Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Most of the site problems were minor in scope, but a few were long and probably costly. When it came to duration, none appeared to match the outage that hit the Publix Super Markets site on January 2.Read more...

Both trends come from the Hitwise post-holiday report, and both could support radically different conclusions. For example, consider the drop in affluent consumer site visits.Read more...

The thought that eBay's purchase of Bill Me Later would kill the Amazon deal is hardly new, with one party involved with the firms saying back in October that "the Amazon and Bill Me Later relationship is dying if not dead already." But the history of Amazon and Bill Me Later dates back a year, when Amazon announced in December 2007 that it would accept Bill Me Later as a payment option at some point in the future.Read more...

When ComScore expanded that timeframe to look at almost the full fourth quarter—which it defines as running from October 1 to December 28—the numbers actually got slightly worse, with identical year-to-year quarter comparisons with 2007 showing a 4 percent drop, to $36.8 billion. The top-ranked sites saw some significant increases, and decreases, in their unique visitor numbers. For the full list, pleaseRead more...

For years, Google has given its Google Checkout service to retailers for free, as long as they bought ads on Google. Alas, no more. Explained one Google manager: “Why have it as a loss leader if it’s doing OK? We saw very healthy results after we decided to charge for the service.”

The change of heart—covered quite well in this Investor’s Business Daily story—is part of an overall cost-cutting program at Google. “They are cutting back on things like their free cafeteria hours, subsidies of their on-site daycare, so trimming subsidies to their merchant partners is no doubt part of that belt tightening too,” Forrester Research Analyst Sucharita Mulpuru was quoted as saying.…

The Gap's Web site has one of the lowest user satisfaction scores on the "2008 Holiday Top 40 Retail Satisfaction Index," a survey-based report from ForeSee Results. ForeSee President and CEO Larry Freed blamed the low score on diminished user perception due to well-intentioned changes to Gap.com. Read more...

As retailers debate how much they truly want to embrace mobile payment efforts, the Mercator Advisory Group is reporting that the tide will soon become unavoidable.

Mercator is now forecasting that smartphone-based remote mobile payments will reach $389 million in 2009, $1.7 billion in 2011 and $8.6 billion in 2014.…

The science and technology of it is really not that far-fetched. The fact that so many consumers—especially younger consumers—today share so many of their thoughts and private moments in so many public settings alone would allow even a casual observer to learn quite a bit about someone. But it gets far worse.Read more...

A handful of retailers—including 1-800-Flowers, Jos. A. Bank, Planet Hollywood and Overstock.com but excluding any of the top 100 brick-and-mortar chains—went along for the ride, pledging discounts to be beamed to T-Mobile customers using Chase Visa and debit cards.Read more...

Having suffered outages during Cyber Monday, J.Crew again became unavailable—to at least some prospective customers—for an extended period on Wednesday (Dec. 17). In doing so, J.Crew's site joined a group of Web properties that continued having a tough time this holiday season, including OfficeMax, Blackwell and Sephora.Read more...

In publishing the results of its 10th annual survey of E-Commerce fraud, the California company said E-tailers continue to lose 1.4 percent of their online revenue to fraud (the same rate of loss CyberSource has seen since 2006) and they compound those losses by failing to sufficiently trust fraud-detection technology.Read more...

The increased interest in coupons is easy to explain, but the drop in comparison site traffic is much more baffling. It could be that overall traffic is lower, as consumers wait for the last-minute ultra-panicked sales. But the latest overall E-Commerce stats don't support that theory. A more likely explanation for the drop in comparison site traffic is the improved sophistication of search engines, especially Google. That theory also edges close to a semantic distinction, raising the question of what Hitwise labels a price comparison site. Read more...

"Obviously, this is one of the busiest times of the year for us and for our customers," one Postal official said. "Volume definitely played a part, but there was also a technical glitch in the system." Read more...

The seemingly happy E-Commerce signs were all around, right after Christmas. On Saturday (Dec. 27), Forrester reported that "more than half of E-tailers we just surveyed still said they were up in sales through December 20." The day before, Amazon tried to make a splash by reporting that its "2008 holiday season finished as (Amazon's) best ever." But both statements lacked context. The Amazon statement in particular was ultra vague, even by Amazon standards. Read more...

Even better, it was happening at a time that rumors—many of them false—were making consumers hesitant to buy gift cards from their rivals. Amazon could have made a good argument that consumers would be more comfortable buying from Amazon. So with such a wonderful plan, what would possess Amazon to put a statement that, at the most charitable, could be described as a phrasing so deceptive that even a New Jersey or Illinois politician would find it too over the top? Read more...

But as is Amazon's tendency, its experiment is a little bolder and more daring.The concept is interesting, but we're having a difficult time coming up with a viable ROI for it. If it's intended to actually generate revenue for Amazon above and beyond revenue that they would have likely already received, it's much more problematic. Read more...

The problem with analyzing e-tail traffic—and especially e-tail uptime incidents—is that we have such a narrow view into the environment. Even the top Web tracking services combined only look at a very small number of key sites. Read more...

The measuring company said November online traffic in the U.K. saw Tesco's traffic decline a whopping 28 percent for the period, while Amazon's was 21 percent lower, European eBay sites were getting 20 percent fewer online visitors, Home Retail took a 16 percent traffic hit and Apple dropped 8 percent. Read more...

It's an odd position for Macy's to take. They're hardly at the cutting edge of this movement (Borders would have a better argument there) and, indeed, their spokesperson on the issue couldn't name a single merged channel feature they offer that isn't already offered by multiple rivals.Read more...

One of the most challenging aspects of apparel E-Commerce is that sizing can be so, well, psychotic. A specific size can vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, if not with different garments from the same manufacturer. Read more...

A service level agreement (SLA) is a guarantee from a site that its uptime will be as promised, n’est pas? Actually, quite the opposite. It’s more likely a complicated document designed to protect the site (not the retailer) in case of any problem.

Pingdom has crafted a wonderful example, based on the Google SLA given to its cloud customers. Google’s SLA: “‘Downtime Period’ means, for a domain, a period of ten consecutive minutes of Downtime. Intermittent Downtime for a period of less than ten minutes will not be counted towards any Downtime Periods.” Pingdom, correctly pointing out that frequent short outages are much more common than long ones, did the math and reported that “Gmail could be unavailable for more than 21 hours in a day and Google could still tell you that, according to their SLA, the service has had 100 percent uptime.” You really need to read that piece before you sign your next SLA.…

"We saw where they suddenly shifted all of their, presumably, image content over to Akamai on the morning of Black Friday," Evans said. "Now that's a really odd thing to do, you know? Hey, it's a really big day. Let's make a major change to our infrastructure without testing it. What if that had gone wrong? As it happens, they were OK once it came onstream, but they had no idea whether that was going to benefit them or be detrimental. They turned it on at 7 o'clock in the morning." Read more...

Despite those incidents—in part fueled by record-breaking traffic, which decided to not be influenced by the recession—this year's Cyber Monday was relatively uneventful, with most of the major retailers faring quite well. But for those who didn't fare so well—including Costco, Bloomingdale's, Borders UK, Gap, Home Depot, Victoria's Secret, Williams-Sonoma, Tiger Direct, Wegmans and H-E-B—it was a memorable day.Read more...