Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

When Hewlett-Packard this week unveiled its prototype Retail Store Assistant—a kiosk that offers customized individualized promotions transmitted directly to a customer's smartphone—it took a business pragmatic position in the personal shopper battle.

There's little debate that customized shopping—taking the CRM customer-specific data one major step beyond the minimally effective coupons at the end of checkout—is almost certainly going to be a key in-store technology over the next few years, especially with grocers. But the form that this customized shopping will take is a key debate.Read more...

As both technology and market demand are allowing retailers to truly customize, many of those merchants must start the painful and expensive integration process, says a new Forrrester Research report.

The promise of personalization—where stores in one neighborhood would have entirely different merchandise than one in a nearby neighborhood with a different customer mix—is nothing new. Retailers have been adding technology to their stores for years to test it out, in many different ways.Read more...

As mobile computing devices start invading in-store operations—both what customers bring into the stores and what the stores will hand to those customers—the very nature of in-store networking is likely to undergo a dramatic change.

Consider this scenario: A customer walks into a favorite retail outlet and grabs a handheld shopping helper from a rack near the entrance. The handheld unit can communicate with RFID-enabled smart-shelves and their tagged item-level cousins, as well as signal digital signage to change based on the CRM profile of the approaching customer.Read more...

If you're going to be in the Boston area June 5th and 6th, would love to hook up with some of you at the ERIexchange show at The Boston Convention Center.

That show is actually shaping up to be quite significant, with keynotes from BestBuy CIO Bob Willett, CircuitCity CIO Bill McCorey and Metro Group managing director Gerd Wolfram, among other notables.Read more...

I don’t typically do this, but today’s Dilbert says something so critical about CRM and performance management that it’s simply impossible to not share.…

Checkpoint Systems on Tuesday will introduce a combined tag product, which is designed to deliver EPC inventory and item-level tracking along with EAS anti-theft capabilities. But the move has prompted an unusual amount—and diversity--of criticism, ranging from privacy and health risk issues to standardization and support for retail returns.

What Checkpoint rolled out on Tuesday—in the backyard of Disneyworld—was a new family of dual-function labels called Evolve. The line appears to be the first product to attempt to merge the inventory and anti-theft measures. The patent-pending line will be Gen2-compliant and will operate in the UHF band of 860 to 960 MHz, but at 8.2 MHz for RF-EAS systems, according to Checkpoint.Read more...

A company called Pump Media got together with Chevron and concluded that the source of sorrow was a consumer deprivation of television commercials while pumping gas. Fret no more, America, because these two altruistic groups have lept to your defense.

They have joined Chevron's video-at-the-pump program where, according to a joint news release, they will be "entertaining motorists while they refuel" while running for the captive pumpers "targeted, high-impact and meaningful audio and video content."("No, no," Chevron officials wanted to say, "no need to thank us.")Read more...

Oracle has in the wings a new service-oriented architecture strategy code-named Project X that will be pitched as a way to merge various Oracle components, according to an eWEEK.com story.

The story quoted one source as saying that the package will try and do what Fusion was supposed to do. “It’s a set of processes that take the best of pieces from [for example] I-flex, Siebel [and] Oracle and deliver that to the customer as a single process,” the story quoted the source as saying. “Behind the scene [the integration framework] grabs different pieces from the Oracle architecture—you have to have a basic underpinning that’s going to define a customer across all the suites—then [adds] process orchestration to define the best-of-breed workflows you can do.”…

The young mobile retail space is starting to consolidate, with today’s announced merger of MobileLime and Cuesol. Sad but true, that the surest sign of a maturing market is when key players start eating each other.

Terms of the purchase were not announced, but the CEO/President of MobileLime–Robert Wesley–was named as the CEO/President of the combined company. That was the only personnel detail released.

Cuesol has focused on what it calls personal shopping experiences, including in-store kiosks and wireless cart-mounted touch screen browsers. MobilLime’s focus has been much more narrow, limiting itself to retail applications of cellphones.…

Oracle's SAP lawsuit accuses SAP of "corporate theft on a grand scale." So what was stolen? Support material freely available to any of thousands of Oracle customers. These are the super-secret corporate espionage documents that Oracle is screaming about?

The Oracle lawsuit against SAP, although fascinating in its detailed tracking of who took what and when, is so much pure Oracle. This would be like Microsoft suing a small software company and accusing them—with great indignation—of not treating their partners with courtesy and respect.

Gourmet food retailer Harry & David has thrown its apple boxes behind SAP.

The multi-channel chain—with about 130 stores in 34 U.S. states—signed off on a media statement that not only said nice things about SAP, but it took the unusual move of specifically saying that it chose SAP over Oracle. Although such a choice is not unusual, it's quite rare for a retailer to sign off on a news release that has the name of a vendor that they did not choose.

Mirror Mirror on The Wall: Will this retailing stunt work at all? Bloomingdale’s is about to find out.

Fresh from its showing at the National Retail Federation’s tradeshow floor, IconNicholson’s social retailing demo is being trialed with Bloomingdale’s customers in New York City for two days this week. The demo involves clothing consumers shopping in the store while friends–plus quite a few strangers–watch them and give them advice.

“An interactive mirror transmits high-bandwidth video to friends who comment back via instant message and who send their own suggestions from an online catalogue,” said the Bloomingdale’s statement.…

In a speech to an Australian media conference, Sony Pictures CIO David Cortese said he was unhappy with where Oracle has gone since its buying spree. "The good thing is I only have to write one check instead of four. The bad news is it's Oracle," Cortese said.

Sony has been using apps from PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Demantra and Hyperion, all of which are now under the Oracle umbrella.Read more...

