MasterCard Canada this summer will start a 4-month NFC-phone trial, with the backing of some of Canada’s largest retailers, including Loblaw, Petro Canada, Tim Hortons’, Pioneer Petroleum, Rabba Foods, a major NHL arena and McDonalds.
One unusual aspect of the trial is that it will eventually support more than one payment card on each phone, said MasterCard Canada’s Nagesh Devata.…
A handful of grocery chains—including PriceChopper and Wegmans—have started using CRM data to alert customers to product recalls. It’s an encouraging move to convince consumers that loyalty cards can be used to help them beyond taking 10 cents off a gallon of milk.
The program at PriceChopper—a 116-store grocery chain in New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Vermont–is especially interesting as it uses an automatic phone-calling system to instantly and simultaneously reach out to impacted customers. Last month, the system was used to reach out to some 12,000 customers about a recall of Samuel Adams beer due to glass fragments, according to this intriguing report in the Daily Gazette, a daily newspaper from Schenectady, N.Y..…
The idea of offering consumers financial bribes if they use a particular search engine has been tried before, without success. But Microsoft's entry into this field—the latest in a series of Redmond gambits to try and breathe life into its search engine—is different from earlier efforts. Read more...
Using virtual reality, $18 billion consumer goods giant Kimberly-Clark is creating virtual depictions of stores, shelves, products and displays—even sounds and smells people encounter while shopping—to enhance traditional means of research, according to this story in CPG Matters.
“With virtual reality, K-C and its strategic retail partners have a stealth, risk-averse way to test new products, packages, display positions, assortments and point-of-purchase materials without taxing muscles or bearing the cost of physical goods movement,” the story said. “Depictions of retail interiors on the full wall-size screen at its Innovation Design Studio in Greenville, Wis. (opened in May 2007), are realistic and reflective of real-world shopping.” An interesting discussion about this effort–along with skeptical thoughts about some of the sales increase claims–is in the comments area of this RetailWire piece.…
A pair of British shopping centers is experimenting with a creative way to leverage consumer cellphones. The consumers are being surreptitiously tracked by the signals emitted by all mobile devices and a database notes when consumers “enter a shopping centre, what stores they visit, how long they remain there and what route they take as they walked around,” according to a report in The London Times.
A spokesperson for the vendor behind the trials–Path Intelligence, of Portsmouth–said its equipment was just a tool for market research. “There’s absolutely no way we can link the information we gather back to the individual,” a spokesperson said. “There’s nothing personal in the data.” But their system does apparently grab a consumer’s phone’s unique IMEI number, which is found on all GSM and UMTS mobile phones. The carrier would theoretically have the data to match it to personally identifiable data.…
Sears is in a fascinating online position. On the one hand, the $50 billion 3,800-store-chain says its online numbers are soaring, with the number of unique visitors in February 2008 reportedly rising 20 percent in that month. But Sears.com has also run into quite a few speedbumps. Read more...
Guess this is what the cliche-afflicted would call a “sign of the times.” Macys is killing the Bloomingdale’s catalog while Amazon.com is selling copies of Bloomingdale’s 1886 catalog for $12. (Can you imagine the number of out-of-stocks in that thing?)
Current Bloomie’s owner Macys is killing the classic catalog “by early 2009” to focus more on its Web site and “reduce redundancies” (corporatespeak for pinkslip panic). A Macys statement even came up with a politically correct reason to zap the catalog: “Eliminating the paper catalog is also consistent with our sustainability and environmental policies of communicating more with customers electronically and less in paper.”…
To state the obvious: It's getting consumers to use them. I say it's obvious, but one wouldn't guess that based on what the vendors were saying this week. Read more...
As retailers continue to experiment with mobile commerce, one potential problem is when mobile customers prove to be truly mobile. Let’s say a national chain sends an E-mail blast to the cellphones of 10,000 Boston-area customers, inviting them to visit the store for a free sample on Wednesday. The chain limits the offer to the Boston area through area code and other data.
But it just so happens that there’s a huge convention in San Jose that day of the Society Of People Who Live In Boston. Your San Jose locations get flooded with people asking for their free gift, leading to a lot of baffled employees and angry customers. This observation comes courtesy of a colleague who has far too much time on his hands to think up such things.…
The British retail group used the opportunity to beat up banks and card brands for overly high interchange fees. (Then again, retail lobbying groups need no special occasion to make such points, as they often volunteer them when asked about the weather.) But the question remains whether the consumer reactions that are pushing cash usage in the U.K. are likely to be replicated in other parts of the world. Read more...
The new feature—dubbed Virtual Waiter and introduced by the fast-food chain on April 24—is based on "technology that gathers data from millions of online orders and suggests menu items that best match customers' orders." But a demo showed that the technology was much more sophisticated than that suggested.Read more...
Wal-Mart executives this week promised Arkansas legislators that any product with a radio tag would be clearly labeled, as the retail giant tries to put the inventory-tracking devices on all products sold at Sam’s Clubs by 2010, according to this BusinessWeek story.
After checkout, customers would have the option of removing the labels containing the tags, Wal-Mart told the state legislators. “If a manufacturer installed the tag inside a container, workers would be able to deactivate it before a customer leaves the store,” the story said.…
Starbucks on April 23 cut back its financial projections for the year, citing continuing declines in its store traffic, especially in California and Florida. This is announced just a few weeks after Starbucks said it would shake up its Web presence.
