Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Beyond new security holes on the risk side, the reward side is equally huge. While everyone seems to have focused on the general unbanked audience, a much more interesting prospect for this program is teenagers. Plus, this is sort of an anti-showrooming move, where online shoppers are being lured into the stores. Revenue sharing between Walmart channels is also a point of nervousness with this program. And a store's inability to cancel such online orders—even if the customer then finds the item on the shelf—is problematic, too. This is a rare example of the kinds of compromises—between online and in-store operations—chains must make these days.Read more...

Google is trying to expand its Google Trusted Stores program—where participating retailers give Google average shipping times and Google grades them on customer resolution issues—by letting merchants display the results in Google ads. But there’s an issue with the Trusted Stores program itself, and it speaks to trust.

The idea that this is a good guide for consumers to find responsive retailers has two hurdles. First, retailers who know they have issues would simply opt to not participate, which itself skews the results, along with the fact that many merchants (especially smaller ones) are unaware of it. Second, there is little to no verification of the results. Beyond delivering misleading or outright wrong figures for customers, it does a disservice to honest retailers. Without verification and a much more representative sampling of retailers, it’s not clear how meaningful these declarations—whether or not they are on Google ads—can be. …

On Tuesday (April 24), Walgreens rolled out what it calls the “first online find your pharmacist” search tool. The idea is that different pharmacists have different backgrounds, different specialties, and this approach enables customers to connect with someone best suited for their medical issues. Whereas this specific app is narrowly focused on drug stores, could the concept work in other areas of retail?

What if chains asked all associates to pour into a database their specialties and backgrounds? What if a Best Buy site could steer you to a store and a specific associate who owns—and is, therefore, highly familiar with—your specific surround-sound system? What if you are a cross-country athlete and want to find a Sports Authority associate who is an expert in that specific sport? Perhaps the database might reveal a much more narrow area: A Macy’s associate who is familiar with Irish wedding gift traditions. A Home Depot employee with experience restoring Victorian mansions. The idea of creating an extensive, searchable database—Web-accessible, too—of all of your associates’ experience and expertise seems relatively low cost with two huge upsides. One: Possible new sales. Two: The very act of creating such a database sends out the message of credibility and a true desire to help the customer. …

One of the problems with Web ads that try to be clever or funny is that they are rarely strategic. So they might be really funny—and get passed along to many prospects—but customers remember the situation and not the brand. Or they remember the brand, but not any positive attribute. IKEA, though, has crafted an almost unreadable Web ad that is positively brilliant at making its point.

The point of the campaign is that IKEA makes a wide range of furniture to fit in almost any space. So in what the chain is calling “the smallest IKEA store in the world,” it has made a 10.5×8.8 centimeter banner ad that literally lists some 2,800 products. It’s done by mousing over parts of the ad to reveal more and more products. In this rare situation, the Web ad is ugly, difficult to use and utterly perfect at making its point. IKEA discussed it in a one-minute video.…

All this despite a rule that the kiosks are supposed to have the same policies as Best Buy stores. This situation also renews questions about how much—or how little—control retailers should have over kiosks that loudly proclaim their brands.Read more...

eBay CEO John Donahoe said the upcoming app is designed to function with specific TV shows, where it markets items that relate to the show. "You enter whatever channel you're watching and the TV show that you're watching. eBay inventory associated with that TV show pops up, and it's a very compelling experience," he said. How far could this go?Read more...

How could iTunes refund an already listened to song or an already played game? That's not merely a business/profit question. From an IT perspective, there is often no mechanism to do it. What might start out as a legal problem will almost instantly morph into an IT problem.Read more...

The case revolves around a longtime legal reality: Minors cannot agree to a contract. If they pretend to agree, it's non-binding and can't be enforced, writes Legal Columnist Mark Rasch. But what if an adult gives the child their password and permission to make a purchase? It's still the child doing it and the contract, therefore, probably can't be enforced.Read more...

This is not merely an issue of violating the rules of a major search engine. A lot of these partners—carpet installers, for instance—have minimal E-Commerce teams, which means they rely on partners such as Home Depot for E-Commerce guidance. And when chains give advice that is false and endangers the ranking of the sites of those partners, it is a problem.Read more...

The fact that it was a thief who stole the funds is undisputed. However, the immediate next actions of Wal-Mart and Green Dot—which manages MoneyCard for Wal-Mart—is a textbook example not of what should not be done, but how it shouldn't be done.Read more...

Beyond IBM's history of selling out key areas (printers, laptops, disk drives, etc.) a year or so before the market is about to die, this time it's the popularization of in-store tablets along with the integration of mobile and E-Commerce that is aggravating POS's demise. Retail Columnist Todd Michaud predicted in January that this year would see the death of the traditional POS. IBM apparently agrees. (Related Story: Unhappy With Your POS System? Take A Peek At Your Last POS RFP. Don't You Feel Bad Now?Read more...

