Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Pathmark is rolling out a branded combination loyalty and payment card, selling convenience and discounts to its customers. The catch: the combo card only offers debit payment. Read more...

Retailers started using the credit card numbers to identify purchases with specific consumers, given that they had to store them anyway. It turned out to be a convenient link into CRM systems, especially for customers who weren't using the traditional retailer-issued loyalty card. Read more...

In a sign of the times for beleaguered RFID, when $8 billion apparel and home furnishing chain Dillards announced Tuesday that it was beginning an RFID pilot, it spent most of its short statement detailing various restrictions on its trial efforts. It’s sort of like announcing a brand-new hire by telling employees all of the things you won’t permit the new person to do.

The item-level RFID/Electronic Product Code (EPC) trial will feature “tags designed to be removed at the time of purchase. They are not required in the event that the customer wishes to return the garment. No link will be made between the garment information held by the tag and the customer’s personal information,” said the retailer’s ultra-happy news release.…

WalMart.com wants to make it clear: they're not shutting down their online phone support. They're just hiding it. In an effort to force their online shoppers to use their online tools—and only their online tools—Walmart.com has decided to continue its online telephone helpdesk, but—I swear I'm not making this up—not tell anyone the phone number.

In the most literal example of "don't call us, we'll call you" attitude I've seen in quite some time, Walmart.com's customer service people—at their discretion—may call some customers who are having difficulties, but they won't disclose their phone number, which is a fairly effective way to discourage callers.

When pressed if there was any way customers could still call the online helpdesk, Walmart.com spokeswoman Amy Colella said that the old phone numbers still work, if you happened to have written them down.

Consider: In the early days of E-Commerce, a typical retailer and manufacturer might have between eight and 12 products that it is actually marketing, especially with search engine links. Today, that same company would typically be doing the same kind of Web marketing with some 12,000 products, said Tim Armstrong, who serves Google as its president of advertising and commerce for North America.

Armstrong argues that this is morphing ad budgets into operational budgets. Is a Google ad akin to a traditional piece of advertising—something that an ad budget should fund—or closer to the cost of a car dealer building a new showroom and dealership?

The good news is that major companies are now actively pushing mobile. The bad news is that they're pushing in different directions. The mobile phone e-commerce activities you're seeing today are going to fall victim to the same amnesia fog that envelopes all of those early Web searches done on text-based browsers.

Although the Web had been around for years, it was the graphical browser that got the industry to agree on one way to create Web pages that could fire the imagination of businesses and consumers. That defining moment has yet to hit mobile commerce. Forget design and programming issues. There hasn't yet even been broad agreement on how m-commerce is supposed to work. Let's start with simple payment.

In another unintended consequence example, contactless payment and mobile payment efforts seem to have stunted the growth of retail biometrics. Is this a marketing fault or the death of an idea that never had much of a chance?

A few years ago, retail biometrics had what seemed to be a very bright future. They promised superior security and a permanent CRM association. If that customer switched credit cards, moved to another state, changed their name and changed cellphone companies, the fingerprint would still allow all purchases to be associated with an individual customer.

When one Phoenix jean merchant wanted to boost his bottom line, he decided to not look back and to get positively cheeky. (My apology for that lede, but this story pretty much demands it.)

The Hub Clothing store, which sells high-end jeans for between $135 and $900, decided to use specially-placed video cameras to show customers what a traditional mirror couldn’t easily show: their bottom, according to this Associated Press story, which also features this wonderful video segment. The Buttcam–their name, so help me–sounds like a terrific idea, but hope it doesn’t backside on the merchant.…

With many trying to out-service and out-specialize Wal-Mart, grocery chains are looking to spend more than $9 billion over the next year, according to a new report from the IHL Consulting Group.

One of the big trouble spots that IHL saw for grocery chains is the lackluster performance of many loyalty programs, which IHL President Greg Buzek attributes to most retailers deploying the packages poorly. The programs are generally used more as discount programs ("come in with your card and you'll get discounts on 400 specially-marked items") than as an attempt to understand individual customer's buying habits and to make their experiences better, Buzek said.

When the world's largest retailer struggles with a database issue, the numbers can be a bit daunting. It's datawarehouse, for example, is larger than 4 Petabytes. That's more than 4,096 TBytes, give or take a few million bits.

The chain has more than 6,000 stores, with some having almost a half-million SKUs each. You think your Excel spreadsheets are bad? Wal-Mart's database tables have literally 100 billion rows. The retailer's POS systems have to ring up some 276 million items—a day.

