Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Phones that can ring with coupons, beam payments and deliver true multimedia interactive experiences are already in the pockets of most consumers. How far will—and should--retailers go?

A free product coupon is a free product coupon, right? If it's for the same product at the same merchant and the pricing and timing are roughly the same, it shouldn't matter how that coupon is given to the merchant. Andrew Kamps, the VP of operations at a New York restaurant chain, recently learned otherwise.Read more...

I hate to take a brief respite from this retail technology excitement, but when I saw this popular Web video–supposedly depicting Darth Vader’s younger brother as a retail manager–I had to share.…

Another group of retail technology analysts sat down Thursday late afternoon to look at the retail technology week that was. This week’s panel independent retail technology consultant John Fontanella—veteran analyst with the Aberdeen Group and AMR Research—along with returning guests IHL President Greg Buzek and the Retail Systems Alert Group’s Paula Rosenblum. StorefrontBacktalk‘s Editor Evan Schuman moderated. This week’s topics were Alien’s delayed IPO and the problematic ROI picture of kiosks. If some disappointing earnings and a few economic darkclouds are any indication, the retail tech sector may be in for a serious downturn. If so, what segments will fare well and which will likely get bloodied?

A few vendors have been pushing digital watermark technology—somewhat equivalent to a 21st Century microdot—as a clever way to bridge the physical store and online worlds, without the need for keyboard interactions. The cellphone becomes the remote control. Is this where much of retailing is headed? Will it work? What are the practical implications for customer service?

Are there topics or panelists you’d like us to consider for next week? Please don’t be shy.…

We're starting to hear about more digital watermark applications, where the image-capturing (camera) and communication capabilities of cellphones make them ideal tools to connect printed material with Web sites. We reported last month about NeoMedia and its digital watermark flavor called iPOS (Interactive Point of Sale). This week saw an Oregon company called Digimarc roll out its version in a series of cafes in Japan.

The two approaches illustrate the versatility of this hybrid, which literally is multi-channel as it bridges a customer experience from a purely brick-and-mortar activity--such as looking at a poster in a promotion display--to online. But it does it with virtually (no pun intended) no physical activity on the part of the customer. Read more...

The $9 billion Subway chain of more than 26,000 sandwhich restaurants is going to be ringing customers up with its six grams of fat or less messages in August, as one of its franchisees experiments with mobile marketing.

The franchise has struck a deal with mobile payment vendor MobileLime "to market to preferred customers in real-time by offering alerts and discount coupons to cell phones," according to a MobileLime source.Read more...

At the end of every week, StorefrontBacktalk.com will assemble some of the industry’s top consultants, analysts and IT executives to discuss that week’s retail tech developments. We inaugurated our StorefrontBacktalk Week In Review on July 21.

The July 21 panel included Pete Abell from IDC, Paula Rosenblum from the Retail Systems Alert Group, Greg Buzek of IHL and Mark Rasch, a former federal prosecutor who today serves as VP for Solutionary.

The panel–moderated by StorefrontBacktalk Editor Evan Schuman–ripped into a wide range of topics. Listen to Rasch, Rosenblum, Buzek and Abell discuss the new PCI changes announced by Visa or Rosenblum, Rasch and Buzek debate how multi-channel will likely do this holiday shopping season. Abell tackled HP’s RFID-rival Memory Spot alone while Rasch, Buzek and Rosenblum ganged up on self-checkout trends, including a fascinating discussion about self-checkout obliterating impulse purchases. Rosenblum and Buzek also argued about workforce management technology, concluding that the larger companies are–much more than they initially thought–avoiding workforce technology.

Please listen and shout your feedback to us.…

Outsourced live chat is nothing new and as long as there is no law passed requiring live chat personnel to answer the questions being asked and not just read from a script, its value will be limited. But one veteran provider of these typing services has been toying with an interesting twist. Live Person is now pushing a database-driven process that automatically pops up a live chat session when it concludes the customer is having some difficulty, such as with an abandoned cart or he/she seems to be waffling between two similar products.

But the interesting part is that the software looks at the nature of the products involved in the confusion and assigns an appropriate product specialist to handle that query, to allow–in theory–a much more sophicated and specific exchange. Said one company exec: “If you’re buying a snowboard, you’re matched only with a snowboard gearhead.” This is an effort we’re going to be watching.…

Coupons are a time-honored retail tradition, but like secret Black Friday promotions and regional pricing, there is a good argument that they may no longer make sense. There are many Web sites today that are designed to empower consumers, often ostensibly against the interest of big business, whether those are major retailers, government agencies or large publishers.

Some of the more interesting ones help consumers get around mandatory free site registration—such as www.bugmenot.com--or get to a human voice when locked inside a voice-system hell (www.gethuman.com).Read more...

Just what retail IT execs need in the middle of a July heatwave: reminders that the holiday shopping season is waiting around the corner, like a heavily-armed drunk street gang. (Sorry. Heat waves in New Jersey have a way of souring a guy.)

What brings up this merry thought is a statement from Keynote Systems, the Web performance tracking people. Torturously reminding everyone that Black Friday is only 130 days away, Keynote said it was doubling the capacity of its main load testing service, LoadPro. They’ve added three new cities for testing: Seattle, Denver and Miami, for a total of ten locations across five Tier-1 backbones, as well as increasing network bandwidth capacity by almost 60 percent. What Keynote is doing is fine and necessary, but did they have to spoil a perfectly good summer and announce it now?

