Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Your friends here at StorefrontBacktalk editorial also now publish a daily retail site, called FierceRetail, and wanted to give you a sense of what you’re missing by not visiting or grabbing its free newsletter. Urban Outfitters discovers that it can get away with charging more online than in-store. See? Sometimes conventional wisdom is conventionally wrong.

A look into how federal judges are likely to force changes in how price anchors are set in-store plus some questions about whether Sears is thinking about becoming members-only. Was Best Buy’s Facebook promo a victim of its own great deal—and some we-should-have-seen-this-coming rip-off artists? We also threw in our take on Walmart’s $82 million hazardous waste settlement, where Walmart spoke of mouthwash and hairspray and the feds said they were pesticides. (You say tomato, I say Molotov cocktail…) All of that—and dozens more stories—and that was just this week. And Monday was a holiday! Drop by and check it out. It’s free and the snacks all have zero calories. (That may be because they don’t exist.)…

The idea, which Thomas made a passing reference to during a keynote speech at CTIA Wireless, was referenced this way: "The best shopping list is the one you don't have to create and that's what we're working on." (Technically, the best shopping list is the one that someone else has to shop and pay for, but I digress.) Presumably, this mobile app would be built atop the chain's experimental Scan & Go mobile app, which prepares in-aisle checkout leveraging existing self-checkout units. Given that Scan & Go—by its very nature—requires the shopper to register beforehand and to be associated with a verified payment method, it delivers an ideal CRM platform. This is a nice backdoor way to get into CRM for Walmart, which doesn't have a traditional CRM program and never has had one. That is a crucial element of Thomas' self-populating shopping list.Read more...

Like many reports, the statistics here do not strongly support the report's conclusions. The report found that "16 percent of Hispanic shoppers are using their mobile device to make purchases compared to 12 percent of general market shoppers" and the report had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points, making such a distinction razor-thin at best. But the group has done enough reports in this area and has found this distinction consistently shows up when doing head-to-head comparisons. Martin Ferro, a senior account planner for Integer and one of the researchers of the report, said the differences make sense given what he has seen in other reports about U.S. Hispanic shoppers. "They are for sure younger. It's really the new generation of (Hispanics) that are U.S.-born," Ferro said. "They tend to be the very early adopters of mobile technology. Besides the youth, the culture is a lot more comfortable with connectivity."Read more...

But in creating an artificial currency, and allowing it to be transferred and exchanged, retailers like Amazon may be getting themselves into potential legal trouble, writes Legal Columnist Mark Rasch. In fact, they may be making themselves into an illegal unregistered money transfer company or even an unlicensed bank. Such is the problem with digital "money."Read more...

Yes, it's the same goldie oldie plot: Search Engine Loves Payment App, Search Engine Loses Payment App, Search Engine Prays That No One Finds Payment App, Search Engine Wonders If It Can Get Away With Doing A Jodi Arias On Payment App. On Tuesday (May 21), Google again tried killing Google Checkout. In a "We really mean it this time. Dead. We promise" statement, Google said: "Today, we're letting web merchants know that in six months, Google Checkout will be retired as we transition to Google Wallet." Really?Read more...

The problem comes down to the fact that anyone can object to a TLD that has special significance beyond being a trademark, and far more objections have been filed over the nearly 2,000 applications for the new TLDs. In .amazon's case, there's a South American river with the same name (what a coincidence, huh?)—and several South American countries believe that's a good reason for Amazon not to get control of .amazon. Read more...

"In the back rooms, projects like MyGuide and OneTouch also enabled improvements in stocker productivity by helping to facilitate the process of moving merchandise from the truck to the shelf and prioritizing work for our associates," Simon said. "In the first quarter, these initiatives contributed to an increase of more than 3 percent cases handled per work hour."Read more...

