Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

That means the government will ask for—and Congress might insist on—extensive additional limits on using and even collecting such data. If a chain is going to collect specific geolocation data, the retailer needs to do more than inform those shoppers, said Peder Magee, an attorney in the FTC's division of Privacy and Identity Protection. "You need to ask for permission," he said.Read more...

Organizationally, these functional experts will challenge the traditional organizational structure. Data scientists will likely enter an organization through the IT group, because that department is most likely to engage their services to help drive value from information mining projects, pens Retail Columnist Todd Michaud.Read more...

As Best Buy itself said: "While the updates are occurring, customers will be unable to search or browse products, place orders or check order status on BestBuy.com, m.bestbuy.com (mobile or tablet), BestBuy.com/espanol and store kiosks." Customers also "will not receive E-mails regarding orders while the updates are in progress" and checking order status—plus, of course, making online purchases—"will also be inaccessible to store employees, call center agents and online support representatives."Read more...

Ironically, it's Starbucks—which was one of the first to try mobile payment and intrinsically understood the social media concept years before Facebook launched—that has embraced sending giftcards (for customer birthdays, which is another clever CRM touch) through the hail/sleet/dark-of-night people. This issue actually combines two marketing devices popular throughout the 20th Century: snailmail and plastic giftcards/loyalty cards.Read more...

A month after you pitch, writes Retail Columnist Todd Michaud, you're back, and the marketing chief is talking about how your brand needs a new, leading-edge loyalty program. You offer up that there is new technology in place that will enable your brand to create a loyalty system without forcing customers carry another plastic card, tag or smartphone application. Read more...

The initial test used the shopper's physical location, but no other personal data (such as purchase history, other apps on the phone, Web search logs, personal demographics). However, personalization will likely be the subject of upcoming trials, said Dave Etherington, the SVP for marketing and mobile at Titan, the advertising firm that executed the Gap trial.Read more...

But Sears clearly wants it—like Neiman Marcus and every other big retailer. The challenge now isn't doing it, but figuring out how it can fit in with what customers expect.Read more...

What if the customer could tag an item in the retail store so that it automatically was added to their online shopping cart for future purchase? This would enable people who like what they see to purchase it later. "Honey, I really like the looks of this new washing machine, but wanted to let you check it out before I purchased it."Read more...

That ability, plus new detailed maps to customers within Facebook, and Wal-Mart has bought itself quite a gift. The magic comes when those millions of gift-giving events—birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, graduations, baby showers, etc.—are merged with Wal-Mart's new social media files and its not-so-new customer purchase histories.Read more...

But the group has the same hurdles that have weighed down so many industry consortium: potential infighting among the leading players; legal obstacles; the need to build a massive infrastructure, given the intent to shun current networks; and the tech questions, such as whether this new approach will have any better luck at mastering security than today's efforts.Read more...

Retailers have been trying to get that right for years, using a variety of technologies. But if Neiman Marcus' approach works, it may mean that associates and store managers will have to exercise much more discretion and discipline—and that chains will have to change they way they hire associates.Read more...

Being able to move data around your enterprise gives the most flexibility in using that data, and data portability also future-proofs your system by letting you bolt on new technology quickly instead of slowly and oh-so-carefully making changes to what you've already got.Read more...

But when Vons customer Robert Rivera sued the grocery store after he allegedly slipped on spilled yogurt, the supermarket in litigation called up Rivera's purchasing habits, determined he had purchased "a lot" of alcohol and questioned his sobriety at the time of the accident, pens Legal Columnist Mark Rasch.Read more...

Due to the (strange? pyschotic? drug-induced?) unusual policies at Amazon, publishers have no idea who their Kindle subscribers are. That puts us here at StorefrontBacktalk in the awkward position of having to make a plea to our Kindle subscribers: Please reveal yourselves, and tell us how you find the Kindle subscriptions. We’re considering some changes to the service and any customer feedback goes to Amazon—and it’s not sharing. Therefore, we’re begging for whatever feedback you want to share to please share it with us directly.

For you Kindle people who have not yet subscribed to our Kindle feed, it’s not bad for convenience when traveling, when you’d like the latest on retail tech and E-Commerce beamed into your Kindle when you’re not looking. …

But Visa is offering its new service for any issuing bank, mobile carrier and card brand. That means any payment card could go on a phone without the say-so of Google, ISIS or any other mobile-wallet vendor. At that point, will consumers see any reason for a mobile wallet other than the phone itself?Read more...

The Jetsons-friendly cart was demoed Monday (Feb. 27) at a Microsoft event called TechForum, where various cutting-edge projects were showcased. The cart certainly has some interesting potential—and drawbacks—but one key player that is not buying into the short-term need for the cart is Whole Foods, despite the Whole Foods logo having been prominently displayed on the cart at the Microsoft demo.Read more...

The coincidental number that was the program's weak spot? The required information-gathering with a customer took about 10 minutes, which is also roughly the same amount of time it takes most associates to make a new sale. They receive commission for those new sales and nothing for filling out the forms. Wonder why the program didn't work well?Read more...

The problem, then, for retailers attempting to enter the social networking space is whether they plan their strategy and miss new opportunities or allow that strategy to be random and chaotic and to create a host of potential legal problems from copyright infringement to defamation and potential privacy law violations, pens Legal Columnist Mark Rasch. How so? Let's start with copyright infringement.Read more...

In our attempts to battle the never-ending assaults by Spammers, StorefrontBacktalk had to do something this week for which we need to apologize. Our direct discussion forum—Go Beyond The Story—was recently overrun by Spammers. To make the forum useful, we had to wipe out existing users. We then put in place much better security. Now, we are asking our readers who had signed up for accounts in the forum to please sign up again.

We have also cleaned up our discussion forum on LinkedIn. If you want to jump into a discussion on our LinkedIn page, you simply need to first join the StorefrontBacktalk group forum. For you Facebook fans, we have also reactivated the StorefrontBacktalk‘s Facebook page. We love when people comment on the stories, but we need to insist that only comments relating to a story be posted to that story. For comments that do not directly relate to a story or column, the Go Beyond The Story forum is home. And we want it to be a noisy home, with lots of loud arguments and shouting. That’s how retail discussions are supposed to be.…

Those Facebook sites died because they were based on a flawed understanding of what social media is all about. It's not about creating a storefront or a virtual watering hole where customers gather to sing your praises. Those retailers already have that: It's called a Web site.Read more...

With cookies already under tighter controls in the U.K. and the European Union, and the near-certainty of some sort of U.S. Congressional hearings, retailers should be making new customer-tracking plans—plans that don't include cookies.Read more...

And although retailers are turning up customer characteristics that customers would never volunteer, pens Legal Columnist Mark Rasch, some mobile payment systems are digging through a phone's data to raise equally troublesome privacy issues.Read more...

The items that are on the shelf elsewhere or in the backroom? An employee goes to fetch them. Those that are not in-stock at that store? They'll be shipped to her home. This is where Venky Harinarayan, Wal-Mart's Senior VP for Global E-Commerce, head of @WalmartLabs and venture capitalist extraordinaire, sees the world's largest chain headed.Read more...

All of this, pens Retail Columnist Todd Michaud, in an area—such as CRM—where the application of technology could directly impact a retailer's top and bottom lines.Read more...

If a marketing opt-in question is posed, who is posing it? And how will customers react when they later learn they weren't sharing with whom they thought they were sharing? Bad news: This is not hypothetical. There is a broader issue at play here. With any of the third-party mobile payment efforts—Google Wallet, PayPal, ISIS, maybe even Apple—there is the potential for this type of confusion.Read more...