Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

The site—delivered from Digby—also seems to need a little work. It didn't seem able to actually access that database data, forcing us—during a test of the site—to have to type in full E-mail address and name three times (that's annoying, even on an iPhone). It also crashed four times during 30 minutes of testing.Read more...

It's clear that Fortune 1000 merchants still enjoy their distaste for PCI DSS and their distrust of the process. And it’s fair to say that many merchants actually hate the PCI standards and their purveyors. Still, at last week’s meeting, the Standards Council and the card brands attempted to embrace their detractors via the oft-repeated “we want your feedback” refrain. The response? The merchants in attendance were generally well behaved in public (perhaps they fear reprisals), and there were no reported fistfights, as much fun as that would have been. And one of the reasons for this less-than-hostile response was the PWC report itself, which made it clear that the SSC (and, presumably, the card brands) were open to making some much-needed changes to the standards.Read more...

Ten years ago, a common complaint from E-tailers—and especially Fortune 500 retailers—was that domain registration had no sheriff. Anyone could set up a site with the name of a major retailer in the URL—or a slight misspelling of said name—and then later either sell it to the chain, sell it to the chain’s rivals or try and make sales directly.

That’s no longer much of an issue, but an effort starting in Sweden might be the first to add a wee bit of sheriffing into the process. It’s a decade too late—and the move is preliminary as well as remarkably limited—but it’s still a start. The effort is trying to subject all Swedish se-domain names containing the word “bank” to an inspection prior to registration. “This to ensure that anyone who might be confused with a bank actually fulfills the legal requirements for one,” said Erik Arnberg, of the Binero Web hosting site in Sweden. Could this pre-investigative stage impact other words and then other countries? It’s probably too late to have an appreciable impact on U.S. retail, but it’s an interesting development to watch.…

The frugal Chinese are beginning to more freely open their wallets, and E-Commerce is a big factor behind the loosening purse strings. Online shopping, particularly by young and affluent Chinese, is surging, according to Reuters. Citing figures from online marketing research company iResearch, the story said Chinese E-Commerce sales in the second quarter of 2009 increased nearly 92 percent from the same period in 2008, hitting $8.26 billion in U.S. dollars.

E-Commerce activity far outperformed the 15 percent increase in China’s total retail sales from the same period. The piece also noted that Taobao, the nation’s most popular online auction, predicts its 2009 revenues will more than double compared to 2008. “Online retailing is developing so fast in China that it is quietly changing spending habits, making an especially profound impact on Chinese youth,” said Wang Liang, director of Shanghai Liutong Economics Institute, a government research institution, according to Reuters.…

But in two recent conversations with a pair of E-Commerce execs from two unrelated multi-billion-dollar retailers, the execs showed some very different perspectives on when to let your people do the magic and when to hire a specialty firm. The technology on which they diverged was M-Commerce payment security and Web downtime monitoring (or uptime monitoring, if you're one of those perky glass-is-half-full people).Read more...

Macys.com brings in about $1 billion a year, which isn’t overwhelming for the $25 billion chain. But to have four percent of its global revenue coming from online is a continual surprise for CEO Terry Lundgren, according to a speech he gave Tuesday (September 22). Macys.com generated $30,000 in sales the first year it was launched–1996. As of Tuesday, Macy’s “has invested more than $300 million in online infrastructure” and is tracking online sales increases of 13 percent compared with a year ago. Lundgren said Macy’s internal figures show that “every dollar spent online influences $5.77 spent in the store over the next 10 days.

“I, for one, made zero money before 2000 on the Internet,” Lundgren told about 2,000 people in attendance at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center, according to this Las Vegas Review-Journal story. “I truly did not get it. There wasn’t a business model out there that made sense to me, but there was so much interest, it got my attention.” …

Nobody will argue that when it comes to page display rates, the faster the better. However, we couldn't help but wonder about the accuracy, and meaningfulness, of the report. Did anybody actually measure how many seconds passed before an E-Commerce consumer clicked away from a retailer site? It seems hard to believe that somebody interested in shopping at, say, Macys.com would flee in a huff to Kohls.com if the Macy's site didn't load before three seconds had passed.Read more...

The use of NFC technology for mobile payments will hit $8 billion globally this year and will exceed $30 billion by 2012, according to Juniper Research. The researchers said the world’s first NFC devices will be sold commercially later this year by Nokia “and the market will ramp up (starting) 2011.”