Years ago, he got a Wachovia stored value card, which similarly had outrageous fees – fees for putting money in, taking it out, checking the balance, loading the card, not loading the card, as well as an annual fee, monthly fees, etc. It amounted to usurious interest rates and fees of over 3000 percent. When he called to dispute one of the fees, the person on the other end told him that his wife (who had just handed him the phone) had authorized the fee–she did not, and he knew this because he was standing right there. That's when Wachovia said they had recorded the call. To a litigator, them's fightin' words.Read more...

Bizrate surveyed more than 9,000 shoppers (between April 24-30) who had just completed an online purchase at one of their e-tailers. The first—and arguably most meaningful—stat is an overwhelming 78.15 percent of those online purchasers had not looked at those products in any physical store. No surprise there, but it's a key number to remember the next time someone shouts about how showrooming is gutting brick-and-mortars. When they zeroed in on that remaining 21.85 percent of shoppers who had looked instore before buying online, most of them (54 percent) ended up buying from the same chain.Read more...

Amazon's position is very direct: that by agreeing to be a seller, the merchant has to abide by the terms of the agreement, which includes arbitration. The sellers' legal position is focused on how long Amazon held the money and that it violates state law, which sets 10 days as the limit. By violating Washington state law, the action goes beyond the contract (and its arbitration clause) and needs to be settled by a government court, in open proceedings. Amazon's contract sets a maximum time of 90 days and the lawsuit contends that it didn't even meet that deadline.Read more...

Placed, a mobile geolocation vendor specializing in retail, found some intriguing stats when it was reviewing some of its retail findings. It found that the number of Barnes & Noble shoppers who were older than 55 increased 3.4 percent (for the month being probed) and that the number of customers earning fewer than $50,000/year decreased 2.2 percent. It noticed that Kohl's said its shoppers who earned more than $100,000 increased by 1.8 percent. And Target saw the largest increase in physical visits in the Midwest and Northeast regions of the U.S. Clearly, without many months (and perhaps years) of trend data, those stats are meaningless. But it does illustrate the kinds of insights that are possible when overlaying mobile geolocation tracking with CRM and demographic data.Read more...

There's no indication that any retailers are being targeted directly by the FTC. But increasingly, retailers that collect large amounts of customer data through CRM or loyalty programs are using additional data they acquire from brokers to fill in the gaps as they build a picture of customers. Some chains even use data as minimal as a name and Zip code, plus broker-provided data, to get a complete CRM record on a customer from a single transaction.Read more...

This is far from the first time that Target has talked up its commitment to a merged channel/omnichannel strategy, while delivering something that seems to force shoppers to stay in whatever channel Target is pushing at that moment. Consider the chain's giftcard digital strategy deployed during last year's holiday season.Read more...

One assumption has already gone by the boards: House Speaker John Boehner plans to send the bill to the House Judiciary Committee, instead of the Ways and Means Committee, which would normally handle tax legislation. The Judiciary chairman, Robert Goodlatte, has said he has reservations about the bill, and hasn't yet scheduled any hearings on it. And as anyone who has followed the progress of this over the years knows, in a Congressional committee, the chairman can decide whether a bill lives or dies, no matter how the rest of his colleagues might vote.Read more...

It doesn't take the next logical step and try and determine actual purchasing clout. For example, the most meaningful number would be how many dollars of purchases did that shopper's Tweets generate? It's nice if someone has a lot of Twitter followers and if they Tweet that the shoes on your homepage now are must-haves. But an influence rating needs to factor in what happened after that Tweet went out. Did it deliver 48 purchases of that product from the recipients of that Tweet?Read more...

For customers, Consumerist's wisecrack—"Watch out for the Customer Appreciation price penalty"—seems pretty appropriate. For retailers, though, it raises a serious problem. You want to reward returning customers. You also want to entice new customers with low prices. The easiest way to tell who's returning (and link them with CRM data) is with cookies—but that's an invitation to embarrassment if new and returning customers happen to compare notes.Read more...

