Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

"Most notably, the visitors were not in a country where we do business," said Ron DeFeo, Home Depot's director of corporate communications. But given that the overwhelming majority of the programming and design investment had already been paid, why pull the plug only six months after the site's November launch?Read more...

With an eye on group buying—whether it’s 20 people in an office buying a birthday gift or 9 farflung residents chipping in on an anniversary trip or even a Boy Scout Troop—Sears.com on Tuesday (May 5) introduced Givetogether. The program allows for gift givers to use credit cards or other means to pool resources for a combined purchase.

Despite being the great-great-grandpappy of the Big Box chains, Sears has consistently been ahead of the curve with creativity in E-Commerce, mobile commerce and cross-channel thinking. Unlike many of the E-Commerce ideas we’re hearing from the largest chains these days, this development isn’t the proverbial solution in search of a problem. This is an actual awkward issue that consumers have today that the Web can help with. …

This goes far beyond the CVSes, Walgreens, Rite-Aids and Wal-Marts of the world. We often complain about the store-centric thinking that undermines merged channel strategies, where they see online, mobile and even the call center as the enemy. What about the myopic view that goes beyond "store versus online" and gets into "my wonderful store on Elm St. versus your horrible store on Maple Ave." We discuss intra-chain rivalries, often overlooking into-in-store rivalries.Read more...

Is Mobil afraid of Mobile? Is not offering an on-the-road version of a find-me-a-gas-station-quick application an example of E-Commerce fuelishness?Read more...

The recession will keep E-Commerce sales roughly flat (a half-percent decline) this year before returning to the days of double-digit growth next year, predicts e-Marketer Senior Analyst Jeffrey Grau. Grau said in a new report that E-Commerce sales will increase by nearly 10 percent next year, by about 13 percent in 2011, by some 11 percent in 2012 and by about 10 percent in 2013.

But his report did include this rather eyebrow-raising quote: “The recession has fostered a new breed of consumers who meticulously research big-ticket items as well as everyday purchases online. These consumers honed their Internet research skills during the 2008 holiday shopping season when, in search of savings and memorable gifts, they deftly moved between sites and tried different online shopping tactics.” We’re pretty sure most consumers were quite deft at surfing the Web for bargains long before the economy tanked last year. But maybe that’s just us.…

On Tuesday (May 5) , the National Irish Bank (NIB) reported that “technology problems were behind the failure of its debit and credit cards at point-of-sale machines in shops and other businesses across the country” earlier that day. But while the unspecified glitch was resolved within a few hours, retail POS issues continued, prompting the bank to “apologize unreservedly,” according to The Irish Times.

Here’s where it gets interesting. The bank issued a statement that “as soon as the problem was identified, the network was switched to a back-up system and National Irish Bank customers are able to access their funds at the bank’s ATMs as normal now.” But what about Ireland’s retailers, whose transactions were halted? No emergent backup system for them? Another reminder that banks know ATMs and vaults, but POS is a new and lower priority concept. …

Google hasn't been faring especially well, with some seeing Google's move in April to boost prices as desperate. Then on Thursday (April 30), Amazon counterpounched, offering to waive fees for five months for retailers who would be new customers for its Amazon Payments program. The Amazon offer was quite limited, excluding any existing consumers, having the fee waiver only lasts five months (from April 29 through Sept. 30). Technically, it would be five months for those who signed up immediately. The deal isn't for five free months, it's free transactions until Sept. 30, apparently regardless of when a merchant signs up. The deal also has an especially low ceiling, with Amazon saying that the fees will start sooner than Sept. 30 if $2 million or more is sold.Read more...

Despite those issues, many airline sites place a much lower priority on strong uptimes because airline customers are generally much less likely to change carriers based on slow site performance. An unhappy customer visiting Barnes & Noble's site will jump to Borders.com or Amazon.com with the least provocation, but an unhappy Continental customer is much less likely to go through the extreme hassle of switching airlines.Read more...

Retailers often try mild variations of their core strategies overseas, but McDonald’s is trying an experiment in China that is 360 degrees different than its U.S. strategy. It has launched an E-Commerce site to sell mobile phones, digital cameras and MP3 players.

