Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Costco's deployment of Costco Reviews went out of its way to avoid anything controversial or, for that matter, innovative or creative. Almost all of the functionality has been outsourced to an Austin-based social commerce vendor called Bazaarvoice, which will review all comments and post them within 24 hours, once any profanity or "completely inappropriate" comments are removed, said Ginnie Roeglin, Costco's Senior VP for E-Commerce. Read more...

Let's not get too optimistic here. "Mostly unharmed" doesn't mean escaping untouched. But it does mean that when large companies—especially retailers—have to suddenly make do with a lot fewer people, they need that good ole IT magic more than ever. They need the efficiencies that IT promises and the employee-replacing devices that IT enables. Read more...

B&N, with almost 800 bookshops in all 50 states, on Monday (Oct. 27) introduced what it dubbed "My B&N," a program designed to create personal profiles for all customers so that they can more easily interact with other customers. Read more...

Are they ignoring the product or are they picking it up, reading the label and then quickly putting it back? Does the timing and eye movement indicate they were repulsed by the sugar content (near the bottom) or the low fiber count?Read more...

When 1,361-store $4.6 billion chain Big Lots unveiled its first E-Commerce site Tuesday (Oct. 21), it decided to borrow a gimmick from its brick-and-mortars and re-create what it dubbed the stores’ “treasure hunt atmosphere.” Specifically, every morning, the chain plans to announce on the site a “deal of the day,” which is a limited-inventory product at supposedly ultra-discounted rates. Big Lots is also posting certain advertising circulars online only.

It’s an interesting twist on giving consumers a reason to repeatedly come back to the store. It’s also coupled with a loyalty CRM program called BuzzClub, which seems to be offering the same kind of discounts available in most loyalty programs. But Big Lots has come up with a chutptza-ish marketing claim for those customers who successfully apply for a loyalty card, and the chain listed it as the first of eight bulleted advantages: “Get access to all merchandise on BigLots.com.” And that’s something that non-loyalty card members will be denied?…

The trial features three retailers: a small technology café; a midsize, regional Tokyo-area chain; and one of Japan's largest retailers--Bic Camera, whose revenue last year was roughly equivalent to $6 billion. The trial's goal is to show that the consumer phones can hold the loyalty card data of more than 100 retailers, depending on how much data each retailer wants to store. Read more...

The non-traditional Home Depot kiosk trial is based more on the units themselves—small mobile units, some as tiny as 5-inches tall—and the size of the chain's planned kiosk commitment: Well north of $100 million for full deployment, according to the technology consultant handling one of the trials.Read more...

Yes, it's a wacky juxtaposition, but stay with me for a moment. There has been a steady noise coming from retail franchisees who are trying to drive more of their stores' IT strategy. Why now? This IT manager said it's another impact from the economic freefall. When the dollars were flowing freely, having sophisticated reporting wasn't seen as a priority. "Some didn't care about their labor or inventory. A third of our franchisees couldn't have told me what their product costs were," the exec said. Read more...

Carrefour, the world’s second-largest retailer, on Monday (Oct. 13) confirmed that it was awarding a substantial piece of business intelligence analysis business to Teradata.

A very brief statement didn’t reveal any details, other than a self-serving quote from Teradata. “Carrefour is taking a dramatic step forward in consolidating their data infrastructure to better compete on analytics and get quick, precise answers to complex business questions,” said Eric Joulié, vice president Western Europe and president of Teradata France.…

With the new Web site that $1 billion Papa John's launched this week, restaurant workers update the site with topping out-of-stocks by calling a headquarters' call center, which sends a message to have the site updated for that specific restaurant. But the chain is preparing for a much faster system, where employees at each store could tell its POS system about running out of pineapple as easily as ringing up a cheesesteak to go.Read more...

If you’re going to be in New York City on Wednesday (Oct. 15), you might want to drop by the StorefrontBacktalk panel on strategic kiosk use (yes, there is such a thing) at the Javits Center during the KioskCom/Self-Service Expo show.

We’re going to start things off by examining Home Depot’s kiosk approaches and concerns (one of our panelists has been working on it for months) and then debate the security risks of kiosks, the difficulties of POS (and back-office) integration and—for laughs—talk about some of the more futuristic robotic kiosks in the wings. It’s from 3:15 to 4:15 PM and we’d love to have you join us. Someone needs to ask probing questions. If you don’t, I’ll have to, and what fun would that be?…

Japan’s NTT and three large Japanese retail chains—Bic Camera, Nojima and Runsystem—confirmed Thursday (Oct. 9) a trial that the group says will “securely integrate the reward cards of more than 100 retailers into a single mobile phone.”

NTT will run the contactless card trial—called Gyazapo—from February to June 2009. “Once a dedicated application is downloaded into the phone, (the system) enables loyalty points, ID photos and other membership information of multiple retailers to be registered under a single platform,” according to an NTT statement.…

Google’s YouTube on Tuesday (Oct. 7) officially opened its click-to-buy program, allowing users to click on a song they like in the background of a video and instantly download it. Or perhaps click on a product seen in a video or on a poster in a video.

