Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

This marriage could be a very low-cost proposition, with the app asking for the cart's number or, better yet, the cart presenting a QR or barcode that the app can scan. The app—with its capabilities and its CRM history—could use a cart equipped with a simple radio beacon for navigation purposes.Read more...

For the Amazon sales tax haven to be an issue, you first have to believe that the only—or even a main—reason why people shop at Amazon is to save the sales tax. There are quite a few reasons why that is absurd. But the fact that shipping charges are typically many times the sales tax is a pretty good place to start.Read more...

No major advances in mobile location technology have emerged. In the last couple of months, however, quite a few very different approaches to location tracking have emerged. These range from leveraging the earth's magnetic field to piggybacking the data already used by mobile ads, tracking a combination of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signals, and riding the audio signals from existing music speakers. One app even reacts to light patterns from specially enhanced LED bulbs.Read more...

What's impressive is that this approach is three levels deeper than what RedLaser has been used to. It goes beyond limiting its results to Best Buy, focusing instead on what that specific Best Buy store sells and then limiting the results to what that specific Best Buy store has in stock. This means Best Buy's APIs are sharing real-time inventory data.Read more...

Unfortunately, the two software suppliers aren't just throwing the usual hissy fits at each other. They're configuring their software as part of the feud, which means retailers and their online privacy policies and, potentially, the Federal Trade Commission are caught in the middle.Read more...

With a staggering $444 billion in annual revenue, Walmart has generally been sluggish and conservative, allowing tech innovations to be toyed with by rivals such as Amazon.com. But in the last few months, Walmart has quietly started acting like quite the aggressive startup. It has embraced mobile and various innovative tech approaches, including an infatuation with social media, in a way that no major chain—especially not the old Walmart—has ever done.

Consider just the last couple weeks’ activity at Walmart alone, and it becomes clear how change is being embraced by Bentonville. And as anyone who has ever worked with an aircraft carrier knows, turning such a huge boat around quickly is hardly easy. How that’s happening at Walmart is the topic of StorefrontBacktalk‘s September monthly column in Retail Week, the U.K.’s largest retail publication. The column lives here at Retail Week. For those who don’t have a Retail Week subscription—shame on you!—here’s a copy at StorefrontBacktalk.…

When Walmart quietly (was it really intended to be quiet? More on that in a moment) ran this test at one store near the Bentonville mothership, many compared it with the chain's self-checkout efforts. But this setup's advantages make that particular function of minimal interest. Still, it's the most palatable explanation to offer shoppers.Read more...

To test whether the initial engine was indeed able to factor in a shopper's intent, we searched for Apple. Understandably, the results were about iPhones, iPads and other hardware from that company. But we then searched for Oranges, Bananas, Pears and then again asked it about Apple, hoping that it would now understand our desire for the Garden of Eden edible type of apple, which Walmart.com does indeed sell. Nope, it didn't take the hint and continued to display mobile computers. (When we searched for "fruit," the desired apples did materialize in the results.)Read more...

Now imagine the same idea used in-store: A customer walks in, taps her phone against a pedestal-style kiosk and is automatically connected to the chain's CRM system via a secure Wi-Fi network. After that, everything she does in-store is CRM gravy.Read more...

In this trial program, called logically enough "the Receipt Comparison Tool," the idea is to showcase hopefully lower prices to consumers who don't want to walk into a Walmart store. It's sort of a Missouri approach, with the shopper in effect saying, "Show me. I like my store. But if you show me concretely how you'd charge me less for the same stuff, I'll drive over to your store quickly enough. But you show me first." The IT challenge is to accurately compare prices for a specific Walmart store at a specific time—no easy task, given that each store has its own prices and that those prices can change hourly.Read more...

That kind of data-sharing is exactly what many of the retail treasury sorts behind the MCX retail mobile payment alliance have feared. "Whatever the retailer is passing over the lines today, in this initial phase, we'll get that data. We believe the data is that of the retailers, and we would not use that information to share with other retailers," said Don Kingsborough, PayPal's VP of Retail and Prepaid Products. "But, at the same time, when you combine it with our online and mobile information, it becomes very powerful information that we can use—with the retailers."Read more...

This comes on top of the usual political bickering when an organization includes such suspicious rivals as Walmart and Target. Indeed, participants also describe collisions between the group's treasury/finance people (who represent the bulk of the dues-paying members) and those same chains' marketing/mobile groups (who have very different objectives).Read more...

Granted, these aren't the first thieves to be done in by those not-so-loyal cards—a Sears associate got zapped last year—but they are among the best. Seems that Michael Pollara of Florida was hitting quite a few Toys"R"Us stores using the ever-popular box stuffing trick (take a big box with a cheap item in it and replace the contents with something much more expensive).Read more...

