Imagine the following scenario playing out at your favorite retail store. You have been running all around town trying to prepare for an important formal banquet on January 11, 2005. After having worked with a sales associate at a major department store for an hour to select seven possible outfits, you lug them into a dressing room to see what might work. Read more...
Some of the nation's largest retailers pay Paul Walsh to think about existential-sounding questions like "How cold is cold?" and "How wet is wet?" No, Walsh isn't a philosopher. Indeed, as a trained scientist (a meteorologist, to be precise), his answers are anything but theoretical. But it certainly is about perception. Read more...
When I thought about retail IT operations in 2005, I envisioned an eccentric, wealthy hermit who lives in a comfortable mansion in the middle of the woods.
The hermit certainly knows about the big city and all of the glorious things he could buy there, but he is content. He has what he needs and a sufficient number of things that he wants. His home is sound and he doesn't have a heck of a lot of motivation to go out and make it fancy and state-of-the-art. Maybe someday, he thinks. Read more...
With the holiday season comes fruitcake, traffic jams and an anticipated onslaught of must-be-returned gifts from well-meaning (and possibly colorblind) friends and relatives. But sprinkled amongst those gift-receipt-clutching consumers are what the industry considers thieves: people who deliberately use return policies to steal. Read more...
If the "Max" in Office Max is supposed to refer to the amount of time its e-commerce server takes to respond, it's aptly named. And Target's target is apparently not lightning-fast e-commerce experiences. Those conclusions are courtesy of the latest round of Web traffic analysis from the folks at Keynote Systems. Read more...
For years, line-of-business managers have told IT executives that their goal is to improve efficiency. Their mission is to leverage hardware and software to do in a nanosecond what it takes human employees minutes, lunch breaks and vacations to do. Read more...
In many ways, 2004 will be seen as a technological turning point for retail: the year that many technologies that have been hyped for years started to become real. Traditionally, retail has always been a mixed barcode for being technologically advanced. Read more...
Consumers are looking for black coal to put into their brick-and-mortar retailers' stocking this holiday season, with complaints soaring about bad customer service experiences. But those same consumers are seemingly ecstatic with online customer service. Read more...
One of the most logistically challenging situations for any large retailer is the return. Newgistics Inc., a Texas retail service firm, launched a tracking service intended to alleviate some of the uncertainty involved in the process. Read more...
Wawa CIO Neil McCarthy's voice reveals his anger as he recounts a recent meeting he had with bank executives to complain about high credit card fees that are out of proportion with services. Wawa's 550 stores sell a huge amount of gasoline: about 110,000 gallons per week per store, which places it among the highest volume in the country. Typical volume for U.S. gas stations is about 40,000 gallons, McCarthy said. Read more...
When Kmart and Sears announced their plans to merge and create the nation's third-largest retailer, it shook the retail technology world.
Although it will take months for the two retail leaders to merge their almost 3,500 stores with a projected $55 billion in annual revenue, the combined operation will have the ability to significantly influence retail technology trends. Read more...
An age-old CRM criticism is that it's an expensive package that often delivers the information too late (long after the customer has left) and to the wrong people (back-office managers instead of salespeople on the floor). One CRM firm introduced two packages that it claimed avoids those problems. Read more...
Reigning over 175 home entertainment stores in 21 states, Tweeter CIO Bill Morrison looks cautiously at the calendar as the year-end holidays approach. While many of his counterparts are trying to train oceans of seasonal employees and hoping that errors don't obliterate consumers service, goodwill and inventory accuracy, Morrison sits back, confident in the chain's decision to forgo any customer-facing seasonal help. Read more...
In the first year or two of e-commerce, one sign of sure trouble was seeing a high number of abandoned shopping carts.
I've always loved the term "abandoned shopping carts" because it's one of the rare examples in technology where the term quite accurately—and explicitly—describes what it means to describe. It refers to a customer who starts to shop, puts some items into a virtual shopping cart and then simply goes away before buying anything. Read more...
In a move that is expected to slash one kind of retail installation project from nine months to three, a National Retail Federation division has unveiled the initial public release of its IXRetail Time Punch XML schema.
The division—The Association for Retail Technology Standards, or ARTS—also introduced Customer 2.0, which is intended to aid the exchange of customer data among applications in order to simplify integration of new applications such as loyalty programs into existing IT infrastructures. Read more...
In one corner of Microsoft Corp., the smaller the better is the order of the day for new customers. Microsoft's latest retail push is focusing on the smallest of retailers, those with perhaps a single checkout lane and no more than nine stores. Read more...
While many retailers are struggling to make multichannel operations work at all, Best Buy is taking a leadership position in making the retailer a single brand with multiple points of access.
But Best Buy is an almost perfect example of the difficulties in making all channels appear as one to the customer, as it excels in certain areas while sending mixed messages in others.Read more...
With wireless uncertainty as its staunch ally, Vivotech will introduce a system to help retailers quickly convert existing POS units to accept wireless entries. Read more...
It's only fitting that the largest retailer should have the world's largest database, but at more than one-half a petabyte, that's a lot of information, even for Wal-Mart.
The vendor that is supporting those many bytes of data—NCR's Teradata division—begged for the extraordinary permission from the normally secretive Wal-Mart to announce this achievement to make a point: It is arguing that its systems can scale without hiccups even at an extreme number. Read more...
When America Online announced its yawn-oriented shopping portal ("Gee," asked executives from Microsoft and Yahoo simultaneously, "why didn't we think of that? Oh yeah. We did."), it renewed the perennial offline/online e-commerce debate. Since shortly after the Web came into being and browsers became graphical, the Web was without form, and void and darkness were upon the face of the browser. And Andreessen said, "Let there be commerce." And Barksdale saw the commerce and that it was good. And Barksdale divided the online from the offline. Read more...
In the clothing business, selling a suit that doesn't fit a customer makes little sense, even if it's highly profitable. The same can be said for retail e-commerce strategies: There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all Web site. Casual Male, with more than 533 stores in the United States and Puerto Rico, dominates the "big and tall men" apparel niche, which it identifies as a $6 billion market. Read more...
When Microsoft Corp. unveiled its embedded operating system for retailers, it stressed the mini-OS' plug-and-play capability. But one key motivation for the company might have been the fear that retailers were considering upgrading without Microsoft. Late 2004 had retailers at a key IT management point, with aging POS (point of sale) systems pressuring them to upgrade, but many standard upgrade paths unappealing. This drove some retailers to consider Linux. Read more...
One problem that retailers have with the World Wide Web is that it's so ... well ... worldwide. A group of newspaper publishers tried to address that issue with the launch of a Web site intended to match consumers looking for specific products with local retailers that have those products on special promotions.Read more...
Store managers are starting to complain that their data-collection efforts are baring fruit, says Evan Schuman, but they're not being allowed to eat any of it. It's a common complaint within retail circles. Read more...
Frustrated by what some see as IT executives hoarding CRM information, retail store managers are starting to do an end run around corporate with their own customer-information-gathering systems.
One result of this retail technology revolt are smart store kiosks, which today do a lot more than display electronic brochures.Read more...
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
