Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

There may be a way to flip this problem into an advantage. What if chains viewed every store as a local distribution center? And used local talent to deliver not only to customers but on the same day? This approach enables the merged-channel retailer to extend that experience right back into the customer’s front yard and maybe through the front door.Read more...

If traditional retailers really want to win the war against their online counterparts, they need to shift the battlefield from price to convenience. And nothing says "convenience" like "drive-thru," right?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...

But the number-two card brand also spoke of a near-term future where E-Commerce will be able to use the EMV chip to authenticate and process E-Commerce and M-Commerce transactions. However, will consumers pay more for laptops that can handle such security? And will tablets and smartphones—which can more easily and more cost-effectively handle such technologies—grow quickly enough to make desktop/laptop enhancements irrelevant?Read more...

The idea that an E-Commerce transaction is not a real transaction should be repugnant to any retailer in 2012. But those old prejudices that stores are where serious commerce happens are apparently acceptable.Read more...

The timing of the move raised eyebrows. Such shutdowns have historically been done overnight, perhaps starting at about 11 PM or midnight East Coast time, and during the weekend. Also raising eyebrows was why a planned software upgrade required the site to be taken down at all. Given the home repair nature of Home Depot, weekend downtime can be more costly than a Wednesday or Thursday.Read more...

Amazon may be sprinting to get a strategic advantage when E-Commerce sales taxes finally kick in, but it’s still in no hurry to pay up. Last week, in its annual 10-K report to the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission (SEC), Amazon said Arizona has billed it for “approximately $53 million, including tax and interest, for uncollected tax for the periods March 1, 2006, through December 31, 2010.” The “transaction privilege tax” bill was dated November 2011; apparently, the state’s revenue department just realized those four Amazon distribution centers in Arizona belong to that company in Washington.

Yes, Amazon has to keep pretending its warehouses belong to a company completely separate from its online business. And the state has to do this little dance to start negotiations that will end up in an agreement that Amazon will start collecting Arizona sales tax on some future date or once a federal law kicks in. But wouldn’t it be nice if, for once, both sides could just skip the inevitable lawsuit, lobbying and legislation and go straight to the back-room deal? Arizona is already so late to this game it’ll be lucky just to get through one of those three Ls before Congress finally acts.…

That suggests the Dallas-based high-end retailer made a change in the wee hours—exactly when you'd expect—but then accidentally left test code in the homepage. The result: a Web site that probably worked fine for everyone in IT, just not for all customers.Read more...

Given that greater-than-99-percent of Visa retailers in the U.S. also accept MasterCard, chains must go along with whichever brand has the more strict requirements. Typically, that's been Visa, but not this time. On EMV-related PCI relaxations, however, the two brands opted to adopt identical policies.Read more...

Home Depot took its Web site offline on Wednesday (Feb. 1) to upgrade its version of IBM WebSphere from version 6 to 7. (Exactly why the planned outage began at noon on Wednesday seems a little mysterious, but Home Depot knows its traffic patterns better than we do.) However, in what was apparently an effort to give visitors something to read, the “Pardon Our Dust” default page included a link to Home Depot’s company blog, which even had a new post for do-it-yourselfers on Wednesday.

Only one problem: The new blog post had a link to where customers could buy that product on the site—which, naturally, took the customer to the only page working on the regular site, the “Pardon Our Dust” page. In fact, all the blog’s links went either to that page or to a grim-looking error page headed “Moved Permanently: The document has moved here”—and “here” turned out to be a link to the “Pardon Our Dust” page (from which they could, of course, click on “Blog” again). Enticing customers with products you can’t sell them—and then running them in circles? Sometimes the best thing to do really is to just close the store for the day.…

That means Amazon gets to build South Carolina distribution centers and enjoy a five-year holiday from having to collect sales tax—while Overstock.com, eBay and even Wal-Mart become the new big targets in the crosshairs of state tax collectors.Read more...

eBay’s bid to become the link between big U.S. retailers and Australian customers is off to a less-than-sterling start. On January 18, eBay CEO John Donahoe bragged to an earnings call audience that Macy’s used eBay Australia to get a foothold Down Under without creating a brick-and-mortar presence. “Macy’s saw that the Australian dollar was very strong,” Donahoe said. “The Australian consumers are very open to import and they’re looking for brands. And Macy’s opened up a store in eBay Australia, and so they’re now reaching consumers in Australia on the eBay platform without having to have assets reside in the country.”

Well, sort of. Actually, Macys.com was already selling to Australian customers last summer, using third-party vendor FiftyOne to handle shipping, customs, currency issues and customer service. And the Macy’s eBay Australia store currently has no products; Macy’s spokesman Jim Sluzewski said the eBay store was tested only through the end of 2011 and Macy’s is now evaluating its results. So Macy’s wasn’t depending on eBay to reach Aussies, and the eBay store was already closed when Donahoe did his bragging. Other than that, he got it right—we hope.…

The historic argument has been that E-tailers have a huge convenience advantage and that a retailer must combat that by leveraging its experience/ambiance advantage. But with showrooming, the customer has already driven to the store, parked, walked to the aisle and found the desired product. The physical store has the convenience advantage 10 times over.Read more...

In theory, load times of 3 seconds or more should cost retailers half their customers. If that's true, E-tailers should be going out of business. Maybe it's time to dump those theories.Read more...

Clearly, one errant employee is something every chain has. But this example brings up a too-often overlooked PCI fact: Compliance is an issue for every employee. Mobile payment, being a disruptive factor, will only make things worse, because it creates many more opportunities for payment-card data to be captured/retained against the rules.Read more...

It's time to evict Web and mobile app development, and pretty much any marketing initiative that isn't core to your business. Heresy? Certainly, pens Retail Columnist Todd Michaud. But it's necessary.Read more...

"When I think about secondary validation, that gives me more of a warm fuzzy even though we have people saying that I have a more sophisticated chip and that my smart device has got some protection sitting in it," said Bill Titus, the Loss Prevention VP at Sears. Read more...

Wal-Mart has recently been trying to more closely align stores with various online, mobile and social efforts. But like all major chains, brick-and-mortar management resistance is non-trivial.Read more...

It's a fine theory. Trouble is, it doesn't actually seem to work for most of the 16 retailers that ForeSee looked at, ranging from Best Buy and eBay to Avon and Target.Read more...

But it was the unequivocal declaration that payment systems had not been touched that raised eyebrows. At this early stage of a breach investigation—knowing that cyberthieves tend to be quite good at hiding their tracks and creating misleading tracks—is such a blanket promise to customers reckless?Read more...

But what's really clever is how the contest uses social media as stealth customer engagement—an area where Wal-Mart hasn't been exactly brilliant in the past.Read more...

The conceal part of that action is considered evidence of criminal intent. Now let's see you try and enforce that rule when you have in-aisle mobile checkout.Read more...

We have our early clues from the CIO of the $2.5-billion 481-store Guess chain, one of the first test sites for Google Wallet in "a couple of stores" in California since May. In total, how many customers have tried Google Wallet? Says CIO Michael Relich: "Five or six." Not 500 or 600 customers, mind you. Five or six. Read more...

But the Guess iPad trial is hardly being done to save costs. The flexibility of the tablets and sharp, customer-friendly graphics make the devices a much more effective way to show demos and to locate merchandise, check inventory and do anything else that a kiosk would normally do.Read more...

But that's just the start. Does anyone really expect that Google won't take this further—and that your traditional SEO and social media teams aren't about to collide?Read more...