“The McDonald’s Super Value online store was the chain’s first online shop” and “it’s a strategic media tactic to target the right audience, specifically, urban adults in their 20s,” according to this Wall Street Journal story. Beyond the electronics, McDonald’s is also selling their traditional food items, but with an auction twist: “McDonald’s used an auction system to promote its Value Meals. It posted electronic goods on its Taobao site for close to the retail price, but dropped the price when a user clicked on it. The first user to click on it at the price of 16.5 yuan — the price of a Value Meal, or roughly $2.50 — got to buy the item at that price.”…

But deeper in the site, there were some answered questions and those answers were rather troubling, to the extent that a consumer is searching for credibility. The answers all seemed to be peppy and not especially neutral. One question asked: "Where can I find a great deal online for Sony VAIO VGN-CR507E Q 14 1 Laptop 1 86 GHz Intel Pentium Dual-Core T2390 Processor?" The answer: "What a great solid little system that you can really do a lot on. You can really get a great buy at Amazon or Best Buy." Do you get the sense that answer could have been written before the question was written?Read more...

But that may be precisely the point. With the economy still scraping bottom, many retailers and E-tailers are having to craft strategies that are designed to be very temporary and very emergent. There's a major E-Commerce vendor, for example, that is out there trying to convince retailers to halt efforts to bring in new sales, proposing that they instead force all efforts on the installed base. This forces us to consider three distinct issues.Read more...

"My hypothesis is that, in tough times, consumers stick to brands they know which are the big multi-channel retailers," Mulpuru said. "Also, those multi-channel retailers are very aggressive with pricing now and they're discounting aggressively to maintain market share."Read more...

Starbucks is boasting of a 60 percent redemption rate on a mobile coupon trial being done in Mexico, where customers send SMS messages to access 2D barcode mobile coupons. That is an unusually—suspiciously?—high redemption rate, especially for a mobile program.

“Every time you present your coupon, the offer would be modified, such as get a venti for the price of a tall, to make people come more often to the store,” said this story from Mobile Marketer. “The call-to-action urged consumers to text keyword STARBUCKS to short code 80080 to get a WAP link to download a buy-one-get-one-free 2D barcode mobile coupon. Starbucks is equipped with 2D bar code recognition software, so employees can read the mobile coupon directly from consumers’ mobile phones at the point of sale.”…

The ability to use GPS to deliver geolocation features for mobile commerce is one of the feature-rich capabilities that scares away even the most lion-hearted E-Commerce execs. The ability to tailor offerings to a consumer’s precise location is powerful, but so too are the paranoia fears of letting a consumer know just how much you know about them. Sears has opted to try to make it feel a little safer.

When the mobile app is launched (Sears is first pushing it for Apple’s iPhone, apparently on the premise that anyone who would shell out that kind of money for an AT&T phone is probably clueless as to where they are most of the time), consumers are given the choice of typing in their Zip Codes or letting the phone’s GPS system find them. If the consumer selects for the phone to find her, it’s presumably going to feel less freaky. “The app then customizes the shopping experience, showcasing geographically relevant products, such as local sports teams apparel, the closest stores to where the shopper is at that moment, and even current weather conditions,” said an Internet Retailer story. “Shoppers can search Sears products, browse by category, review current coupons and perform other tasks as they would on the Sears e-commerce site.” …

In the days of convergence, the conventional wisdom was that online and broadcast signals would be merged into one device. Then the debate was what the final merged form factor would be: a TV screen? Laptop screen? PDA screen? New stats suggest that instead of a merged screen—or morphed content from one device to the next—the current reality is simultaneous viewing of multiple screens of content.

In-Stat reported that more than 66 million consumers watch television while interacting with Internet-delivered content. That broke down to between 33 percent and 50 percent of all men and 25 percent of all women surveyed. About 20 percent of all respondents said they sent and received IM messages while watching TV. What are the E-Commerce implications? What if a Web site is synchronized with a TV broadcast, so that it can show additional content? What if the site allowed consumers to buy what was being made, worn or discussed in a show? It could give simulcast a radically new meaning.…

The threat of an Internet tax has been made so many times for so long as to be almost meaningless. But it’s not quite meaningless because it always seems to be just a few votes away from being taken seriously.

