Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Question: How can you take a virtually meaningless holiday and somehow drain the last remnant of meaning from it? Answer: Without shame, apparently, if Wal-Mart, Amazon, Sears and Toys”R”Us marketing have anything to say about it. Of course, we’re discussing the industry’s favorite non-holiday holiday—Black Friday. The origin of the term dates back almost 45 years, when the day after Thanksgiving was the time most retailers went into the black financially. But in recent years, that hasn’t typically been the case. And E-Commerce activity has shifted that date around anyway (and please don’t get me started on the silliness of Cyber Monday).

All of this said, one definition gives the holiday a raison d’etre, albeit a monumentally trivial one: Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving, and the sales are to pour more people into the stores. This year, Wal-Mart, Amazon, Sears, Toys”R”Us, True Value and various others started to promote their “Black Friday” sales in October. October? You’re offering Black Friday sales before Halloween? Let’s get a jump on this trend: Why not offer Fourth of July pricing at Thanksgiving? Or Election Day specials on New Year’s Eve? These fabricated holidays have little enough meaning without marketing distorting them anymore. …

Litan spoke of additional security measures being better than the alternative of "having the customer account drained." But that's just it. These thieves are not stupid enough to kill the goose that laid the golden mag-stripe. Just as the typical consumer needs to see enough fraud to make a phone call to a bank—and endure the inevitable series of hold music performances—worthwhile (for some, that's more than $5, and for others, it can be more than $20), the typical bank needs to see enough of its customers get hit to make a call to its fraud department worthwhile.Read more...

Sears last week (Oct. 29) rolled out its AdYourWay service, which the $44 billion chain dubbed “a revolutionary new shopping tool.” What does this revolutionary offering do? “From a single personalized page on Sears.com, and soon to come to Kmart.com, AdYourWay allows customers to receive personalized product recommendations based on previous purchases and product searches. Once a customer is logged into Sears.com or Kmart.com, AdYourWay technology works to provide customers with deals and offers on products of interest and those that are relevant to their lifestyle. Through the unique ‘Follow’ functionality, shoppers can select a desired item and set up E-mail alerts for price drops.”

Come on, guys. Your revolutionary new shopping tool is to offer people what Amazon has been doing for more than 10 years? To be fair, this is a fine feature. It’s a welcome addition to what Sears has been offering, and it would also be welcome for many major chains. But to label technology that is this old and established as revolutionary is so Microsoft. Maybe Sears is positioning this tool against Tesco and it means revolutionary in the Red Coats sense?…

Even if nothing had gone wrong technically, it's worth remembering that every time you change what a user has to do, you're creating slowdowns and glitches. It's true of E-tailers dealing with processors, programmers with APIs and customers with E-Commerce sites (or even brick-and-mortar stores): Move things around or change the way things work and you may impress some users with your shiny new features—but you will confuse and irritate people whose highly productive habits have stopped working. And to Sage Pay's credit, it eventually found a temporary workaround for that problem.Read more...

The columnist took the vendor up on its offer and tried the machine, working with company owners. At the end of the process, the machine is supposed to cough up a list of jeans that will fit that consumer perfectly and where to get them. In this case, though, the machine found zero. Zilch. But this is not merely a case of a vendor proudly doing a demo before the technology is ready. It's the latest example of a vendor focusing on the majority of consumers, when the gold actually lies in the minority.Read more...

PayPal's outage again spotlights the problem of backup strategies that simply don't. It's painfully reminiscent of recent datacenter fiascos at American Eagle Outfitters and Wal-Mart. And while some major retailers were kept apprised of the progress of PayPal's outage and disabled PayPal payment functionality on their E-Commerce sites to minimize problems, most of PayPal's customers got the word late or not at all. Apparently there was no effective plan for dealing with that side of the outage, either.Read more...

For example, Whitman was quoted as telling The New York Times: "I led a community at eBay that, you know, was 80 million unique visitors a month strong, and so I think I understand what California needs to turn itself around." This statement isn't political. It's quintessential Silicon Valley. When was the last time a Washington insider made an argument by rattling off a unique visitor stat?Read more...

On the surface, the differences between the two versions do not appear significant. So why would you not want to validate using the latest and greatest? Looking deeper, however, shows that one change in Version 2.0 could have an impact on your decision. And that change, says PCI Columnist Walt Conway, is the new guidance on scoping.Read more...

Amazon has dressed up that court ruling as a big victory for customer privacy. But now Amazon will have to cough up the customer data, and North Carolina will begin to go after Amazon's North Carolina customers to collect the taxes due—and you can bet that the revenuers will mention Amazon's name when the tax bills go out. Amazon is already collecting sales taxes in five states where it has physical operations. Therefore, a few more court victories like this one, and Amazon might be better off just collecting all state sales taxes itself.Read more...

The story behind the numbers also gets into some definitional questions. Consider a 19-year-old who poses a question to a Facebook forum about which car to buy. Does that consumer think of such an inquiry as mobile research or merely talking with friends? Retailers are likely to see it as quintessential M-Commerce research, but the consumer—who is answering these survey questions—is more likely to see it as hanging with friends and say "no," said Pam Goodfellow, a senior analyst with Big Research, which managed the NRF survey.Read more...

The short version: You can expect to spend more time at the beginning of your assessment, and some of the approaches and technologies you may recently have put in place may no longer make the grade. Read more...

