Microsoft officials confirmed the outage on Monday (Dec. 1), blaming a tidal wave of traffic. Read more...
There's not that much significance to the stats from that single day, mostly because the bulk of E-Commerce shopping will happen later in the season, most likely somewhere from Dec. 12 through Dec. 22. Also, the economic pressures will push larger purchases much later in that cycle, as consumers hope for even better bargains and retailers get more desperate as the "shopping days 'till Christmas" dwindle into the single digits. Read more...
In a trial initially limited to the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Israel and Italy, Visa Europe is starting a trial this month of a card with an 8-digit alphanumeric display, 12-button keyboard and a long-life battery, according to a report in The Nilson Report, a respected credit card industry newsletter.
The card has the ability to offer reciprocal authentication, which is designed to allow consumers “making transactions via phone or the Web a way to identify the party on the other end before transmitting identifying credentials,” the report said. Such a card could be extremely useful to E-Commerce efforts to thwart phishing sites set up to harvest credit card data from unsuspecting consumers visiting look-alike fraudulent Web sites.…
Sears.com was "completely offline," said Shawn White, director of operations at site performance monitoring company Keynote Systems. "And if anybody made it through without getting redirected (to a placeholder page that said the site was experiencing load-related difficulties), their experience would have just been horrendously slow. Slow to the point they would have walked away." Read more...
According to a probable cause document, the defendants' lack of discretion may have done them in. Best Buy regional loss prevention officer Steve Castillo "noticed a strange pattern of purchase activity," according to the federal filing. How strange? The reward card was linked to 77 different credit card accounts between April 2007 and June 2008. And it was used to make 125 separate credit card purchases totaling $252,000, the filing said. Read more...
It's almost unfair to even label it E-Commerce, because the site is equally focused on helping in-store sales. The in-store features—such as tracking in-store inventory on the site and allowing in-store POS units to access online-only products—aren't new to the space, but JCPenney has added some nice touches. Read more...
Following a site meltdown by a major U.K. retailer this month, Internet traffic tracking firm Hitwise was able to document and make concrete what has always been assumed: Consumers abandon a retail site when it melts down faster than politicians vote for a tax cut. When Debenhams’ site suffered severely during a well-publicized late November sale, the percent of its downstream traffic that went to competing retailers jumped from 33.2 percent to 46.9 percent, according to a nicely detailed Hitwise post.
“Looking at the top individual retail Web sites that received traffic from debenhams.com last week, the biggest beneficiaries were Marks & Spencer (which accounted for 4.6 percent of downstream visits, up from 2.8 percent the previous week), Next (2.2 percent) and John Lewis (1.7 percent),” said the posting written by Hitwise Research Director Robin Goad.…
Recently released numbers raise questions as to whether online will be much of a savior at all. New figures from eMarketer project that E-Commerce sales will top last year's numbers by some $5.6 billion, a 4.1 percent increase from $136.8 billion to $142.4 billion. Read more...
Indeed, some are going so far as to suggest that the decision could undermine Web comparison sites in general. But is that necessarily a bad thing? Read more...
PayPal has come up with yet another payment-related use of a cellphone: to authenticate a non-mobile E-Commerce transaction. Customers of the payment giant “can now choose to receive a unique six-digit security code via text message to their mobile phones prior to logging in to their accounts,” PayPal said in a Nov. 24 statement.
PayPal has already been using two-factor authentication with a physical device (the PayPal Security Key), but using SMS and mobile leverages hardware consumers already have. Consumers would have to use the codes in addition to their regular username/password combos. …
When are related product lists helpful and when are they distracting? Is it an obviously useful upsell or is it doomed to the fate of the salesperson who shows a customer one too many choices? HP thinks it’s often the latter and has sharply trimmed the number of related items it shows. And the company is claiming a 30 percent sales increase as a result.
An interesting detail in this BusinessWeek piece points out that an Argentinean physicist apparently analyzed—on HP’s nickel—data from Facebook, YouTube, Digg and Amazon to mathematically model user attention. Conclusion: “The long lists of recommended add-on products commonly featured on E-Commerce sites yield diminishing returns. Web shoppers tend to stop paying attention after a certain point.” Aside from the fact that all of the sites selected (other than Amazon) skew to one demographic extreme of Web shoppers, this raises the question: Don’t HP E-Commerce workers ever shop online for themselves? They truly needed a physicist to tell them this? …
Such is the plight of Michal Geller, Amazon's director of consumer gift cards. Down the road, Amazon is toying with other ways to truly customize cards. But avoiding privacy issues, Geller said, is non-negotiable. "Anything related to privacy is off the table," he said, forcing Amazon to focus on "some creative ways (that are) not creepy." Read more...
