Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Sure, this is chump change to Google, customers don't care much about privacy and you're not Google. But the same dynamic could leave any E-Commerce site with holes in security or PCI compliance, especially because your carefully vetted procedures can get sidestepped as soon as an emergency fix is required—and any glitch qualifies as an emergency.Read more...

The home-delivery problem for E-Commerce is hardly only a British issue; it is an apartment and city issue. But the fact is that a huge percentage of the E-Commerce decision-makers in this country do not live in apartments or urban areas.Read more...

And what does Amazon say? "A merchant can obtain certification without a physical walkthrough of a service provider's data center if the service provider is a Level 1 validated service provider (such as AWS). A merchant's QSA can rely on the work performed by our QSA, which included an extensive review of the physical security of our data centers." Yeah, this isn't going to be pretty.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 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...

Most fared well, with a few exceptions. Coast's "service was a failure, and defied the objective of convenient click-and-collect." For Marks & Spencer, "a faster turnaround would be welcome." Homebase shoppers find that "the tight deadline for pick-up and limited availability is a drawback." These lessons learned, among others, certainly apply to the U.S., and this report offers an opportunity to avoid the hiccups suffered by our European counterparts.Read more...

The good news: Virtually all the large retailers got their response times down under the fabled three-second mark. The bad news: There's no longer a clear correlation between speed and site size and the number of files requested, the variables that Pingdom tracked in this study.Read more...

What the pizza chain came up with is a way for consumers to make their own pizzas, with the touch intensity and finger distance used dictating how the dough will come up, whether the slices are cut uniformly and how evenly distributed toppings are. It's a game—for now.Read more...

In a letter the state ruled that cloud operations are fully taxable, assuming the end user is in Pennsylvania. "The ruling represents a marked departure from the department's earlier treatment of cloud computing. Prior department guidance advised that access to software solely through the Internet was not a taxable transaction, as long as the server did not reside in Pennsylvania."Read more...

But what choice does a retailer have? Even though it's a hassle, a chain can't simply opt to not support the leading browser, can it? Maybe not, but one Australian E-tailer has opted to fight back against one version of Internet Explorer: It's now charging customers a 6.8 percent IE7 tax.Read more...

Microsoft on Monday (June 18) set out to prove that retailers have alternatives to Apple for tablets and that Microsoft still matters. Unfortunately, it ended up proving the opposite—for both.Read more...

When Walmart started talking about its successes with its Pay With Cash Online program, consumers showed quite an interest in buying products online by making a promise to pay within 48 hours. And it didn’t take long for a company—completely unaffiliated with Walmart, as far as we can tell—to swoop in and offer to facilitate high-interest loans so underbanked shoppers can deliver the cash.

On Tuesday (June 19), Loans.net put out a statement about Walmart’s Pay With Cash program and pitched itself as a loan finder. (Thanks, guys, but Walmart can suck blood from shoppers who aren’t good at math all on its own.) There’s an irony here. Many consumers avoid credit cards because they don’t want to be on the hook for large interest payments if they can’t pay for everything right away. To address this, Walmart offers people a way to shop online for cash. Then a loan-finder vulture swoops in to charge those cash customers high interest. Guess there’s a reason you don’t hear about banker humanitarians very often. …

"Too many (U.K.) retailers still don't fully understand what skills are required to run the online channel," Newman wrote. "There tends to be too much emphasis on technical skills and not enough on core retailing requirements such as good old-fashioned day-to-day trading." Some good thoughts there for retailers on any continent.Read more...

Does traditional mobile commerce have a shot anymore in the U.S.? Or has the industry muddied it up to the point where we need to start over, as Apple and Burger King are trying? We tried to address that politically sensitive topic in the first of our new monthly columns with Retail Week, the U.K.’s largest retail publication.

The reasons why mobile is having trouble are plenty, but it’s fair to say that when MasterCard is the one arguing that mobile payment PCI regulations should perhaps be ignored, something has changed. When MasterCard starts to sound like the most rational and reasonable one in the room, Alice, you know you’ve gone through the looking glass. Please check out the column on Retail Week or, if you’re not a Retail Week subscriber, you can check out a picture of the column right here. …

Domino’s Pizza released an eye-opening figure on Monday (June 11): It has sold more than $1 billion worth of pizza (from mid-April 2011 to mid-April 2012) solely through digital channels. With all of the talk about the chain’s two mobile apps and its dedicated mobile site, that billion seems to suggest the power of mobile. But what Domino’s did not say in its statement tells a very different story.

Although it’s quite true that mobile sales are soaring, it turns out that 93 percent of those billion dollars worth of digital sales were on the plain old Web site. And 70 percent of sales are still the phone into a brick-and-mortar type. There shouldn’t be much of a stunner in that 93 percent figure, but with all of the mobile hype going on, it’s important to remember that figure to keep things in context. (Note: Domino’s also said that it’s selling more through its iPhone app than through Android. Given that the iPhone app has been out for several months longer, according to Domino’s spokesman Chris Brandon, that may not mean much.)…

Why would almost half of the people who specifically are using a cash-only program end up using a payment card or check? Walmart theorized that those shoppers may be scared to use payment cards online. In mid-2012, could this be true? For walmart.com Chief Executive Joel Anderson's argument to work, we have to believe that there exist a lot of consumers who are fearful enough of E-tailers that they won't give them their Visa card online, but who are not so fearful that they hesitate giving it to an associate at the store. Even though the payment data is stored in the exact same place.Read more...

Although Amazon proposed this back on Sept. 30, 2008 (the patent was issued May 29, 2012), the problem it was trying to address still exists today. That would be giftcards that are never used, robbing the gifter of cash, the giftee of the gift and the retailer (depending on whether it was that retailer's giftcard) of the revenue and upsell potential.Read more...

The retailers who shelled out $185,000 per name to buy their E-Commerce sites' domain names all over again include Macy's, Gap, TJX and Home Depot. But Kroger, Walgreens, CVS and Lowe's gave the vanity domains a pass.Read more...

Debenhams, a $4.2 billion chain with 167 stores across the U.K. and Ireland, sees it differently and argues that free Wi-Fi—which the chain will shortly announce chain-wide—is crucial. Is this a U.S.-U.K. difference or a difference in strategy?Read more...

The piece quotes former Amazon Principal Engineer Darren Vengroff saying, "mountains of data and hundreds or thousands of experiments" are behind every new Amazon play, no matter how small. Chains have much of the same data, but they leverage it to hand out coupons one customer at a time. Amazon does it wholesale, slicing and dicing to identify whole new lines of business to invade. Read more...

Well, Google is preparing some major changes to a relatively small merchant area of its site. The fear is that, despite whatever assurances Google offers, the Domino Effect of this decision will impact Google's main search listings. And where Google goes, Bing and Yahoo are sure to follow.Read more...

But 337-store apparel chain Eddie Bauer is going against the trend, deliberately opting for a minimalistic approach. No Wi-Fi in its stores, no in-store product location, no geolocation to locate stores and no mobile app at all. With a primarily female demographic aged 35–55, Eddie Bauer Digital Marketing Director Michael Saracino talks up his chain's new mobile site and said he is focusing on what he calls mobile's "practical features."Read more...

What's unusual isn't that Oracle is stepping up to defend its customers. It's how the database giant is doing that: by using its initial court filing to list dozens of previous patents that, Oracle says, prove the Patents-in-Suit should never have been issued.Read more...