Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

When Gomez reported its latest batch of uptime figures for the Top 50 E-tailers covering the month of August, 3,000-employee Oriental Trading came in dead last. How dead last? The top retailer's high broadband connection (Costco) was a 99.83 percent uptime, and the numbers for retailers stayed in the upper 90s all the way down the list, with the 49th weakest high bandwidth uptime performance going to PC Connection, which clocked in at 98.83 percent uptime. Number 50, Oriental Trading, had only 68.15 percent uptime. Read more...

The application, called Giftag, requires a small applet to be downloaded and then integrated into either Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox browsers. Once installed, users can theoretically visit any E-Commerce site, find something they want and then click on an icon to select it. The application also allows users to select specific elements of the retailer's page to visually highlight it for a friend or relative. Read more...

With a new entry into the browser battleground—Google's Chrome—comes more customization nightmares. This problem is going to get a lot worse very quickly as many E-Commerce sites try and get more complex with more interactivity, multimedia and even 3-D experiments at the same time as consumers are getting more comfortable playing with their browser settings. Read more...

Rite Aid has severed part of a 9-year-old deal with Drugstore.com and will take back its over-the-counter medication online purchases, a move that forced Drugstore.com to “significantly cut its outlook for fiscal 2008,” according to this Wall Street Journal story.

The deal will have Rite Aid handling those purchases on its own site, which in turn will be supported by Drugstore.com. “Drugstore.com will receive about $10 million in 10 monthly payments from Rite Aid in return for relinquishing the prescription service, and will get paid for marketing the new prescription service on its Web site,” the story said.…

The chain sent out invites to its exclusive Premier Black members—supposedly limited to the biggest spenders in the chain—on Wednesday, but inadvertently E-mailed it to the full CRM database. Oops! Read more...

Will E-Commerce Work? You no longer have a choice. You're thinking like this is an optional matter, such as whether you open a new store in Detroit or add a line of gloves. To be blunt, it's not. E-Commerce is now mandatory, as dictated by the Three F Reality: Faith, Force, and Fiasco. Read more...

It looks like Amazon is no longer backing up its pricing, putting an end to its Post-Order Price Guarantee—a policy that allowed customers to recover the difference from an Amazon price drop within 30 days of a purchase. As of Monday (Sept. 1), customers who place orders on Amazon.com are not offered the 30-day guarantee, a customer service representative confirmed.

The representative said Amazon decided to do away with the policy because sometimes price drops on the Web site were actually special offers by the manufacturer of the product. Amazon would then have to compensate the difference to a customer who purchased that item within 30 days of the drop. Amazon corporate did not return repeated phone calls asking about the change. The sharks are already in the water, with at least one company smelling fresh blood. A new Web site called priceprotectr.com is hoping to benefit from Amazon’s change, expediting the launch of a new price protection plan designed for Amazon users. …

Quite a few retailers have been involved in site changes to make the Web more accessible to those with vision difficulties, but Target has been the most aggressive in fighting such efforts. As such, Target's settlement has an especially strong chance of pressuring retailers to aggressively embrace such changes. Read more...

Site navigation problems and unpleasant booking engines are driving customers away from online travel sites and pushing them through the doors of traditional, more personable travel agencies. Even though sales for online travel sites are growing, fewer travelers are actually booking their trips online, this eMarketer report said.

This shift in trip booking bucks the trend for online travel sites, which have been more popular than offline agencies throughout the last decade. The reason for this about-face is that many customers are fed up with “unfriendly booking engines and navigation tools” and are seeking the personal touch of an offline agent. “Not so long ago, industry observers cast traditional travel agents as has-beens,” said Jeff Grau, senior analyst at eMarketer and author of the report. “Perhaps this has helped them to focus on what they do best: provide travel expertise and personalized service.”…

Calvin Klein finally gave its HTML blessing to E-Commerce, offering its first for-sale items on its Web, although the E-Commerce launching as U.S.-only. Anyone visiting from outside the United States will be routed to the existing corporate brochure site.

The site is trying to attract subscribers with a gimmick this month: Offering consumers the chance to win a $1,000 online fall shopping spree in exchange for registering. Calvin Klein is also—sort of—offering a free shipping deal, but only for customers who buy more than $200 worth of apparel at a time.…

A retail IT lesson from the world of politics? Maybe. Web tracking firm Keynote studied the text message blast sent by the U.S. presidential campaign of Barack Obama, the one in which his campaign promised to tell supporters his VP selection before it was broadly announced.

That message didn’t quite work out politically, as CNN broadcast the choice hours before the text blast was supposed to start. As a result, the campaign immediately triggered the blast, which didn’t work well, either. About 50 percent of people who subscribed to receive the text message from the Obama campaign regarding the VP pick may not have received it “in a timely fashion and perhaps not at all,” Keynote said. Does this mean Common Short Code SMS messaging won’t work for large national blasts? Not necessarily. But if you’re relying on getting your data out to prospects, it’s probably a good idea to vote for a different transmission method. …

Has Amazon decided what it wants to be when it grows up? More to the point, are there indications that it has now decided that one thing it does not want to be is yet another thin-margined retailer?

One tech blogger is arguing that Amazon wants to get as far away from retailing as possible by examining its hiring choices surrounding Kindle and Amazon’s Web Services. Interesting reading.…

Mike Osier, head of IT Operations at Netflix, wrote in a blog posting on Aug. 22 that it was "a key faulty hardware component" that caused the hiccup. "On Monday, 8/11, our monitors flagged a database corruption event in our shipping system," Osier said. But why does the site hide its blog? Read more...

With the frequent product changes executed by any large e-tailer’s site, the tech hurdles of launching a mirror site in another language can be daunting. But this challenge has created a small industry of companies that are trying to facilitate rapid globalization for e-tailers.