This peek into the IT operations of this $345 billion retail empire comes courtesy of a phone interview with Wal-Mart Chief Technology Officer Nancy Stewart.

JCPenney has been experimenting with ways to bring online depth into its brick-and-mortars, with some healthy (107 percent sales boost) initial increases in test stores, according to this DMNews,com story.

The pilot–which was launched late last year in 40 stores–is interesting in that it matches some attractive numbers with bringing online into offline, but it’s unclear if the “this is different” newness factor was isolated. If it wasn’t, the sales bump might be more a result of the trial than what the chain would see in the longterm. Also, this appears to be true multi-channel–as opposed to the desirable merged channel–as the systems don’t appear to talk to each other. Still, it’s an encouraging step.…

Google this week launched a new cookie program, aimed at appeasing privacy advocates. The search giant changed the cookies' expiration date from 2038 to two years after the consumer's last visit to Google.
At first glance, it sounded like an accommodating change. In reality, it's far from clear whether it truly gives privacy groups anything. First, giving up the 2038 date was easy, given that it's highly likely the Google cookie of today (or of a few years ago) will be entirely irrelevant to the Web user of 2038.

At the heart of Web analytics is the belief that by pouring into the almost unlimited number of stats that Web sites today can churn out, we can figure out what our visitors are thinking, what they want and how to get them to do what we want them to do.

This gets into one of the great conundrums in E-Commerce today: You have to know your audience quite well before you choose the criteria by which you'll get them to know them much better. I bring this up because of an interesting Web traffic analysis change announced this week by the Nielsen/NetRatings folk, which itself follows similar changes implemented by ComScore.

With so much of E-Commerce analytics dependent on industry-accepted definitions of pageviews, visitors and visit length, changes in the way that is tracked can have a huge impact. So when Nielsen/NetRatings on Tuesday announced that radical changes it how it tracks Web site popularity, it’s something to be seriously examined.

The first impact of the change—which will now measure popularity by how long users linger on sites, not by how many pages they view—was that it sent AOL, Yahoo and MSN way up, leapfrogging Google, according to this well-done Washington Post story. The story reported that IM and E-mail usage was a key factor.

The change in audience measurement comes as the frequent use of online video and streaming sports scores and stock quotes make the number of page views increasingly irrelevant to a Web site’s popularity, the story said. “New technology has also altered the way consumers engage sites. For example, a system called Ajax automatically refreshes Web page content without the user clicking to reload the page, which reduced the number of page views in the old rankings. Now new e-mails also appear without pressing the “check mail” button. Nielsen rival ComScore addressed these changes in March by measuring the frequency with which users return to sites.” A piece very much worth reading.…

Hewlett-Packard on Wednesday announced that it has created a mobile application that uses imaging algorithms, wireless broadband and the phone's digital camera to allow on-the-fly color matching.

HP is pushing the technology as a way for retailers to help boost sales by, for example, helping sell makeup that matches specific skin shades.

Fidelity National suffered the ultimate insider theft when an IT staffer sold about 2.3 million customer records to a marketing firm. But it's the low-tech way this techie did it that makes it interesting.

The company said that this was all orchestrated by one employee, who has thus far only been identified as "a senior-level database administrator who was entrusted with defining and enforcing data access rights." If someone wants to steal a database, that's the perfect job to have.

Despite—or is it because of?—this employee's technical expertise, intimate knowledge of the network and extreme access, he/she didn't break in, didn't do a transfer and didn't concoct such elaborate script to make data copies. "The incident does not involve any outside intrusion into, or compromise of, Certegy's technology systems," said a company statement. Here's the most fascinating part: "To avoid detection, the technician removed the information from Certegy's facility via physical processes; not electronic transmission."

The average time it takes a consumer to make an E-Commerce purchase decision has jumped from about 19 hours in 2005 to 34 hours and 19 minutes this year, according to a report that is slated to be published next week.

The report, created by a security service called ScanAlert and based on about 128 million visitors to 470 web sites, makes the reasonable conclusion that the increase is based overwhelmingly on the increase in the number of E-Commerce sites today. In theory, this allows for much more extensive—and time-consuming—comparison shopping. Comparison shopping is certainly a very good possibility, but as the novelty of E-Commerce purchases becomes more of a distant memory for most, other more innocuous options are also possible.