It's striking, though, how much of a contrast the 36-year-old Mayer makes compared with the existing members—with an average age of 60, the board is heavily weighted with CEOs of non-tech companies, venture capitalists and Wal-Mart veterans. The board seems to be acknowledging that it may not be the ideal group to oversee Wal-Mart's moves into the worlds of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, geofencing and Foursquare.Read more...

Empowering retail employees is certainly a wonderful thing, and nowhere is the potential for empowerment more explicit than with social media. But that cuts both ways, as it also enables one or two careless employees to do more damage to the brand than would have ever been realistically possible before. Consider this month’s stunner from KFC.

As has been widely reported, someone in the chain’s Thailand operation saw the 8.6 magnitude earthquake hitting northern Indonesia as a marketing opportunity and posted on the company’s Facebook page: “Let’s hurry home and follow the earthquake news. And don’t forget to order your favorite KFC menu.” Beyond the marketing disconnect (other than a tie-in of “disaster for your health” compared with “disaster for your planet”), the odd phrasing (does KFC Thailand have multiple menus and consumers have their favorites? Wouldn’t it be “order your favorite item from KFC’s menu?”) and the big bucket of a lack of sensitivity, this post raises a fundamental social media issue. Does the ease-of-use mean that chains have to remove all approval efforts for marketing messages? Five years ago, could a few employees have done this much damage so easily? …

In fact, what lawmakers probably thought was a simple idea runs into a buzzsaw of complexities—and the IT project is the easiest part of the problem.Read more...

In short, it means beating Amazon not with price cuts—which would only reinforce a cheap quality reputation while gutting already thin margins—but by delivering the type of buying advice and pleasant environment that Amazon can't touch.Read more...

When Sephora, the global cosmetic chain, updated its Web site on Monday (April 9), it made some very impressive tagging decisions to enable personalization at the age and makeup ingredient level. Below the stats the 300-store chain released—such as that each product will now be tagged with 25 different characteristics and that this tagging took 50 people 5,000 hours to complete—is the obvious in hindsight observation that a 16-year-old girl is probably not interested in seeing the same cosmetics that would appeal to a 70-year-old woman.

The goals of hiding different things—say wrinkles versus pimples—would suggest different products, as would skin tone, hair color, eye color, lighting (office versus nightclub) and even clothing. Sephora will also enable searches by ingredients—for consumers who are allergic to specific chemicals—and fragrance. (It also enables search by price, but Sephora doesn’t get any brownie points for that.) And although it certainly helps the customers find the right product, it does even more for CRM files. Age, hair color, allergies and full cosmetics preferences? Welcome to CRM heaven, cosmetics-style.…

The cloud move, like last fall's quadrupling of the number of Best Buy IT project managers, is an effort to control IT costs without rolling back IT initiatives—absolutely critical in the face of Dunn's inability to stem the chain's loss of sales to Amazon. Amazon, ironically, is among those that Best Buy is writing checks to for its cloud efforts.Read more...

As a result, pens Legal Columnist Mark Rasch, Apple, PayPal and a host of other payment processors may find the need to hire new teams of lawyers to help them comply with the inevitable subpoenas and discovery requests that will befall them.Read more...

Journalists know—through painful experience—that you should never type in a placeholder headline unless you’re OK with it being accidentally published. The more embarrassing the headline, the more likely it will be to publish. Unfortunately, no ever shared that lesson with Amazon. When displaying an image for a drill bit set, someone wrote in the published product shot: “Some copy that indicates these are helpful instructions.”

To see it, you need to call up the drill set and click on the image to make it larger. In case Amazon fixes it before you have a chance to look, we grabbed this screen capture. [Note: As anticipated, Amazon has now fixed this image.] Not clear if this picture was generated by the manufacturer—Irwin—or if it was done by an Amazon person, but Amazon should check the images before they’re published on its site. Then again, if Sears doesn’t bother, why should Amazon? Note: Irwin’s site has the same image on it, but it looks fine at irwin.com because the image is too low-resolution to be readable, which is what that kind of dummy copy is designed for. Amazon’s mistake was in ordering up a hi-res version of the image. P.S.: Kudos to Consumer Reports for having initially spotted this boo-boo.…

We've been here before. Asking "security" questions based on easily discoverable or guessable answers is no longer a good idea for general consumer access, but for administrative access? You're really protecting super-user privileges by asking for their favorite ice cream flavor?Read more...

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...

In fact, Microsoft's effort produced a bad-results hat trick: It didn't drive more store (or mobile or online) traffic, it wasted time for both store associates 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...

And the thing that made the systems interact was something that Nordstrom's software developers had no control over: the homegrown system that the affiliate site used to handle Nordstrom orders. That's what couldn't be tested until a problem actually showed up.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...