Juniper said payments using NFC or Sony’s FeliCa RFID technology, already commonplace in Japan, will be in the midst of a substantial growth spurt in North America and Western Europe by 2014. Juniper analyst Howard Wilcox is quoted in RFID Update saying “the clear readout from industry analysis is that NFC is going to be a default feature of phones in the future, much like Bluetooth is now.”…

When $1.2 billion Columbia Sportswear launched a new E-Commerce site in August, it gave shoppers the option of having their goods shipped in a used box instead of a new one. It was an initiative the company hoped would resonate with its customers, folks who (being outdoorsy types) tend to have a fondness for trees. According to Columbia, the assumption was on target: About two-thirds of the products purchased since the site went live have been shipped in used boxes.

Adding to the eco-friendly fun, Columbia created another site that allows people to track boxes as they continue to be re-used by others. To make this box tracking possible, Columbia places on each used box a sticker that includes a unique, scannable QR code and a number that can be entered at the A Box Life site. Participants can also “post pictures and stories about their box and periodically return to the site to follow their box’s journey, helping to illustrate the value that one box can deliver in its lifespan,” said the company.…

Among the complaints: No guidance, the standards are designed for a bygone era of technology, the standards are anything but standardized, why should banks have to not comply with PCI?, compliance gamemanship and "We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Credit Card Data."Read more...

When it comes to mobile investments, E-Commerce Director Dan Shelffo said "we're poking around" and that his group has made some "site modifications so that we can start to dabble" in mobile communications. But the spreadsheets do not look attractive. "I have to protect the billion-dollar brand. When I look at the dollars that I am going to invest, I look at the return. I know what my ROI is," Shelffo said. "When I look at mobile, I see a lot of investment."Read more...

But in recent years, PCI advocates—especially the card brand executives—have discouraged the practice, arguing that the safest process is to use payment card numbers to process a payment and to then delete it as quickly as possible. Having those numbers lying around—especially spread into marketing and sales departments—was simply increasing the chance that someone unauthorized could access the data. But the guidance is vague and subject to economic considerations.Read more...

Despite those heavy-weight retail brands, only a couple have borne the vast majority of the costs and headaches associated with a breach. Why? Because the first one or two chains have to go through the expense of identifying the breached numbers and having them shut down and reissued. That task's completion makes life so much easier on the others. It's also better for investigative costs, brand reputation and several other factors. Is this fair? Can and should something be done to make it more equitable?Read more...

One approach that has been tried is leveraging services such as Facebook Connect, which lets a user log onto Facebook and then log onto an E-Commerce site (using the same browser) and allow that site to access Facebook names—with the customer's permission—without the customer revealing a Facebook password to the E-Commerce site. But then it runs into the limit of the system's inability to display a friend's shopping pattern without that friend's permission. ("Hi, Brenda! I see that you're shopping at Phil's Pervert Video House, too.")Read more...

The perceived inaccuracy of online depictions of in-store inventory may be at the heart of a new excuse that one Best Buy employee is apparently using to avoid having to hunt up products, according to this wonderful report from Consumerist, a Consumer Reports-owned site with a nice dose of attitude. Seems that a consumer went to Best Buy to purchase a deeply-discounted hard drive after the site said the item was in stock. The shelf was empty, so he asked an employee to help him find it.

“He informed me that they were all out of stock and that the Web site takes about 6 hours to update the inventory, and that that was the reason for the discrepancy,” the customer said, according to the story. “I didn’t trust him, however, so when I got home I logged back onto the Best Buy site and ordered the HDD for in-store pick-up at the same location and about a half an hour later, there was a message in my inbox letting me know that my order was ready to be picked up” and he indeed drove to the store and was given the hard-disk. Added the story’s author: “You have to admit, however, that his ‘the Web site is wrong’ line did effectively get you to go away, albeit temporarily, which we can only assume was its intended function.”…

Second Life-like efforts to make 3-D E-Commerce effective–and profitable–have not gone very far. The Tweeter electronics chain was thinking about it–shortly before the chain had to liquidate–and Brookstone actually launched a small project using it.

But Gen Buy, a surprisingly insightful new book about Gen Y purchasing trends, has a line that sounds intriguing: Wii shopping. Unlike the Web, Wii game systems already exist within 3-D and are quite popular with Gen Y consumers (and those who shall soon become Gen Y consumers). Could the concept work if the device and the format are different? …

In something that is going to make the day of certain cell phone manufacturers while driving others crazy, the Environmental Working Group has published a very long list of cell phones in order of how much radiation they give off. Now there’s a TV commercial I can’t wait to see: “Our phone will give you brain tumors in twice the time of our key rivals. You want a slow painful death or something quick and merciful with a keyboard for easy texting?”

As consumers use their phones more and more–with retailers preparing to ask them to shop on them as well–it’s yet another in a long line of roadblocks.…

About three years ago, new IT strategy at Macy’s pushed the number of servers they needed to manage from five to 60 and that forced IT to explore outsourcing and they chose a San Francisco company called Splunk, according to a Wall Street Journal story than ran Tuesday (Sept. 8). The story quoted Ratnakar Lavu, Macy’s group vice president of technology, as saying the service was used to identify a Web problem last year involving a feature to help customers find product availability for a specific store.