The nation's largest retailer is taking shop-online-pickup-in-store to the next logical point, allowing its Web site to leverage the brick-and-mortar chain's logistical army.

Wal-Mart on Tuesday began the first phase of Site-to-Store rollout, where consumers can get free shipping online and pick up the merchandise at a local store. The move is significant not merely because any move by Wal-Mart influences the rest of retail, but because it's an ambitious attempt to truly offer a multi-channel service. The idea is for the chain to leverage the convenience of its 3,300 stores (all of which are slated to participate "by late summer," Wal-Mart said) and marry it with the almost unlimited virtual inventory possible online. To read the full story,

With more than 90,000 employees, what was Best Buy thinking when it created two employee-accessible versions of its Web site that look exactly the same, except that each had different prices?

In any dramatic story—and this Best Buy dual-Web-site story is starting to become deliciously dramatic—there are good characters and bad characters. In a really good dramatic story, those good/bad distinctions are much more complex and they invariably are dependent on perspective, the reader's point of view.Read more...

As a few supermarkets trial customer held scanners to check out items as they shop–sort of a wand approach to a smartcart–the Baltimore Sun caught up with some consumers to get their reactions.

“I wish every store had this,” said White, 39, who recently moved to Sykesville from Baltimore. “This has made my shopping more efficient. As I see my bags getting full, it makes me think about what I’m buying, rather than just piling stuff into the cart.” Not a lot of new information, but an interesting look at how consumers are reacting to the technology.…

An innovative RFID trial in Tokyo is using RFID-tagged lipstick to record when various samples are tried as well as to give store clerks full customer history of products purchased as well as tried.

The trial—involving retail chain Mitsukoshi, cosmetics company Shiseido and RFID vendor Fujitsu—also offers consumers a "virtual real-time makeup" session featuring a camera-equipped kiosk, display and RFID tag reader "that will enable customers to view on the display how particular products would look on their face by waving tagged cosmetic products such as lipsticks or eyeshadows over the tag reader," the companies said in a statement.Read more...

Technology and customization are wonderful things and when a grocery chain can use the Web to professionally pipe out personalized messages in cake frosting and then have it shipped–all without any human effort–it’s a potentially incredible thing.

Let’s stress the word potentially, as this picture of a cake that was delivered by the Wegman’s grocery chain makes deliciously clear.

Automation is good, but common sense is nice, too. The computer system decided the bracketed HTML commands were part of the message. Some of those instructions were proprietary to Microsoft, but it doesn’t look like vanilla HTML would have sliced any easier. Guess when it comes to saving personnel costs with automation and improving customer service, retailers can’t have their cake and eat it, too.…

The retail technology world of 2007 is absolutely in transition and nowhere is that more clear than here at the industry's largest gathering, the National Retail Federation's tradeshow and conference.

There are primarily two transitions. The first is an in-store transition, from a world where technology was virtually all behind-the-scenes as far as consumers were concerned to one where the bits-and-bytes are what the industry coyle dubs customer-facing.Read more...

While working the NRF show this week, a theme that emerged in almost every conversation was the online/offline struggle and I usually asked how much of that CIO's chain's revenue was virtual as opposed to physical.

That's where one particular CIO—who put his own chain's online revenue significantly south of the industry standard of about 5-6 percent—offered a wonderful insight. When asked what the percent would likely be when his company would take online-offline integration seriously, he said, "The day that neither myself nor my CFO has a clue what the percent breakdowns are, that will be the day we've got it right. As long as my numbers are sufficiently segregated that I can easily identify what's online and what isn't, we'll still have a long way to go."Read more...

Oracle on Monday will official launch its Retail Returns Management package, which will support highly-customized returns policies, such as one allowing a frequent purchaser to return more products than a less profitable customer.

Oracle is pushing the package’s ability to track–and enforce–returns across mutliple channels, making it theoretically easier to deal with in-store returns of catalogue and online purchases, as well as those from a store in another state.

This has some strong potential as many retailers are feeling the pressure to liberalize their return policies. This suite could at least allow merchants to formalize exceptions, which might at least take away some of the sting of aggressive return policies. Also, the integrated CRM capability across multiple channnels couldn’t hurt with that elusive single-view-of-the-customer goal.…

A software package that will—without human intervention--add and remove products based on inventory and item profit margins will be introduced next week by Mercado Software.

The significance of the rollout of Mercado 4 is not in the integration between web analytics and the E-Commerce platform—which has been offered by various vendors—but in the package's ability to instantly make site changes without employees getting involved.Read more...

Despite cross-channel initiatives of every kind at virtually every major retailer, it seems that certain capabilities at any one company either shine offline or online, rarely both.

The best evidence of the great online/offline divide can be traced to the earliest days of the Web. As the Web was just creeping into prominence, if you had asked any hotshot market observer who would likely run the biggest online bookstore in the new medium, the answer would have been Barnes & Noble or Borders, anything but Amazon.com.Read more...

Global Data Synchronization Network (GDSN) efforts got a major boost this month from Wal-Mart, as the retail giant set this month as the deadline for many of its suppliers to comply or die trying.

The Jan. 1 deadline was included in an October letter that was dispatched to an unspecified number of suppliers demanding both compliance and an aggressive data-cleansing effort, according to a report in Computerworld.

The story said the letter claimed that GDSN is no longer a “bleeding edge” technology but is “now a mature solution providing tangible benefits for retailers and suppliers.” Touted benefits reportedly included improved purchase order accuracy, fewer administrative errors, better supplies of stock and greater speed in getting product onto the shelves.…