To listen to top industry analysts discuss the upcoming holiday season and what it will likely mean for multi-channel marketing efforts, please click here.…

Vendor-initiated surveys have a remarkable history of establishing that the vendor’s service or product is every bit as wonderful as the vendor’s always said. Given the tremendous discretion involved in phrasing the questions, choosing who is being asked and how the answers are analyzed, self-serving vendor research shouldn’t change a lot of minds.

That said, MasterCard PayPass on Tuesday released “internal MasterCard data”–some of it dating back to last September–that showed the average ticket being about $20 and that consumers used credit cards about 18 percent more once they became contactless. “Though PayPass technology can also be used for transactions exceeding $25 (at which point a signature or PIN is required for verification), roughly 75 percent of all PayPass transactions were for purchases below $25 and approximately 45 percent of all PayPass transactions were for purchases below $10.”

To the extent that the point is that consumers are carrying less cash than a year ago, they clearly are. But a lot of that involves cultural changes, making it not clear how much of that 18 percent increase would have happened anyway.…

SAP has bought out Praxis Software, a Minneapolis-based 12-employee E-Commerce/CRM SAP partner since 2003, for an undisclosed amount.

Praxis’s software will now be combined with SAP’s Business One software, which helps small and midsize users manage accounting, inventory, customer relationships, and other functions. To read the full story in Red Herrring, please click here.…

Giftcards are quickly becoming an extremely popular retail payment option, but the traditional analog cards suffer from a lack of security when used for E-Commerce. One company has a two-factor—and possibly three-factor—way of dealing with that.

Imx Solutions said the products are initially being used by Sears, Kmart and CompUSA along with television’s Ultimate Shopping Network (USN). The giftcard is a mini-CD that uses a company-issued–and hidden–password plus it takes a page from the one-time-password-issuing devices because it has a series of encrypted codes on it that needs to match up with a list of encrypted codes on an Imx server and the correct code “changes twice a minute.” To read the full story, please click here.…

The CIO for billion-dollar clothing retailer Guess Inc. had a challenge. He knew their search engine was delivering terrible results and that he would take many months to replace. What should be done in the meantime?

Even CIOs at billion-dollar retailers have to put their jeans on one upgrade at a time. But Guess Inc. CIO Michael Relich found himself in an especially difficult position when web analytics told him that 60 percent of his E-commerce site's search results were delivering "not found" responses to prospects. Read more...

Warning consumers about anything presupposes that there is something bad with that item, something that should be avoided. This might be a self-fulfilling prophesy. The commissioner for Information and Privacy in Ontario unveiled on June 19 a series of tips and guidelines for using RFID within Ontario.

But the guidelines themselves certainly need to be examined seriously because North American products can ill-afford to accommodate two different standards and, besides, neither Mexico nor the U.S. have any material privacy RFID rules at the moment.Read more...

In theory, a smartphone can bring into the store the depth of data possible on the web, merged with enough site- and user-specific data to make even the stodgiest CRM system blush. But can it work in the real world? NeoMedia is arguing that it can. Read more...

A technology vendor called SmartTools thinks that customers should stop lollygagging around in the cashier checkout lanes. While waiting, they should be scanning their own items and saving the cashier's time. If you find this idea attractive, we need to chat. (Hint: This is not an especially good career-advancement purchase.) Read more...

When a Cincinnati man brought his hard-drive to Best Buy to be repaired, he was told that he couldn't have his old hard-drive back. But fear not, he was told: the drive would be made useless by having holes drilled in it. A few months later, the fully intact drive is purchased at a flea market in Chicago for $25.Read more...

The Web is all abuzz with the Grass Is Always Greener On The Other Side Of the Firewall stories about Google preparing an online payment system (a la EBay's PayPal) to be called GBuy while EBay is preparing a contextual Web ad service (a la Google's AdWords) to be called EBay AdContext.

But the most reality-based analysis is that Ebay and Google are proving to be the quintessential example of coopertition (is there an accepted spelling yet for that blend of cooperation and competition?). Read more...

MasterCard today tolled out its PayPass watch in Taiwan today, allowing consumers to pay with contactless without having to take out a credit card. The watch comes with some small retail discounts, but Taiwan consumers are expected to show minimal resistance.

Would this catch on in the United States? Not likely, unless the discounts were a lot more generous than the 10 percent discount in one chain being offered with today’s promotion.

But it’s hard to beat the sex appeal of a lime-green watch with a vendor’s brand on it. Rolex, watch out.…

When $57 billion consumer products giant Procter & Gamble decided to experimentally tag and track its Braun Cruzer razors, it tied that tracking in with a 61 percent increase in sales. Is a rock-solid RFID ROI business case far behind?

As retailers find dollars in having certain stores specialize in various Ethnic or lifestyle segments, they are often neglecting to update their store data to match, so finds a new Forrester Research report. This is a matter of frustration among some consumer goods manufacture suppliers who now need to know more about those customers. A product that appeals to only two percent of shoppers should be viewed very differently, for example, if it happens to be appealing to 85 percent of Hispanic shoppers or 86 percent of vegetarian shoppers or 89 percent of senior citizen shoppers.Read more...

With more home deliveries and installations, retailers and restaurants are facing the point-of-sale challenge of verifying payments away from the POS while paying higher credit card fees for card-not-present purchases. Read more...

The IT director at bath products retailer Crabtree & Evelyn wants to move away from the homegrown applications that run point-of-sale and back-office systems, but he says he's trapped.

The multimillion-dollar cost of moving to off-the-shelf apps would easily outweigh the cost of sticking with apps that work quite adequately. Read more...

Breakthrough technologies invariably require some IT executive somewhere to have the guts to deploy when no one else is seriously doing so.

That's a bold and dangerous move, given how many technologies fizzle and die after an impressive beginning. Read more...