“To figure out what was behind the glitch, his IT team could have gone through the time-consuming process of checking each server for the flaw. Instead, Mr. Lavu entered in a query to Splunk’s software. Within minutes, the technology scanned the indexed information from all 60 servers and highlighted how there had been a pattern of errors across some servers. In two days, the problem was resolved, says Mr. Lavu,” the story said. “‘It would’ve taken us quite a while without Splunk because it was a very complex problem to solve,’ said Lavu. ‘It’s Google-like and identifies patterns though search.'” He added that he had “some concerns that the technologies won’t be as effective if the amount of data and machines they have to scan keeps growing.” An interesting read.…

This is the latest in a series of high-tech blunders from the 123-year-old $47 billion 3,900-store chain. Is this because of the chain's size or, more likely, because it has been pushing the envelope on what it's trying to do technologically, perhaps beyond its testing limits.Read more...

In March, Western Union cut a deal with Amazon to let the E-Commerce giant's customers use the 44,000 Western Union locations with fees ranging from $3 to $8. Then Bank of America and Citi got into the act with a one-time use card, another tactic to make sure the payment is only used for the immediate purchase price and nothing else. Last Thursday (Sept. 3), eBillMe offered its version, where the payment company is working with MoneyGram—and others—to offer cash-only options at about 75,000 walk-in locations, for a $5 fee. Read more...

When European technology leaders are envisioned, Germany and the U.K. are most likely to come to mind. But a new report suggests that, at least when it comes to E-Commerce, it’s the Parisians and the rest of France that are most comfortable. ComScore reported Monday (Sept. 7) that “26.7 million people in France visited an online retail site in July 2009, an increase of 21 percent (compared with) the previous year, significantly higher than the 5-percent average growth in the retail category across Europe.”

The report is interesting because France is also embracing M-Commerce and particularly the iPhone at an unusually intense rate. (A reader commented on it in a story about M-Commerce.) The problem with any of these stats is that they are percent of increase, which could simply mean that France has been more hesitant to embrace E-Commerce until now. The ComScore study also excluded M-Commerce activity. If France’s M-Commerce activity is indeed picking up, that could be a material exclusion. ComScore offers some rough comparison points between countries, such as “the penetration rate of the online retail category of total online audience,” which it puts at 77 percent for the U.K., 69 percent for Germany and 69 percent for France. But it’s still an interesting report.…

When negotiating—or surrendering to—a service-level agreement guaranteeing uptime levels with a Web hosting service, retailers need to be cautious of how “downtime” is defined. Pingdom is now blogging about more SLA games, including some hosts that exclude any downtime that they consider maintenance. Here at StorefrontBacktalk, if our site is down, it’s of little comfort that it was a planned outage that we never asked about.

Pingdom’s post on Monday (Sept. 7) also spoke of hosts that exclude server downtime and only count network downtime. Again, if the site is unavailable, that’s downtime. Pingdom is a bit more forgiving, though: “To be fair, for dedicated hosting providers, it would be difficult to guarantee anything else when the customer has control over the server.” It also repeated an observation that Pingdom has made before that hosts often ignore smaller outages, even if they have many of them. Of course, for chains, it’s not merely situations of Web hosting. These tricks also apply to services handling mobile sites, customer comments, video reviews, shipping and almost anything else your site needs to outsource, especially for the holidays. Sometimes—and may I be forgiven for saying this—it’s actually good to have the lawyers involved in SLA negotiations.…

But what does any of this have to do with M-Commerce? A lot. If they finally get around all of the technical and logistical hurdles of M-Commerce, they will be trying to get millions of consumers to interact with their sites—via their phones—and see product lists, read reviews, watch multimedia demonstrations, interact with social sites, download PDF instruction manuals and even ask their peers for feedback on their shopping choices before consummating those purchases. That's all great, but—if successful—will it turn the Home Depots, Walmarts and Targets of the world into examples of what may become known as "The AT&T Factor"?Read more...

Blockbuster was the first to glitch, with Pingdom reporting the entertainment site becoming unresponsive at 1:43 PM New York time and staying down for 18 minutes. It was reported back down again at 3:11 PM New York time and it stayed down for 32 minutes. It then was reported down again at 3:57 PM and stayed down for 11 minutes. Read more...

At its simplest, the technique is quite easy to do, which is why it's best to be avoided. The site visitor simply modifies the URL of the page he's visiting. If the stars align, the retailer's server will cache that page, grabbing the rewritten page heading with it. The next consumer that comes along and seeks that page will likely be shown the modified page.Read more...