Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Wanted to briefly step outside our retail IT playground for a moment to share a bizarre E-mail marketing observation. People seem to have forgotten the subject line rules in E-mail, where you’re supposed to assume very little space, depending on the browser involved.

With that in mind, two recent E=mails. The first was from retailer Williams-Sonoma. My Outlook showed: “Free Culinary Demons” Intrigued, I clicked further to find it was really “Free Culinary Demonstrations.” A few days earlier, a retail software vendor sent me a message that read–seemingly candidly–“The ROI That You Can’t Afford”. A click revealed what they had intended to say “The ROI That You Can’t Afford To Miss.” …

Consumers will go to the chain' site and use codes from their POS receipts to begin the process. "We have the demographic information and we've got the fact they bought, say, a cellphone and, more importantly, what we have is what they didn’t buy, such as a warranty or accessories."Read more...

There have been a few unsuccessful efforts at allowing the search engine to complete the transaction, eliminating a visit to the retail site at all. Those efforts will be tried again and Google and others will likely succeed eventually, a few years down the road. But in the meantime, search engines are trying to evolve way beyond portals. To do that, they must provide a lot more information so that consumers can make more choices before they leave to make their purchases.Read more...

The license plate/mobile situation is the latest example of a retail industry, pressured by an ailing economy that is sending household name chains into bankruptcy and forcing an ever-growing list of store closings and layoffs, trying to push the cash drawer envelope more and more on privacy issues. This effort is made all the easier because of improvements in technology, the ubiquitousness of smartphones and the fact that many younger consumers have an attitude toward privacy that is lightyears more flexible than preceding generations.Read more...

Maes makes the point that the data being made available to today's smartphone is fine, but it's rarely practical to reach into one pocket to access. At a conference, for example, "You don't shake somebody's hand and then say, 'Can you please hold on for a moment while I take out my phone and Google you?' When you go to the supermarket and you're standing there in that huge aisle of different types of toilet paper, you don't take out your cellphone and open a browser and go to a Web site to try and decide which of these toilet papers is the most ecologically responsible purchase."Read more...

It's a great theory. But as PCI Columnist David Taylor reports, things haven't quite worked out that way.Read more...

The research, conducted in May by Boston-based site analytics company Compete, found that Walmart.com enjoyed about 32 million visits during the month and Target.com was visited about 28 million times. Compete extrapolates information based on the activity of a 2,000-member panel, said Debra Miller, an associate in the company's retail consumer product department.Read more...

The letter to the council supported an end-to-end-encryption standard, seek more input from retailers at an earlier stage, give larger chains more time to implement new PCI requirements, let there be a list of the most important elements that really need to be done (rather than insisting on compliance with every one of the "more than two hundred detailed requirements of the PCI DSS") and allowing retailers to store fewer pieces of sensitive data.Read more...

Although the 8-hour outage on Monday was—at the time—the longest period the site was dead in the water, the other outages were not minor. In addition to the 8-hour incident on Monday, the site was offline ten other times that day with four of those outages lasting an hour or more and the others lasting at least 25 minutes. The site also was reported by Pingdom to be down about 10 times on Saturday, with most of those outages being less than 30 minutes long. But Sephora has been running into quite a history of site problems, dating back to last year's Cyber Monday (Dec. 1).Read more...

As e-tailers have learned the hard way from E-Commerce, customers don't care about tidy legal contracts assigning responsibility and quality-of-service obligations. If they go to a Wal-Mart or a Home Depot site and they have a bad experience—whether it's with uptime, a FedEx delivery hiccup, incorrect status reports, a video consumer comment that glitches or anything else that the retailer may or may not be directly handling—those customers are going to blame Wal-Mart or Home Depot and might take their business elsewhere. If M-Commerce is on your plate, you need to get used to living by the carrier's standards.Read more...

The FTC said the highly intrusive application would "monitor consumers’ online secure sessions–including sessions on third parties’ Web sites–and collect information transmitted in those sessions, such as the contents of shopping carts, online bank statements, drug prescription records, video rental records, library borrowing histories, and the sender, recipient, subject, and size for web-based E-mails. The software would also track some computer activities that were not related to the Internet."Read more...

But new numbers just for May—showing Macy's online hitting 12.2 percent sales increases, compared with a 9.1 percent drop for in-store, which is a massive 21.3 percent spread for that month's $1.74 billion in revenue—make it hard to view those figures as anything other than powerful E-Commerce performance.Read more...

Hitwise, an online measurement firm that is usually quite reliable, issued a statement Wednesday (June 3) that CircuitCity.com’s relaunch marked a 230 percent increase from the prior week and that 84 percent of its visitors had not visited in the past 30 days.

Somehow, I wonder if the fact that the company had gone bankrupt, shut everything down and wasn’t offering anything on its Web site for months might have skewed the comparison numbers a bit. This is just another in our continuing series called “Web stats are great but they need an awful lot of context to mean anything.” …

Victoria's Secret's new mobile experiment is more of an adjunct to its catalogue (paper and online), with the mobile app needing a catalogue number before an item can be purchased and tracked.Read more...

The most frightening—and fun—thing about social networking and retail integration is the speed with which it changes. That means that retailers must have a fine-tuned crystal ball into what’s a year or two down the road so it can launch and take advantage of trends before they’ve died out. A wonderful opinion column in Mashable details several interesting technologies that may form some nearterm online innovations. One good example is where Twitter might be headed.