One such company is an 8-year-old outfit called MotionPoint, which has an interesting method for mirroring retail sites, described in this Wednesday (Sept. 2) story in The Financial Times of London: “When a customer wants to access a foreign language version of a particular site, page or item, a MotionPoint server passes on the request to the original site. The response, in English, prompts MotionPoint to retrieve a previously translated version of the page or item held in its own stored data and send it on to the customer. The foreign language versions of each page or product are kept updated by human translators, who use software that ensures the translation fits the space available on the page. They are also automatically alerted to changes made on the original site, enabling material to be updated within a few hours rather than the days required by a traditional operation with translators not working directly on a Web-based system.”…

JCPenney is testing the Australian waters a bit with an online push. The retailers has a local URL and an Australian company handling all operations, but it’s still shipping merchandise from the States and asking Australian shoppers to wait “12 to 14 working days. This “request” prompted one Australian publication to ask “whether Australians would be prepared to wait two weeks to receive something purchased online, especially when goods shipped from Amazon in the U.S. generally arrive within a week if in stock.”

But any online attention is a good thing, that story said, given “the ambivalence shown to online shopping by Myer, Target (Australia) and David Jones.” Sharon Hooker, operations manager of JCPIC Australia, said global currency fluctuations may prove helpful: “All prices on the JCPenney Australia site are shown in Australian dollars. With many items priced comparatively lower in the United States, buyers are in for some very pleasant surprises.”…

In an overall down market where the 150-store Nordstrom chain is seeing a 4.3 percent sales drop, online operations are jumping 15 percent–accounting for almost 8 percent of all sales. Company execs now project online to soon top 10 percent. Even more intriguing: Nordstrom is reporting a sharp increase in the number of multi-channel shoppers, who now represent almost a third of all sales.

But Nordstrom is doing online differently, according to this wonderful profile in The Puget Sound Business Journal (Seattle). First, Nordstrom is delivering the identical merchandise online and offline, a tactic quite different than many other cross-channel retailers. Secondly, its call center staffing has not been outsourced, a move that the customer service-intensive chain said gives it a competitive advantage.…

In various discussion groups, sellers have criticized eBay, saying its new fee policy liberally uses what some sellers not-so-fondly dub "eBay math."Read more...

In North America, "the mean estimate for share of IT budget devoted to innovation in 2007 was 35 percent," the Forrester report said. "But a lower median at 30 percent and mode at 20 percent suggest that a few retailers planned heavy funding of innovation, while most planned much less investment." Read more...

A lot of retailers have been tinkering with the idea of using virtual online worlds as a marketing tool, but there haven’t been many major retailers committing to the strategy, with the possible exception of Circuit City. As major chains are doubling up their focus on computer-savvy young consumers, though, other major chains are finding their aversion to avatars giving in to their adoration of avarice.

Sears, Kohl’s and J.C. Penny are the latest chains to try selling clothes in popular teen virtual worlds, allowing users to purchase apparel for online avatars. The retailers are teaming up with avatar sites and animating actual apparel lines that teens and tweens can place on their avatar characters, according to this Wall Street Journal piece. …

A “persistent and mysterious technical glitch” has severely disrupted business operations at the massive online film rental site Netflix, “potentially affecting millions of its customers,” according to this story in The San Jose Mercury News.(UPDATE: ValleyWag is reporting that the outage happened “because of massive database corruption in their Oracle cluster caused by a botched upgrade”)

The company was unable to ship any DVDs to its customers on Tuesday (Aug. 12), managed only some deliveries Wednesday and said it again was forced to halt shipments for much of the day Thursday, said Netflix spokesman Steve Swasey. A company-issued blog post warned that “the issues we’ve faced over the last several days have been significant and there’s no guarantee at this point that our shipping operations will be fully restored by tomorrow.” The story said that the note did not identify the cause of the problem and Swasey previously said Netflix executives were having trouble isolating it.…

But the $20 billion retail chain, with roots dating back to 1902, decided to use its customers' payment card numbers as customer identification numbers. To avoid PCI conflict, J.C. Penney is using a form of tokenization to convert those payment card numbers into "a different ID number," said company spokeswoman Kate Parkhouse.Read more...

Some are questioning, though, whether the chain's lower priced approach might limit the number of consumer phones that can access the related content. Read more...

It seems Circuit City has concluded that the Web isn’t just a fad, after all, with a major E-Commerce revamp coming just a couple of weeks after the chain confirmed a substantial multimedia push for its employee-training extranet.

Beyond alliances with a host of publishing companies to share their content on circuitcity.com, the changes announced Tuesday (Aug. 13) acknowledged that most Circuit City customers use the Web to decide if they’ll go to a store. “The Internet is our new front door,” said Brian S. Bradley, Circuit City’s senior vice president for multi-channel. The changes include blog entries, more demos and an interactive forum for talk with each other and Circuit City sales reps. Love how the interactive forum is painted as a CC innovation. Wonder if these guys ever heard of Usenet?…

"What is surprising is that the top 15 sites are typically much less reliant on the Internet for their revenues than the bottom 15," said Lawrence Shaw, founder of Sitemorse, which co-created the study. "If the table was reversed, then it would make more sense." Read more...

If it makes U.S. retailers feel any better, their U.K. counterparts aren’t faring any better in making cross-channel and especially merged channel efforts work. The percentage of online sales among those merchants has plateaued, holding steady at 4.4 percent for the last two years, according to a Martec report.

What makes those numbers look even weaker is that those figures have flat-lined while the percentage of U.K. retailers offering E-Commerce sites have been sharply increasing, hitting 68 percent this year, compared with 58 percent in 2007. …