“Click-to-buy links are non-obtrusive retail links, placed on the watch page beneath the video with the other community features,” Google said in a blog announcement. “Just as YouTube users can share, favorite, comment on, and respond to videos quickly and easily, now users can click-to-buy products—like songs, books and movies—related to the content they’re watching on the site.” This is a logical and interesting move, but it will take a very long time before even a few percent of YouTube videos will have anything to click on. Still, a journey of 1,000 Exabytes begins with a single click.…

The problem is that most IT functions in-store are behind-the-scenes. To put a finer point on it, argues Nikki Baird of Retail Systems Research, is that in-store IT is not usually creating things that are customer-facing. This matters because retailers like to prioritize IT projects based on traditional ROI spreadsheet metrics, which rarely apply to new ideas for customer interactions. Read more...

Merged channel and E-Commerce issues will be the fighting words of the day at Retail Perspectives 2008 in Montreal on Monday (Sept. 22), where StorefrontBacktalk will be speaking and moderating discussions on those topics plus PCI, in-store strategies, supply chain and global tactics.

Panelists include IT execs from Build-A-Bear, Tesco and Reitmans, and confirmed audience participants include JC Penney, Jones Retail, Brookstone, Carters, Fortunoff and Casual Male. We would love to see you there.…

The application, called Giftag, requires a small applet to be downloaded and then integrated into either Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox browsers. Once installed, users can theoretically visit any E-Commerce site, find something they want and then click on an icon to select it. The application also allows users to select specific elements of the retailer's page to visually highlight it for a friend or relative. Read more...

With a new entry into the browser battleground—Google's Chrome—comes more customization nightmares. This problem is going to get a lot worse very quickly as many E-Commerce sites try and get more complex with more interactivity, multimedia and even 3-D experiments at the same time as consumers are getting more comfortable playing with their browser settings. Read more...

The chain sent out invites to its exclusive Premier Black members—supposedly limited to the biggest spenders in the chain—on Wednesday, but inadvertently E-mailed it to the full CRM database. Oops! Read more...

Wal-Mart on Wednesday (Sept. 3) launched what it dubbed the Walmart Smart Network—a series of next-generation digital-ad systems—to 2,700 stores. The funky aspect of this rollout is that all 27,000 screens will be centrally controlled via an Internet Protocol Television connection.

In theory, this will allow content to be adjusted based on a virtually endless list of criteria and could be tweaked on a per-store, per-screen and time-of-day basis, said officials with Wal-Mart, who seem to be unsure when they’re Wal-Mart and when they’re Walmart. (Both were used.) “Every screen and every message has a purpose and we will be analyzing point of sale data on an ongoing basis,” said Stephen Quinn, chief marketing officer, Walmart Stores, U.S..…

Calvin Klein finally gave its HTML blessing to E-Commerce, offering its first for-sale items on its Web, although the E-Commerce launching as U.S.-only. Anyone visiting from outside the United States will be routed to the existing corporate brochure site.

The site is trying to attract subscribers with a gimmick this month: Offering consumers the chance to win a $1,000 online fall shopping spree in exchange for registering. Calvin Klein is also—sort of—offering a free shipping deal, but only for customers who buy more than $200 worth of apparel at a time.…

In an overall down market where the 150-store Nordstrom chain is seeing a 4.3 percent sales drop, online operations are jumping 15 percent–accounting for almost 8 percent of all sales. Company execs now project online to soon top 10 percent. Even more intriguing: Nordstrom is reporting a sharp increase in the number of multi-channel shoppers, who now represent almost a third of all sales.

But Nordstrom is doing online differently, according to this wonderful profile in The Puget Sound Business Journal (Seattle). First, Nordstrom is delivering the identical merchandise online and offline, a tactic quite different than many other cross-channel retailers. Secondly, its call center staffing has not been outsourced, a move that the customer service-intensive chain said gives it a competitive advantage.…

This concept is being trialed right now by Germany's $81 billion Metro Group, in a project with Procter & Gamble.Read more...

But the $20 billion retail chain, with roots dating back to 1902, decided to use its customers' payment card numbers as customer identification numbers. To avoid PCI conflict, J.C. Penney is using a form of tokenization to convert those payment card numbers into "a different ID number," said company spokeswoman Kate Parkhouse.Read more...

Some are questioning, though, whether the chain's lower priced approach might limit the number of consumer phones that can access the related content. Read more...

The trial is apparently focused solely on evaluating the units' selling capabilities—and Best Buy's ability to handle and protect payment—and will not be integrated with any of the company's other systems, at least for this trial. That would mean no interactions with CRM, inventory or supply chain, and even payment systems handled outside of Best Buy's network. Read more...