But as we’ve noted before, Starbucks has always had an unusually weak Web presence, especially for a chain that for years dominated social networking buzz among younger consumers long before MySpace, Facebook or YouTube were factors. Is this the price that must be paid for years of Web neglect? Could an enthusiastic Web site have helped in-store sales?…
Those North Face executives are far from alone. As retailers and consumer goods manufacturers have been watching—mesmerized—consumers watch more than 10 billion U.S. Web videos in February, they have tried to figure out ways to make it work for them. Read more...
Linda Shea, the polling firm's senior vice president and global managing director of customer strategies, said the inability to answer questions was particularly telling, and it was the result of an E-Commerce double-whammy. It reflects a rapidly increasing set of consumer expectations when it comes to E-Commerce sites at the exact same time that retailers are slashing customer service budgets, she said. Read more...
One of the most annoying parts of many a casual restaurant outing is at the end, when you just want to say “Check, please” and all wait staff seem to sense this and decide instead to join the Waitress Relocation Program.
Microsoft has decided to help (OK, they smelled money in those missing food servers) and created a device that permanently sits on the table. Redmond is backing this hardware that can take payment, print out a receipt and do it all without having to catch anyone’s eye. It allows the tip to be added (minus a deduction for subjecting you to the machine), and it can show various promotions. (OK, so having mandatory TV commercials when you’re dining out is probably not a good thing.) It also has a button to summon a manager if there’s an issue.…
The National Retail Federation’s Shop.org is lobbying the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to not flag consumers when their shopping behaviors are being tracked online, arguing that it would merely serve to frustrate those consumers.
In considering voluntary guidelines for E-Commerce behavioral advertising, the FTC is considering asking sites to display a “pop-up” notification whenever information is collected. Wrote Shop.org: “We all know how frustrating pop-ups can be when you are simply trying to read the latest headlines on a newspaper website. Now transfer that experience to a retail website where customers have come to expect a seamless experience from homepage to checkout. These types of ‘hiccups’ could be devastating.”…
A DVD rental kiosk outfit has rolled out a kiosk that keeps track of orders and awards free videos for frequent shoppers. The idea of a kiosk that has a long-term memory and an active CRM component is a wonderful next step (OK, a baby step) for intelligent kiosks.
The new units from DVDPlay use E-mail addresses in lieu of a loyalty card. “By entering an E-mail address during the rental process, the stand-alone DVD rental machine’s patent-pending software recognizes the number of customer rental transactions and, after every tenth rental, generates a promotional code for a free movie that is automatically sent to the customer’s E-mail account,” said a statement issued by the company. …
Wal-Mart is pushing to create online communities for its customers, where Wal-Mart employees can sit on the sidelines, take notes and be influenced, or so suggests the chief marketing officer for online operations at the world’s largest retailer.
“Consider 130 million customers in a community sharing information on products they buy and use,” said Cathy Halligan, in this Marketing Daily story. “We learned you need to listen to these customers and implement the top-requested features.” …
McDonald's is launching iced coffee as part of some new menu options and "part of our objective was to create additional awareness," especially among the younger consumers who McDonald's assumes will be receptive to a mobile coupon campaign." Read more...
That E-Commerce figure will hit $204 billion this year (when it's percent of total retail will climb to seven percent) and will continue to have major gains for the next several years, hitting $335 billion in annual sales by 2012, Forrester said. But one of the report's authors, Forrester Research Director Carrie Johnson, said that this isn't necessarily cause for retail celebration, as she projected that many of those increased sales are little more than online cannibalizing in-store sales.Read more...
The Web world defies prediction—or does it? Conventional wisdom would have the new up-and-coming retailers faring better online, while the old-style bigbox merchants lag behind. And yet, Starbucks has had far more online troubles than it should have while Sears, according to this intriguing Chicago Tribune feature, is soaring online.
The number of people who visited Sears.com and Kmart .com at least once in February—an industry metric known as unique visitors—rose 20 percent, to 14.7 million, from the same period last year. That makes Sears’ Web business the second-fastest-growing site among mass merchants in 2007. Sears clearly has some serious challenges, but go tell that to the company’s Web people.…
When Best Buy removed annual fees from its bonus card, the company yielded about 10 times the number of shoppers opting to sign up for its rewards program, according to this Forbes.com story.
A location that gains a reputation as a “flat-screen store,” for example, is identified as one frequented by more people with disposable incomes. Hence, salespeople are trained to pitch complimentary products, like sound systems and attachments. Interesting story…. …
The European Commission is cracking down on search engine data-retention, with a new proposed rule that search engines should delete personal data about their customers within six months.
The BBC News site said this recommendation is likely to be accepted by the European Commission and could lead to a clash with search giants like Google, Yahoo and MSN. “Google and MSN anonymise user data after 18 months, while Yahoo does the same after 13 months,” the BBC reported.…
Cards issued by European banks when used online cross border don't usually support AVS checks. So, when a European card is used with a billing address that's in the US, an ecom merchant wouldn't necessarily know that the shipping zip code doesn't match the billing code.
-Marc