“It has allowed one man to create a device attached to a chair that tweets at the presence of noxious natural gasses (ahem), another uses Arduino to monitor when his cats are inside the house or out, and a small bakery and cafe in East London is now able to tweet what’s fresh from their oven. This may all seem like pretty pointless stuff, but the pointlessness is the point.” Oddly enough, they’re absolutely right. Well worth a read if you need to plot out where E-Commerce is headed.…

Sears opened in May its MyGofer trial store, a drive-through approach for picking up merchandise purchased online. But preliminary reviews have been unhappy, with TheStreet.com calling it “a bad cross between Amazon and Dairy Barn.” A prominent Chicago retail consultant questioned why consumers wouldn’t simply pick up their online products at an existing Sears store.

“That’s where it totally breaks down for me. Why would I change my behavior to go here?” asked Mara Devitt, a partner at Chicago-based McMillan Doolittle, who also complained about the quality of the site that is connected with the new venture. “It’s the most frustrating Web experience,” she said, citing as an example that it offered no product dimensions.…

But the rollout Tuesday (May 26) from the Papa Johns global chain of 3,404 pizzerias takes it one step farther. Yes, it's generally just glitz and icing, but it integrates webcams that will literally interact with pizza boxes.Read more...

Although it's always difficult to accurately project what new IT leaders will do with their new gigs, there are indications that neither exec is likely to create major ripples, at least not in the nearterm. At Best Buy, the 41-year-old Roberts technically replaces Bob Willett, who has held the CIO title for years and has been a senior IT leader at Best Buy since April 2004. But Willett has been holding dual titles, serving as both the full chain's CIO and CEO of Best Buy International. Willett will continue as CEO of Best Buy International and, most critically, Roberts will continue to report directly to Willett. When a new executive is reporting into the executive being replaced, that's rarely followed by a radical shift in strategy.Read more...

Beyond focusing on avoiding "Beyond PCI Lock-in," pens GuestView PCI Columnist David Taylor, retailers also need to focus on ensuring that these new security efforts don't break their existing applications. Some of the tokenization and end-to-end encryption approaches currently (or soon to be) on the market don't always play nice with existing ERP, CRM and other enterprise applications.Read more...

Like everything in retail payment security, the issue is much more nuanced than it initially seems. But the micro-payment version is clean: We materially improve security, proprietary hooks are needed. That said, retailers will soon have a lot less negotiating power than they've gotten used to.Read more...

Although it boasts the ability to mix and match, it literally just moves small thumbnails of the outfits near other. If it generated images of the models wearing those impromptu combinations, that could have been much more meaningful.Read more...

The two Internet-only retailers remained at the top of ForeSee Results' new list of sites in terms of user happiness. Although it was a 1.2 percent decline from the spring 2008 score, the 85 scored by Netflix landed the movie rental site at the top of the consumer satisfaction list for the third year. A perfect score would be 100. Amazon, with a score of 84 (a 1.2 percent increase over last spring) came in second-place followed by QVC with an 81. Wal-Mart's site scored 77, as did the J.C. Penny's, Cabelas and Drugstore.com sites.Read more...

Sure, we can do news stories and columns on these documents but we thought some some readers might want a database of all of these documents as they evaluate new issues. We're not sure if we have the right answer, but today we're launching our best shot: StorefrontBackground. StorefrontBacktalk and StorefrontBackground are linked and share many of the same resources (such as our image library, some of the editors, shared servers, etc.) but are, editorially, polar opposites.Read more...

Sears.com is quietly getting into the social networking space. Well, not quite. Sears’ effort, done under the MySears.com banner and claiming more than 200,000 registered users, is more of a combo FAQ, suggestion box and interactive customer service site. This is a critical distinction because of a social site is one where the consumers dictate the topics and the exchanges. A retail giant landlord can quietly observe and follow where customers go or it can try and lead.

This BrandWeek piece details the Sears effort and it also brings up the teen-focused Wal-Mart effort from a few years ago, called The Hub. Bentonville pulled the plug on that site in barely 10 weeks. But it was only last year that Starbucks launched its own customer site, although it was pretty much limited to “telling Starbucks what it can do to get more of your money.” It’s sort of like a death row program, where condemned inmates can ride lifecycle machines to generate enough power to run the electric chair.…

With the growth of Twitter and other sites designed for the detail- and context-challenged, Amazon decided that it needed to have its very own URL shortener system: amzn.com, which is more Amazon-friendly than tinyurl.com and shorturl.com.

“It works like this: If I’m looking at Dan Brown’s upcoming book ‘The Lost Symbol’ and want to tweet about it, I take the book’s ISBN number (listed on the product page) and put it on the end of amzn.com/. ‘The Lost Symbol’ ISBN number is 0385504225. So the short URL would be amzn.com/0385504225,” according to this TechFlash story. “For other Amazon products that don’t have an ISBN, you use the ASIN number (Amazon Standard Identification Number), also on the product page. The tool also works for Amazon Wishlists. You type ‘amzn.com/w/’ plus the Wishlist ID number, which is usually at the end of a person’s Wishlist URL.”…