In a blog post on Monday (Aug. 13), FTC Senior Attorney Lesley Fair said that following a published privacy policy isn't enough. The FTC could go after businesses that misrepresent privacy protections in their opt-out and customization instructions—or even just those that join an industry self-regulation group but then don't follow its code of conduct.Read more...

Charlotte Russe, a 500-store youth apparel chain, recently cited almost 100 percent read-rates on its text messages, which pretty much indicates the lack of understanding of text open-rates. In E-mail, an open-rate means someone has read the subject line and the from line, and then decided the message is worth exploring. In text, “opening” means far less, if anything at all. But that doesn’t mean there are no good ways to gauge message effectiveness—redemption rates do a wonderful job—and it also doesn’t mean there are not good ways to make those messages get read more often. Consider, for example, a customized honeypot approach—sort of CRM for texting.

Few retailers are using text timing as a means to send such messages more effectively. Most consumers tend to open and respond to texts during certain hours, based on their schedules. To determine those optimal times requires little more than sending some very deep discount offers—offers too good to resist—to get targeted shoppers to respond quickly. By sending two or three such honeypot messages over the same number of weeks (use different days to gather more data), you can map the best times to send messages to those shoppers. This approach goes beyond tailoring the message to the individual shoppers. It also tailors when to send that text.…

This discussion, though, is really about a much more strategic and fundamental issue. With showrooming and reverse showrooming and everything in between, does the very nature of retail Web pricing have to be rethought? Once the price comes off the Web page, everything is up for discussion. Customized pricing? Pricing based on how generous shoppers have been with their last five purchases? Is this another way to ditch the bottom-feeder bargain hunters? Will chains offer deeper discounts to people who shop with a short list of their most direct rivals? Will Target.com charge a lower price to someone coming to its site from an Amazon visit as opposed to a Barnes & Noble visit? And could this flex pricing ever make the transition to in-store, leveraging mobile?Read more...

If this approach works—it's already been tested with much smaller merchants—the potential is for payment cards to be associated with anything that the full-blown digital wallets have promised: giftcards, loyalty programs, stored value, etc. Read more...

Behind this approach is a deal Shopkick cut with Mood Media, one of the largest retail in-store music providers. What this means is any chain that happens to use Mood for audio has a quick-and-easy way to offer mobile marketing. But there's a lot more to this. Those speakers can also offer in-store geolocation.Read more...

That means no signage telling customers about it, no references on the retailer's Web site (and certainly not its homepage), no marketing, no reference in E-mails to customers and no associate training so that at least they can tell customers. The mobile map app itself doesn't even have Walgreens' name, so if a customer using either an Apple or an Android smartphone went searching for Walgreens, he or she wouldn't find it. The only way to download the Walgreens map app is for a shopper to happen to know to search for the vendor's name.Read more...

A company called QThru, for example, is making waves with a mobile app that handles product identification and completes mobile payment through scanning an old-fashioned barcode. Its claim to fame: that the app identifies the product within two seconds even when the hand holding the phone (which is taking the picture of the barcode) and the hand holding the product with its barcode are both shaking and when the barcode is incorrectly positioned.Read more...

Not only can online retailers charge different prices to different consumers, they may also be able to prevent one consumer from telling others how much they were charged. First off, is this approach likely? asks Legal Columnist Mark Rasch. Answer: Yes, because it's the next logical step.Read more...

Drilling into the details of the plan raises questions about how different the site will truly feel, and that speaks to how the data is used and to how aggressive the customization is. For example, the more decisions are made—or, more precisely, perceived by customers to be made—about spend levels and then displaying higher-priced items, the more resistance might be encountered.Read more...

The good news: no Google-style POS changes required, at least not to meet Microsoft specs. The bad news: no help from Microsoft, either. Unless you build your own in-store shopping app, the Microsoft Wallet will basically do contactless card emulation—and not much more.Read more...

The chain last week announced enhancements such as deeper access to purchase history and promotions—which themselves telegraph specific types of drugs being prescribed. For authentication, the site is seeking the usual password and login for access. But it then requires a birthdate and—here's the good part—two pieces of information likely found only on an existing prescription bottle: a prescription number and the store number.Read more...

When automated, do such tools facilitate good interactions and help customers encourage each other's purchases (such as saying whether an outfit looks sharp with those shoes or if that drillbit is the proper one for a particular fix-it job) or will it just freak shoppers out when it helps strangers approach them? In New Jersey, for example, a stranger approaching while smiling is legal justification for using deadly force.Read more...