Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

This is not to say that most executives don't know where their data starts and where it's sent. But as data routes its way through off-site backup, into employees' laptops and USB flash drives, is shared with key customers and partners over an extranet and even spoken in a call center, that data can end up in quite a few unexpected places. Read more...

Still, those technological trendsetters are found in pockets throughout Europe, Asia and Australia, with most overseas retailers still slow to embrace self-checkout, according to a new report from European retail tech analyst firm Planet Retail. That said, for those merchants who have deployed, they are often exceeding their U.S. counterpart. Read more...

The global ERP market grew 16.7 percent last year, hitting a market valuation of $20.7 billion, according to figures recently reported by Gartner. SAP is clearly dominant as the vendor with the largest marketshare, with SAP’s 28 percent being exactly double the second-largest marketshare for an ERP vendor: Oracle.

The third, Sage (7 percent), is coincidentally exactly half of Oracle’s marketshare. The next two vendors–Info Global Solutions and Microsoft–took 6 percent and 4 percent, respectively. That still left the largest slice of the marketshare pie–at 41 percent–to be split among a wide field of “others.” …

Senior members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee have instructed top brass from several companies with strong Web interests–including Google, Microsoft, Comcast, AT&T and Verizon–to report back on whether they’ve tweaked their ads to match consumers’ online habits. Although no E-Commerce companies were initially contacted, if Congress tries to restrict Web sites from customizing their content, it will have a huge retail impact.

There’s not much of a real distinction between a traditional banner ad on MSN pushing the latest Disney movie and using the same technique on Macys.com to make sure that purses appear on its homepage and–for this particular customer–all are displayed as pink. As long as the focus is placed on permission rather than banning, the damage should be minimal. Nothing to worry about then. When’s the last time you heard of Congress overreacting to something it doesn’t understand?…

Circuit City on Monday (July 28) confirmed that it will go live in mid-August with an experiment that uses convenience—multiple suppliers able to brief from one virtual location—and multimedia entertainment to try and get that associate training to increase. Read more...

An EU undertaking called the SMART project—set to start widespread testing in October—is getting good support with some creative efforts. It’s looking at scenarios such as “if one product is selling well at store A but selling badly at store B, RFID-powered inventory systems could initiate the transfer of the product from one store to another,” according to this ComputerWeekly story.

The project Web site goes into some other interesting possible directions, such as smart-shelves that tell consumers “whether the product is available in the back-room or whether there is a joint/ personalized promotion” and “shelf replenishment practices that change based on real-time information about availability and product shortages.” One of the tests includes “automatic discounting system for products–specifically, meat–that is nearing its (expiration) date.”…

Deals like the Amazon-Tivo arrangement will present context-relevant ads to appear right alongside—or embedded within—various entertainment and information shows. For advertisers, this is merely the next logical step following obvious product placement in entertainment shows. ("Gosh, Grandma, what a large Apple logo you have!") For retailers, though, it's a way of getting that profitable E-Commerce site somewhere other than on a PC or on a smartphone. Read more...

The data from several unrelated retail sensor projects—all of which track consumers electronically during their shopping experience—will be hitting IT desks soon, as no fewer than three such efforts are going to be announced by September.

Retail marketers are notorious for arranging for a ton of data to be collected, only to have the task of making sense of it fall on IT. In this case, marketers and their love of dollars and sensors have outdone themselves, with today’s CRM data of what consumers actually purchase becoming a rounding error when compared with the sensor data tracking every move and every potential move. Read more.…

As part of an extensive recent retail sensor trial, technicians noticed a strange phenomena, one where testing equipment seemed to make every grocery store examined appear to be a massive nursery.

The Nielsen-deployed aisle sensors were using thermal measuring, using a customer’s body heat to indicate a person, which was intended to count the number of people in an aisle at any one point. But the devices registered an awfully large numbers of babies sitting in the shopping cart seats, according to Peter Hoyt, executive director of In-Store Marketing, a company coordinating that trial. It turns out that they were interpreting fresh-roasted hot chickens—which were emitting significant body heat and were sitting in the baby seat—as newborns. The devices were then reprogrammed and the attack of the chicken babies was quickly halted. (We deserve brownie points for having resisted saying that the test results were foul.)…

Such is the case with the announcement Monday (July 21) that Wal-Mart is standardizing on an Oracle business intelligence package—Oracle's Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus (Oracle BI Suite EE Plus) to be precise. Read more...