BusinessWeek this week looked at the latest legislative hurdles of the Web tax efforts, as well as various efforts to agree on a voluntary tax collection program. (Amazon’s for it, EBay is against.) But that program is essential, for reasons that have nothing to do with taxes. If retailers can’t get together on something as smallfry as a state tax collection program, why would Congress believe that retail can police itself on PCI security or other controversial areas? …

J.C. Penney is the latest retailer to conclude that the deadly economy means that in-store must, for the moment, get unconditional IT priority. J.C. Penney CEO Myron Ullman was explicit about a change in tech priorities as he prepared for his shareholders meeting this week.

” I’m saying IT isn’t the back door. It’s the front door,” Ullman said in an interview with the Dallas Morning News. The story continued: ” Penney has decided dot-com isn’t the hub anymore. It has put information technology at the same level with store operations, merchandising and marketing when planning the company’s future.”…

The neighborhood physical video rental business is in a very difficult position these days. Blockbuster is trying to survive with a kiosk strategy, courtesy of an NCR acquisition of a large operator of video rental kiosks.

But is this too little, ludicrously too late? A nice discussion happened Wednesday (April 23) at RetailWire about the Blockbuster strategy. My favorite comment comes from author Ryan Mathews from Black Monk Consulting: ” Blockbuster stumbled because the notion of physical access became less important in the video rental business. Does creating another physical solution change all that? I don’t think so.” The discussion is worth a read.…

Most of the products that are likely to be at play in the merger talks—including Java, MySQL, Sun servers and workstations and Oracle's Retail suite—will either be unchanged (Oracle Retail seems to have no redundancy and is likely to be not impacted at all) or the changes will be irrelevant (MySQL operates so far below the database size and needs of most major chains that it is likely to be irrelevant). Although Java has attracted a lot of attention and debate, it's unlikely that Oracle would handle it much differently than did Sun. But if one looks a bit further down the road, things could get a lot more interesting for the typical retail chain CIO.Read more...

In almost any other economic climate, word of IT cutbacks that extensive would definitely be seen as bad. However, given that we're suffering through the worst economic downswing in 40 years and venerable companies are dropping like flies, the figure should be seen as relatively good news, said Forrester Senior Analyst for E-Commerce Technology Brian Walker.Read more...

The patent in question is held by a company called Actus and it's a very specific methodology for handling and sharing the revenue associated with smaller purchases such as, according to an example cited in the lawsuit, Wal-Mart MP3 music downloads.Read more...

BestBuyEyeglasses.com is an eyeglass E-Commerce site that is proudly going public with a tale of how it boosted revenue by 21 percent by recommending higher-priced items. They made a decision to stop presenting to customers “what seemed to be the most relevant products for that shopper, based on all the data it has mined about how shoppers browse and buy on its site,” according to this intriguing Internet Retailer piece.

If true, this is quintessentially the worst possible E-Commerce strategy. Recommendations online work if those recommendations are believed to be based on objective measurements, such as “the top five products purchased by the people who visited the pages you did.” When customers realize what is being done—and they will, given time—they will feel betrayed and all of the power of recommendation engines will be lost. Word to the wise: If you’re going to choose to push the most expensive products on customers, please have the decency to not be proud of it.…

Everybody knows Amazon.com is an online giant. Now an analyst has determined just how big a giant: According to RBC Capital Analyst Stephen Ju, Amazon accounts for more than a third of all E-Commerce.

“Using our data, the total GMV (value of all the e-commerce activity flowing through AMZN’s platform) is close to $12.5 billion in the U.S., or 34 percent of the $37 billion the U.S. Commerce Department reported for 4Q08,” wrote Ju an April 14 report called “How Much Share Does Amazon Really Have?” Ju determined Amazon’s piece of the U.S. E-Commerce pie continues to grow. It was 27 percent last year, he wrote.…

This all raises the issue of "should retailers wait for the PCI SSC to 'bless' or integrate so called 'beyond PCI' technologies into the standards?" GuestView PCI Columnist David Taylor's answer is a profound "no." Read more...

How was it that one employee was able to make that change and have it populate globally? No supervisor had to approve? No software to check for a radical shift of titles? Not even a pair of employees checking each other's work?Read more...