"We can't do what we need to do and want to do with off-the-shelf solutions," said Neil Ashe, Walmart president and CEO of global e-commerce, speaking at a retail conference last week. And one of the first big projects to come from the insourcing is a proprietary search engine that has tighter integration with local stores that will let Walmart continuously customize its search without having to wait for outsiders to develop the features it wants.Read more...

If a mobile site redesign’s job is to make a site look better and to deliver more sophisticated functionality, then the mobile site changes at Foot Locker (NYSE:FL) delivered. But if the goal is not to slow things to a Web crawl, it apparently failed. Such is the assessment of mobile performance firm Keynote, which evaluates retail mobile performance every month. After the redesign, Foot Locker site availability plunged from 100 percent to 93.42 percent, Keynote found, according to Internet Retailer. That’s the difference between being ranked as the faster retail site late last year and performing dead last on the publication’s 30-retailer index at the end of April. Its 10-second October 2012 home page load time had slowed to 17.42 seconds in April.

“The newly designed site has double the number of page objects and triple the amount of kilobytes,” said Herman Ng, mobile performance evangelist at Keynote. “Another factor that appears to be slowing down its mobile home page is that it now has multiple objects coming from third-party domains, and some of them have a much slower average load time compared with page objects hosted on the Foot Locker domain.” Hg added: “We also noticed Foot Locker’s site availability, also known as success rate, fluctuated the most out of all the retailer sites on the Keynote index. This means there could be back-end stability issues. Another common reason could be that they didn’t provide a maintenance message to end users when their site was undergoing routine scheduled maintenance.”…

By dialing that store immediately, he might be able to have it fixed before it goes in the oven. It would discourage moves such as the time-honored pizza-chain tradition of taking ingredients that drop on the floor and put them right back on the pizza. All things that could truly speak to customer service and that could also give pizza buyers a reason to switch to Dominos. Unfortunately, that's not quite what Dominos has in mind.Read more...

In this case, though, the executive was Best Buy's chief ethics officer, who wanted to have a site outside the direct control of corporate. And she learned a lesson about why one wants to be within the protection of a multibillion-dollar chain's IT department. She learned that when her Best Buy blog was shut down, possibly due to a cyberthief attack.Read more...

From the shoppers' perspective, that single login is not that exciting, as most have been doing a very insecure replacement: using the same login/password for those dozens of sites. In effect, that's what PayPal is doing. The security impact is that if there is a breach—at PayPal, at that shopper's computer, elsewhere—that password can now be used to access all of those sites. At least that's the hole until PayPal is contacted and the password is shut down or changed.Read more...

That dramatically cuts Amazon's delivery costs, and it's the most obvious explanation of why Amazon flipped its position on online sales taxes in 2011, from the leading opponent to a major supporter: All those warehouses give Amazon a big advantage over its e-commerce rivals, and it doesn't want those rivals to have a sales-tax advantage in return.Read more...

Instead of IP addresses, they need to think about e-mail segmentation. Instead of database clusters, they need live content marketing. Instead of disaster recovery, they need to wake up focused on integrated marketing across all digital channels. It’s as much science and math as configuring a new router, and that has many marketers nervous. And it should. But as these marketers find their way into this new world of math and science (digital relevancy), they need to be careful to not cross the fine line between being relevant and being just plain creepy.Read more...

Walmart (NYSE:WMT) has announced that it is expanding—to chainwide—an experiment to let associates more easily see work opportunities in other departments at their store, as a way to supplement their pay. "For example, a bakery or deli associate can now request to work an available shift in electronics or the lawn and garden area and vice versa," the Walmart statement said, adding that "this program is showing value beyond filling available shifts. It's providing associates the opportunity to help build their careers by learning about different departments, which helps strengthen our stores and benefit associates and our customers."Read more...

One key element of the bill that won't relieve the tax pinch but should simplify the implementation: A state can't start requiring collection of the taxes until it provides free software that nails down all the complexities of that state's sales tax structure, including automatic calculation of what rates are owed on which products for any location in the state.Read more...