But the specific tactics being considered—and detailed in a Web site for the group officially dubbed the Information Grand Voyage Project—includes searching history of game programs, blog postings, surreptitiously captured video segments from TVs and computers, tracking Wi-Fi locations and using an RFID reader connected to a cell phone to identify a consumer's activities "based on data captured by mobile device camera." Read more...

"How many smart people are out there who are simply not reserving inventory" for all channels, asked Forrester Principal Analyst George Lawrie. "You never know where demand is going to crystallize." He cited morale—not to mention inventory—problems caused by "reserving inventory for stores that could have been sold by the catalog or online channel." Read more...

A handful of Stop & Shop stores have been using in-store location tracking–coupled with basket content–to narrowly target ads to customers using handheld shopping devices, the chain confirmed in a statement issued Thursday (July 17). Some 92 of the chain’s 360 stores are participating in the trial.

“If a customer is walking down the health and beauty aisle, it can trigger an offer for a new brand of shampoo,” said Michele Deziel, the senior VP of marketing at Modiv Media, which is working with Stop & Shop on the trial, along with Microsoft.…

The assumption of some anonymity on E-Commerce sites can be critical. Let's look at a scenario for Amazon.com. One of its most critical value-adds is customer comments—both good and bad—about its products. What if a consumer—employed in the consumer appliance world—purchased a toaster that was absolutely horrible? Read more...

Will consumers ever deploy counter-top barcode scanners and a Web site to have groceries delivered to them automatically? A company called Ikan.net is hoping they will.

The system combines a Web-connected barcode scanner, which scans every product before it’s thrown out or recycled, and then adds it to a shopping list. The list then is shared with either a grocery retailer directly or a grocery delivery service like Peapod, which does the delivery of the empty items. This nicely done New York Times story shows the efforts of its writer to use the system.…

J.C. Penney customers are twice as likely to say they are highly satisfied with their in-store shopping experience if they are working with store employees who are accessing the company’s Web site while standing next to them. That according to an Internet Retailer story quoting Kevin Gebhardt, the chain’s director of multi-channel coordination and implementation.

It’s been almost two years since the chain connected all 35,000 of its point-of-sale systems to the Web, giving associates in its nearly 1,100 stores access to the retailer’s e-commerce site, JCP.com, the story said. “J.C. Penney also has tested placing Web-enabled kiosks in stores so that customers can access JCP.com on their own, but decided against deploying them,” Gebhardt said. He added that “the retailer is focusing on helping employees provide better service rather than on self-service technologies, with the exception of kiosks that customers use for accessing online gift registries.” …

When Oracle finally introduced its Retail 13 integrated suite this week, after three years of acquisition and integration, the teams working for the world’s largest enterprise software vendor might have breathed a sigh of relief. They might have hoped that the hardest part was behind them.

But creating a vast integrated suite is not the hard part. Convincing retail IT execs, worried about politics, perception and pragmatism, to turn over their most valuable data to one license-fee-hungry vendor? That’s where the real fun starts. Read more.…

Are European retailers going to have any better luck than American retailers with consumer-facing biometric payments? The 750-store Albert Heijn supermarket chain, the largest such chain in the Netherlands, is about to find out.

While various European chains (such as Germany’s Wagener Department Stores) have enjoyed modest success with biometrics, the Albert Heijn chain’s June 17 statement said it would commit to the trial for six months.…

A Verizon Business security report analyzed more than 500 data breach incidents over four years and found that 73 percent started from the outside and only 18 percent were inside jobs. Read more...

"One thing that is true about Amazon's site is that it is very complex, utilizing numerous backend database, proxy servers, distributed application and Web servers, lots of dynamic images, etc.," said Shawn White, director of external operations at Web site performance tracking firm Keynote. "Even accessing the homepage involves complex multi-step interactions between the Web browser and a number of backend systems within Amazon." Read more...

But the change for The Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy and PiperLime is delicate, as the company still wants those brands to maintain their distinct personalities. Those conflicting goals give the new site a bit of a Jekyll-and-Hyde feel, as though a long-time favorite clothing store suddenly stopped remembering to take its medication. Read more...

About 36 percent of all E-Commerce shoppers who abandon their shopping cart did so because the purchase total was a lot more than they had expected. That’s one takeaway from an April PayPal survey of U.S. e-tail consumers.

The survey offered few surprises, but the quantification of the stated reasons was intriguing. The top cause was the expected “shipping charges were too high” (43 percent). The remaining cart surrender reasons were the consumer wanted to do more comparison shopping (27 percent), the prospect “could not contact customer support to answer questions” (16 percent) and some 14 percent said they gave up because they had forgotten their username and/or password.…