Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Senior members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee have instructed top brass from several companies with strong Web interests–including Google, Microsoft, Comcast, AT&T and Verizon–to report back on whether they’ve tweaked their ads to match consumers’ online habits. Although no E-Commerce companies were initially contacted, if Congress tries to restrict Web sites from customizing their content, it will have a huge retail impact.

There’s not much of a real distinction between a traditional banner ad on MSN pushing the latest Disney movie and using the same technique on Macys.com to make sure that purses appear on its homepage and–for this particular customer–all are displayed as pink. As long as the focus is placed on permission rather than banning, the damage should be minimal. Nothing to worry about then. When’s the last time you heard of Congress overreacting to something it doesn’t understand?…

It’s the kind of issue that never existed in brick-and-mortars. When a physical store discontinues a physical product, gremlins don’t typically sneak into customers’ homes and take back the paid-for products. And yet, in effect, that’s what Yahoo inadvertently did when it shut down its music download service.

Yahoo announced a few months ago that it was shutting down its online music store, which includes killing the “servers used to validate that the music customers play is not violating copyright laws,” said a report in Forbes. Although Yahoo said that “music purchased on its music service will still work, users may not be able to move files to ‘new computers or devices.’ As a result, Yahoo is encouraging customers to burn CDs to back up the music they purchased.” Last week, Yahoo decided to offer customers coupons to pay for consumers to “replace their music collections on Rhapsody’s music store or give them a refund. Customers will have until the end of the year to take Yahoo up on its offer.”…

A possible new slogan for Borders.com in New York: “You give us 90 seconds. We’ll give you a lottery ticket.”

At least that seems to be the idea, as the book chain is trying to get consumers to spend 90 seconds on its newly launched E-Commerce site. For those willing to give it a try, the bookseller will enter them in a lottery to win $1,000. Hardly MegaBucks, but what do you expect from a bookseller? The only problem: Will this attract prospective customers or non-prospects who just want the money?…

Apparently, one of those mistakes included precisely how the retailer said it made too many mistakes, as the company made more than a half-dozen changes to its homepage apology from Wednesday to Thursday. Read more...

Deals like the Amazon-Tivo arrangement will present context-relevant ads to appear right alongside—or embedded within—various entertainment and information shows. For advertisers, this is merely the next logical step following obvious product placement in entertainment shows. ("Gosh, Grandma, what a large Apple logo you have!") For retailers, though, it's a way of getting that profitable E-Commerce site somewhere other than on a PC or on a smartphone. Read more...

As retailers watch the crucial social networking space, overwhelmingly dominant leader MySpace is very comfortably holding onto a 72 percent market share, according to stats covering June. But Facebook saw its growth soar 40 percent, which might be a bad omen for MySpace in a few years.

MySpace is still in a very comfortable position, holding a marketshare that is more than four times as large as Facebook’s 17 percent, according to figures released Wednesday (July 23) by Hitwise. Statistics, though, can be misleading, especially when the base numbers are small. A much smaller site called MyYearBook.com is only at 1.54 percent marketshare, but that was enough for it to register a 318 percent increase, compared with its 0.33 percent marketshare recorded last June.…

The latest data points, courtesy of a report issued Monday (July 21) by Comscore, have several encouraging points for global e-tailers looking to tap India's 1.1 billion people, which is more than triple the U.S.'s measly 303.8 million people.Read more...

Such is the case with the announcement Monday (July 21) that Wal-Mart is standardizing on an Oracle business intelligence package—Oracle's Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus (Oracle BI Suite EE Plus) to be precise. Read more...

But the specific tactics being considered—and detailed in a Web site for the group officially dubbed the Information Grand Voyage Project—includes searching history of game programs, blog postings, surreptitiously captured video segments from TVs and computers, tracking Wi-Fi locations and using an RFID reader connected to a cell phone to identify a consumer's activities "based on data captured by mobile device camera." Read more...

"How many smart people are out there who are simply not reserving inventory" for all channels, asked Forrester Principal Analyst George Lawrie. "You never know where demand is going to crystallize." He cited morale—not to mention inventory—problems caused by "reserving inventory for stores that could have been sold by the catalog or online channel." Read more...

Consumers older than 50 are rapidly growing fond of the Web, with such users checking news, for example, more frequently than those younger than 20 as well as participating in online communities more. But the new university study found that instant messaging and video downloads were “still tools for young users. Only 9 percent of users 50+ said IM was important or very important compared with 48 percent of users younger than 20.”

“The perception is that Americans over 50 only dabble on the Internet, but we are finding that they are increasingly spending time online becoming involved in robust Internet activities, such as online communities,” said Jeffrey I. Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School for Communication. “In specific areas, there is often little difference in use of online technology between older users and some of the youngest users.”…

For those e-tailers wondering if video is an effective way to reach American consumers, here’s the latest video stat, courtesy of Comscore: In May alone, U.S. Internet users viewed more than 12 billion online videos, representing an increase of 45 percent versus one year ago.