That's why the announcement from Kindle that it will, "later this year," introduce "lending for Kindle" is so potentially significant. The concept is a direct steal from the physical world. A person who purchases an e-book can loan someone a copy of that book, with restrictions. If a consumer today buys a book from a physical store, that consumer owns that book and is therefore free to sell it to someone else, for whatever price the market will bear. Instead of prohibiting that in the digital world, why not encourage it, albeit for a cut.Read more...

Let's look at what the world's largest E-tailer said. Amazon—and tons of retailers—has made lots of ports to new platforms. You create a dedicated app and it has your brand on it. Or you craft a version of your product to run on the new platform. But Amazon, owner of one of the strongest brands in retail today, opted to give its iPad version an entirely new name: Windowshop.Read more...

We're coming to an inflection point that will have some scary repercussions for the mobile industry. Until recently, criminals have had very little incentive to attack the mobile channel. But this is changing, and fast. There are three reasons for this shift.Read more...

Background in "store systems would also be interesting" for this position, said DSW CIO Carlos Cherubin. "This is a new position, born of the fact that our organization is growing," he said, referring to its current 210-person IT operation (internal IT staff of 170 plus about 40 IT contractors). "We're a 200-person shop day-to-day," Cherubin said.Read more...

One of the most frustrating truths in retail security is that, by definition, it has no meaningful return on investment—at least not in the sense that CFOs and board members view ROI. There’s no chance at improving revenue or profit; at best, it’s risk avoidance. Even that’s dicey. If security is in place, how do you really know that you would have been breached otherwise?

One way to squeeze out ROI: Flip an unsexy security expense like PCI by upgrading to a POS system that also moves lines faster or displays ads while customers are waiting. Or what about training cashiers to encourage debit-card users to key in their PIN—thus improving security and reducing the cost of card transactions at the same time? We explore these and other ideas in the latest StorefrontBacktalk podcast on security. To listen to the podcast, please click here.…

In a recent financial statement (it involved declaring a quarterly dividend), Visa CEO Joseph Saunders made an interesting comment. Well, it should prove interesting to retailers who are steaming about their latest interchange fight. Said the CEO: “This is the second consecutive year that the board has authorized a meaningful increase in Visa’s dividend, demonstrating confidence in our business and our commitment to returning excess cash to shareholders.”

Excess cash? Yeah, that’s exactly the phrase you want to publicly use with retailers who are already screaming about charges that they see as profiteering. If you feel the need to return excess cash, why not return it to the customers you overcharged in the first place? Just a thought.…

It's hard to imagine a better illustration of how far behind the curve everyone is when it comes to tracking E-Commerce. The industry is literally still deciding what words mean. Yes, it's helpful to have consistent terms for trade groups and analysts across Europe to use, so no one has to guess whether E-Commerce is supposed to include gardening supplies (yes) or online gambling (no). But at this rate, it's going to be a while before everyone in European E-Commerce is speaking the same language.Read more...

Like most media outlets these days, we here at StorefrontBacktalk get deluged with PR people pitching stories about their clients. But also like most media outlets, very few of those pitches are appropriate for us.

To help, we have crafted a page with our best-kept secrets about how to successfully pitch a story to us. It starts with understanding our audience and how we try and differentiate our stories. (Note: This particular blurb is a horrible example of what our typical stories are like, but it’s a pretty good example of an irony, so at least we have that.) So for PR professionals only: Please check out our PR tip cheat sheet, and your chances of getting a story placed will soar.…

But is that necessarily true? Given the various target audiences for different categories of retailers, is it not realistic to assume that site management has already matched functionality and visuals to target customers? Read more...

The purpose of the questions often is to locate the "unknown unknowns" or to make sure contingencies are addressed. As such, the questions may sound obvious or even silly at first—at least until they succeed in actually uncovering a problem you didn't know you had. Read more...

It doesn't take a brain surgeon to see that the now-defunct new logo was pretty dowdy; it looked like a subway sign that someone defaced with a square blue sticker. But Gap made use of one very good E-tail practice: It launched the logo on its Web site a month before it was scheduled to appear in stores or marketing materials. And when it turned out to be a catastrophe with customers, Gap was able to delete it so completely that we couldn't find a sample anywhere on Gap's site to show you what it looked like.Read more...

The Macy's crash itself was unremarkable, having lasted barely an hour on a Sunday morning (Oct. 17), which is how all well-mannered outages should behave. Site visitors were shown a screen with a headline warning of a "temporary shopping jam" and a message that blamed the difficulties on "heavier traffic than normal." More interestingly, though, the screen had a striking 10-second countdown animation, with visitors instructed to wait 10 seconds and then refresh. But that refresh might need to be done a few times.Read more...

Let's open this strange-fest with Domino's Pizza. Domino's is no stranger to unorthodox campaigns, such as the one the chain launched early this year declaring how stunningly horrible its products had been just weeks before. On Monday (Oct. 18), Domino's announced that its Web site's Pizza Tracker feature will be more customizable. "Depending on the theme, Pizza Tracker might sing, cheer or even sweet talk the status of customers' orders from the moment they are prepared to the second they are out the door or ready for pick up," said a company statement. Sing? Sweet talk? Can you say Pizza Train Wreck?Read more...

At first glance, the Best Buy Commerce API program doesn't look that different from its earlier API efforts or from API moves by other chains. And even Best Buy's official line about the program—"we'll connect with customers wherever they are"—has a deeply innocuous element. But there's much more to it.Read more...