The trial is only available to a little more than one-fifth of TiVo's 3.6 million subscribers (just those who pay for broadband TiVo) and is limited to those willing to pay cash. Still, the approach is quite interesting, at least for those who believe that convergence was a good idea ahead of its time. Read more...
The crash itself, resolved by the end of the day, was caused by a hardware problem with Cisco routers in the company's San Jose datacenter, said Ranjith Kumaran, YouSendIt's chief technology officer. But the bigger problem was twofold: When the file transfer systems died, that also brought down the Web site. And the system crashed in such a way that customers weren't sure if their files had been transmitted or not.Read more...
When Sears rolled out its mobile effort (Sears2go) this month, it illustrated the challenges for a retailer trying to craft a clean and stable mobile strategy at a time of extreme flux for the mobile space.
In a sense, the first decision on mobile a retail chain needs to make is the cellphone’s equivalent of the age-old buy-versus-build debate. Do you take your full-fledged E-Commerce site and strip out almost all of the images and the most sophisticated functionality until it’s barely one step ahead of pure ASCII? Or do you add an extensive layer—most likely outsourced—that tries to interpret and translate queries and responses from your full Web site into something a smartphone can handle? Read more.…
But deciding what to do about abandoned carts, that gets complicated. The innocuous-looking store locator is akin to waving a red cape in front of the face of an E-Commerce manager bull. In this case, even the bull is very real. And, yes, it all comes down to incentive plans, the least focused-on reason why Merged Channel programs so often fail.Read more...
We see tons of variations on the meta-search concept for E-Commerce, but this site seems to have hit on a truly practical combo: An engine that finds the lowest prices and simultaneously finds relevant coupons and then integrates the two.
The site, PricesandCoupons.com, says its display will include redemption instructions and expiration dates and claims to only show “name brand merchants who have solid customer service ratings.” How PricesandCoupons defines that last part is where my eyebrow raised, but the concept still has some serious potential.…
The credit database giant argued that such a card could potentially reduce "the need for companies to retain customers' personal identification information, which could also result in the reduction of risks posed by data breaches." Although that theoretically could be the case, the only way such a card—dubbed the Equifax online identity card—will be successful is if it's adopted by a large number of retailers. And each of those retailers would have to be willing to surrender one of their most precious pieces of data: customer history. Read more...
At a glance, Best Buy's efforts sound similar to the social networking site widget efforts pushed recently by rival national pizza chains Pizza Hut and Papa John's. But Best Buy's plans are far more adventurous; the retailer envisions pushing its content out to mobile, blogs and video sites in addition to social networking sites. But the company also plans to create wiki-like rich content by leveraging what one Best Buy exec dubbed "150,000 tech-savvy employees, some 65 percent of whom are 16 to 25" years old. Read more...
MasterCard’s PayPass is ramping up its mobile program with an over-the-air provisioning service to supposedly make it easier for consumers to personalize their payment data on their mobile devices.
As long as a consumer has a phone using Near Field Communications (NFC), MasterCard says the program should work. “First, the PayPass application is securely transferred onto a secure area of the consumer’s mobile phone via the mobile network. Next, the PayPass application is personalized with the consumer’s individual payment account details,” a MasterCard statement said.…
Costco's deployment of Costco Reviews went out of its way to avoid anything controversial or, for that matter, innovative or creative. Almost all of the functionality has been outsourced to an Austin-based social commerce vendor called Bazaarvoice, which will review all comments and post them within 24 hours, once any profanity or "completely inappropriate" comments are removed, said Ginnie Roeglin, Costco's Senior VP for E-Commerce. Read more...
Let's not get too optimistic here. "Mostly unharmed" doesn't mean escaping untouched. But it does mean that when large companies—especially retailers—have to suddenly make do with a lot fewer people, they need that good ole IT magic more than ever. They need the efficiencies that IT promises and the employee-replacing devices that IT enables. Read more...
B&N, with almost 800 bookshops in all 50 states, on Monday (Oct. 27) introduced what it dubbed "My B&N," a program designed to create personal profiles for all customers so that they can more easily interact with other customers. Read more...
Simply put, retailers selling very high-priced items to a decidedly well-to-do clientele often invest much more heavily in creating a comfortable environment with an abundance of personal attention. There's a reason retailers such as Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, Armani, Coach and high-end jewelers tend to be the last to embrace kiosks, mobile-commerce and online promotions. Read more...
Cards issued by European banks when used online cross border don't usually support AVS checks. So, when a European card is used with a billing address that's in the US, an ecom merchant wouldn't necessarily know that the shipping zip code doesn't match the billing code.
-Marc