Nearly 142 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 85 videos per viewer in May. Google Sites also attracted the most viewers (83.8 million), who watched an average of 50 videos per person. Fox Interactive attracted the second most viewers (60.8 million), followed by Yahoo! Sites (40.2 million) and Microsoft Sites (29.5 million).…

The assumption of some anonymity on E-Commerce sites can be critical. Let's look at a scenario for Amazon.com. One of its most critical value-adds is customer comments—both good and bad—about its products. What if a consumer—employed in the consumer appliance world—purchased a toaster that was absolutely horrible? Read more...

Will consumers ever deploy counter-top barcode scanners and a Web site to have groceries delivered to them automatically? A company called Ikan.net is hoping they will.

The system combines a Web-connected barcode scanner, which scans every product before it’s thrown out or recycled, and then adds it to a shopping list. The list then is shared with either a grocery retailer directly or a grocery delivery service like Peapod, which does the delivery of the empty items. This nicely done New York Times story shows the efforts of its writer to use the system.…

A new E-commerce payment system at UrbanOutfitters.com allows users to complete purchases in one screen, boosting cart conversion rates by 19 percent, according to an Internet Retailer story that quoted Dmitri Siegel, managing director of Urban Outfitters Direct.

The original approach forced customers to use several pages to handle payment, address and other purchase details. “We were losing a lot of customers with that,” Siegel said.…

Amazon.com on Wednesday (July 9) finally deployed Bill Me Later as a payment option, almost eight months to the day after Amazon announced its intent to do so.

The credit-card-less payment option is partially owned by Amazon (Bill Me Later would only say that it was a minority investment), which is OK, given that Google owns GoogleCheckout and EBay owns PayPal. Web giants simply can’t go anywhere these days without sporting their very own alternative payment vendor. …

The first outage on June 20 was an internal glitch with the retailer's delivery processing system, forcing the chain to take down its site because it couldn't fulfill the orders. But the site itself wasn't the problem. Read more...

On Tuesday (July 8), the tenth day of the problematic performance and a "our website and call center are running slowly as we fine-tune the improvements" apology replacing JCrew's homepage, JCrew spokesperson Margot Brunelle-Fooshee said the problems are still slowing things down and the associated disclaimer "will probably be up until Friday" (July 11).Read more...

J.C. Penney customers are twice as likely to say they are highly satisfied with their in-store shopping experience if they are working with store employees who are accessing the company’s Web site while standing next to them. That according to an Internet Retailer story quoting Kevin Gebhardt, the chain’s director of multi-channel coordination and implementation.

It’s been almost two years since the chain connected all 35,000 of its point-of-sale systems to the Web, giving associates in its nearly 1,100 stores access to the retailer’s e-commerce site, JCP.com, the story said. “J.C. Penney also has tested placing Web-enabled kiosks in stores so that customers can access JCP.com on their own, but decided against deploying them,” Gebhardt said. He added that “the retailer is focusing on helping employees provide better service rather than on self-service technologies, with the exception of kiosks that customers use for accessing online gift registries.” …

The London-based 823-store Sainsbury's grocery chain immediately issued almost a half-million dollars' worth of £10 (roughly equivalent to $20) vouchers to some 30,000 disgruntled customers and personally--through staff volunteers and no software automation—called every one of those 30,000 to apologize and tell them about the vouchers. Read more...

The conventional wisdom has held that China is not likely to embrace E-Commerce, because of the Chinese aversion to credit payments and fears of piracy and poor quality products. But a Forbes story this week makes a powerful argument that E-Commerce—and a credit-card lifestyle in general—will be coming to China very soon and in a big way.

“In interviews the China Market Research Group (CMR) has conducted with 500 young adults between the ages of 18 and 32 in six cities across China, nearly 80 percent of respondents said they had made an online purchase in the last six months. The vast majority expected to buy something again in the next quarter. Seventy percent said they weren’t putting aside any money in savings accounts and that they would use a credit card for online purchases if they had one,” the story said, adding that the study “suggests it is a lack of credit cards and other payment options, rather than a cultural aversion to buying online, that has curtailed the growth of e-commerce in China. But the problem of payment is resolving itself. Credit card use is booming as domestic banks like Bank of China and China Merchants Bank roll out services targeting consumers in China’s smaller cities. We expect the number of credit cards in China to increase fivefold, from 56 million at the end of 2006 to 250 million by the end of 2013.” …

"Response times for some short codes degraded severely during the busiest hours of the day. One CSC (common short code) showed a 60 percent peak-period slowdown every day, indicating a major capacity issue was present," Keynote said. "Many of the CSCs monitored showed significant reliability issues. Several (experienced) more than 10 hours of outage while one (experienced) more than 50 hours." Read more...

A UK company is pushing retailers to use voice-recognition to authenticate purchases over the phone and online.

The Voice Commerce Group’s Voice Transact package has consumers call the service, quote a pre-arranged product code and then a series of digits dictated by the automated system. Verizon is involved in the rollout. VCG CEO Nick Ogden was quoted in E-Commerce Times saying that there are “current problems with the system, the biggest of which was interoperability between different banks’ systems and the standards used in the technology.”…