Look for Yahoo next week to try and push Web ads to the next customized level, with “a new system dubbed SmartAds that allows advertisers to compile ads on the spot based on a Web user’s Internet profile, including such data as their location, recent product searches and, in some cases, age or household income,” according to this Reuters story.

From one perspective, this is nothing new, as Google and others have been trying to get close to this for more than a year. But Yahoo is making the right noises, with announced plans to merge its display and Web search advertising businesses. The next rev of Web advertising was going to happen sooner or later, almost certainly by early year. Yahoo’s dollars will simply guarantee that it will be sooner. …

In court papers, SAP has now conceded that one of its units did perform “some inappropriate downloads of fixes and support documents” from Oracle.

The Tuesday acknowledgement came from SAP CEO Henning Kagermann. “Even a single inappropriate download is unacceptable from my perspective,” Kagermann said. “We regret very much that this occurred,” according to this CIO Today story. Technically, this was a violation but it’s far from clear whether Oracle suffered any true harm or whether SAP achieveved any material advantage.…

When looking at CRM programs, many retailers today focus on what they can do and not what their prospects want them to do.

Nothing radically new here, but i just stumbled upon this great Microsoft commercial about the consumer-retailer disconnect. When you see the guy with the “advertiser” shirt, think ‘retailer” and this really works. Sorry that it happens to be a vendor commercial, but even Microsoft can make a valid point from time to time.…

A key division of the Albertsons grocery chain officially abandoned its loyalty card program on Wednesday, officially saying that it wanted customers to be relieved of the burden of having to show a card to get discounts. Unofficially, the program got pulled because grocery managers weren't bothering to use the data.

To be fair, the decision for the Albertsons group that handles some 78 stores in Arizona, New Mexico and El Paso, Texas (Albertsons has any other groups for other geographies) was complicated. First, the chain's history has been marked by a strong and consistent resistance to any kind of CRM/loyalty program, with Albertsons being one of the last of the major retailers to launch a loyalty program when it tried it out in 2003. The chain is now going to try and push its new lack of a loyalty card as a reason for customers to shop there. But the truth is that the chain never saw a viable return-on-investment from the program. Why? As one Albertsons official—who asked to remain anonymous because of a fondness for a continuing paycheck--said on Wednesday, "The data was being collected but it wasn't being used."

Lands’ End is hoping technology can deliver a better swimsuit-purchasing experience online than in-store. With few items of apparel are the subtle distinctions more important than with swimwear. The battle: to approximate the exact look-and-feel of the swimsuit online (advantage: brick-and-mortar) while minimizing the awkwardness and embarrassment of the process (advantage: online).

The Camden Courier-Post did a revealing (sorry. Couldn’t resist) look into how Lands’ End is trying to play this one, with options to “send messages to a personal shopper and match suits to their body types through a search mechanism that lists six elements.” Worth a read.…

In Sunday's New York Times, there's this intriguing piece talking about how E-Commerce sales are quickly running out of steam. Perhaps "intriguing" is the wrong word for it. A more apt term might be "dangerous" or "out-of-context" or ..... nah, I think I'll stick with "dangerous."

The piece is not dangerous because it reveals some deep, dark secret. It doesn't, not does it claim to. It's dangerous because it perpetuates the misguided—but commonly held—belief that online and offline retail efforts today are distinct. Even worse, it seems oblivious to the rapidly-increasing influence that each has on the other.

The story is built on stats showing a sharp decline in online sales. But those statistical issues are not the key problem with the Times story. The problem is that it still sees online and brick-and-mortar as rivals. The reality is that we are just starting the age of the merged channel.

Shoe chain Aerosoles is one of many retailers trying to figure how far they can go in the multi-channel race.

In talking with lots of retail marketing and IT execs recently, there appears to be this growing realization—concession?—that a true multi-channel approach is a shock to the retail system. Indeed, even the word "multi-channel" sends the wrong message. Isn't that the opposite of the true goal? Perhaps the phrase "merged channels" is closer, with "multi-channel" usually a pseudonym for what Google's head of retailing has dubbed "multi-silo-ed."Read more...

Best Buy CIO Bob Willett is arguing that RFID can be a huge boost for retailers, but only if they can convince people they won’t abuse the data.

Willett, in a keynote address at the ERIexchange show in Boston this week, credited some RFID trials with already boosting sales in some isolated areas, according to this story in Computerworld. “Before I’m carried away in a box, I’d like to see checkouts gone from the store,” Willet said. “The technology is there to do it today with RFID. The first major retailer that can do it will be remembered forever and a day as a champion of the consumer.”…