange? The reward card was linked to 77 different credit card accounts between April 2007 and June 2008. And it was used to make 125 separate credit card purchases totaling $252,000, the filing said. Read more...

When are related product lists helpful and when are they distracting? Is it an obviously useful upsell or is it doomed to the fate of the salesperson who shows a customer one too many choices? HP thinks it’s often the latter and has sharply trimmed the number of related items it shows. And the company is claiming a 30 percent sales increase as a result.

An interesting detail in this BusinessWeek piece points out that an Argentinean physicist apparently analyzed—on HP’s nickel—data from Facebook, YouTube, Digg and Amazon to mathematically model user attention. Conclusion: “The long lists of recommended add-on products commonly featured on E-Commerce sites yield diminishing returns. Web shoppers tend to stop paying attention after a certain point.” Aside from the fact that all of the sites selected (other than Amazon) skew to one demographic extreme of Web shoppers, this raises the question: Don’t HP E-Commerce workers ever shop online for themselves? They truly needed a physicist to tell them this? …

Such is the plight of Michal Geller, Amazon's director of consumer gift cards. Down the road, Amazon is toying with other ways to truly customize cards. But avoiding privacy issues, Geller said, is non-negotiable. "Anything related to privacy is off the table," he said, forcing Amazon to focus on "some creative ways (that are) not creepy." Read more...

Beyond the simple fact that a consumer with such a card could decide to cut off a particular chain's access to the CRM data juice to which they have grown addicted, Equifax President Steve Ely argues that his firm could leverage the masses of consumers. In so doing, he could tell consumers which retailers have been disappointing a certain percentage of their fellow consumers. Read more...

But deciding what to do about abandoned carts, that gets complicated. The innocuous-looking store locator is akin to waving a red cape in front of the face of an E-Commerce manager bull. In this case, even the bull is very real. And, yes, it all comes down to incentive plans, the least focused-on reason why Merged Channel programs so often fail.Read more...

The credit database giant argued that such a card could potentially reduce "the need for companies to retain customers' personal identification information, which could also result in the reduction of risks posed by data breaches." Although that theoretically could be the case, the only way such a card—dubbed the Equifax online identity card—will be successful is if it's adopted by a large number of retailers. And each of those retailers would have to be willing to surrender one of their most precious pieces of data: customer history. Read more...

At a glance, Best Buy's efforts sound similar to the social networking site widget efforts pushed recently by rival national pizza chains Pizza Hut and Papa John's. But Best Buy's plans are far more adventurous; the retailer envisions pushing its content out to mobile, blogs and video sites in addition to social networking sites. But the company also plans to create wiki-like rich content by leveraging what one Best Buy exec dubbed "150,000 tech-savvy employees, some 65 percent of whom are 16 to 25" years old. Read more...