When Oracle finally introduced its Retail 13 integrated suite this week, after three years of acquisition and integration, the teams working for the world’s largest enterprise software vendor might have breathed a sigh of relief. They might have hoped that the hardest part was behind them.
But creating a vast integrated suite is not the hard part. Convincing retail IT execs, worried about politics, perception and pragmatism, to turn over their most valuable data to one license-fee-hungry vendor? That’s where the real fun starts. Read more.…
At some point in the last decade, nearly every organization involved in electronic commerce did an evaluation of payment gateways. So, what's changed? Read more...
A Verizon Business security report analyzed more than 500 data breach incidents over four years and found that 73 percent started from the outside and only 18 percent were inside jobs. Read more...
The hypothetical Nordstrom example shows how much less respect is paid to the online consumer than the brick-and-mortar one. Does the inherent anonymity in the Web cut both ways? Like the site visitors emboldened by their namelessness who post comments and get into flame wars that they would never have the nerve to try in person, are E-tailers treating their customers with a disrespect that they would never dare consider in a physical store? Read more...
E-tailers in continental Europe are just now starting to get hit by slower growth, but they are still shining much more brightly than their U.S. counterparts, according to new figures from eMarketer.
In the first five days of sales earlier this year, French trade group FEVAD noted a 25 percent rise in revenues from nine leading online retailers in 2008, compared with the same period in 2007. “The group predicts that B2C e-commerce will grow 30 percent this year,” eMarketer said. “That is down from 35 percent in 2007, but still quite healthy.” …
Just in time for Friday the 13th, Oracle is finally ready to unveil Oracle Retail V 13, with a formal rollout slated for Tuesday (June 17).
Oracle’s main retail suite is not expected to undergo any radical changes (even the name change is expected to be slight); it’s mostly claims of better integration and interoperability.…
"One thing that is true about Amazon's site is that it is very complex, utilizing numerous backend database, proxy servers, distributed application and Web servers, lots of dynamic images, etc.," said Shawn White, director of external operations at Web site performance tracking firm Keynote. "Even accessing the homepage involves complex multi-step interactions between the Web browser and a number of backend systems within Amazon." Read more...
Major retailers won't invest in a truly robust mobile deployment until they see most of their rivals doing so. Yes, this is why American business is in the global position it's in today—that grand American Can-Do-But-Only-If-You-Do-It-First attitude. Read more...
The Meijer department store chain–with 182 stores in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Kentucky–is getting creative with its Web site, food recipes and online coupons. A widget for the chain allows a visitor to see a desired recipe, drag it into a calendar and have shopping lists automatically populate with the needed items along with targeted coupons for key ingredients.
Developed by Qponix, a joint venture between Meijer and Fry, the program is testing whether the online coupon-recipe-shopping-list integration will help boost sales in a soft-sell kind of way.…
New York State has started pushing to collect sales tax from e-tailers that have no physical presence in the state, prompting Amazon and Overstock to fight back. But as this BusinessWeek story describes, e-tailers are fighting back with different legal strategies.
All are hoping against the odds that other states don’t pull the same revenue-generating attempt. If New York gets legal greenlights, several more states will quickly mimic its efforts, leading to a flood of almost every state within two years. If it’s going to happen, better it happen quickly. With one or two states, consumers will feel the tax pain and will look elsewhere. When it’s universal, though, it will blend into that amorphous cost of doing business and will cease changing behavior.…
Note to retailers looking to offer free Wi-Fi: It’s a good idea to first make sure you can make the offer. Starbucks discovered that an offer of two hours of free Wi-Fi a day simply wasn’t working.
“Due to overwhelming interest in Card Rewards we are currently experiencing difficulty accessing Starbucks Card accounts. We are working to fix the problem and ask that you please try again later,” said a page shown to site visitors, according to this IDG News Service story. A Starbucks spokesman said that the problems were on Starbucks’ end, not AT&T’s. “Customers overwhelmed the site when joining Starbucks Card Rewards,” said Doug Cavarocchi, a Starbucks spokesman, in an e-mail. …
A university study of cellphone users’ habits–which found that nearly half of the people tracked kept to a circle little more than six miles wide–is raising some ethical issues and might suggest a non-traditional retail testing method.
The Northeastern University study–according to this Associated Press story–could only have done its secret tracking because it was conducted outside of the United States, because such testing would likely be illegal here. Retailers looking to try out new mobile strategies might consider testing the domestic-only applications overseas.…
When Best Buy launched a Spanish version of its site last fall (2007), E-Commerce officials quickly noticed unexpected activity, such as customers spending twice as much time on the Spanish site.
“Spanish speakers could well be hungry for online product information, as only 18 of the 102 largest online retail sites had any Spanish content in late 2006,” said this Internet Retailer story. Best Buy chose not to translate all products into Spanish, instead limiting them to “complex products, such as computers and home theater systems” but “not more easily understood products such as movies and music.”…
Most U.S. Web sites fail the most basic of site performance tests, according to new stats issued by Pingdom. “The worst performance grades were given to Foxnews.com, IGN.com, Gamespot.com, CNN.com, Break.com and ESPN.go.com. The best performance grades were given to Google.com, Live.com, Orkut.com and Craigslist.org. This is not entirely surprising considering their minimalistic style.”
But the more interesting part of the Pingdom stats is the analysis that looks at the sites’ size, HTTP requests and caching. It’s worth a read.…
The dotcom side is trying something similar, but the virtually infinite nature of online means that the Borders site can display as many books as it wants. The ability to drag the shelf to the left or right keeps the cover images flowing. Called the "magic shelf," that feature "is way more robust than it was before" in beta testing, said Kevin Ertell, the Borders E-Commerce exec who is in charge of the site. Read more...
But the change for The Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy and PiperLime is delicate, as the company still wants those brands to maintain their distinct personalities. Those conflicting goals give the new site a bit of a Jekyll-and-Hyde feel, as though a long-time favorite clothing store suddenly stopped remembering to take its medication. Read more...
Barnes & Noble on Wednesday (May 28) launched its mobile E-Commerce site, which is pretty much a super-slimmed down version of its regular site.
B&N Mobile includes search, store-finder, book availability and order tracking. It’s not an especially sophisticated site, but it puts the world’s largest physical world bookstore on a very short list of major e-tailers who have bothered to design a version of their site for the cellphone.…
Like many ex-cons, when Martha Stewart got out of prison, she had a different outlook on life. So she’s going to relaunch her E-Commerce site. But this time, she’ll try and do it right by doing as little as possible.
In their new direct-to-consumer model, the homemaking queen will use her site to make the pitch, but all aspects of the site will be outsourced. “On the old site, we did the manufacturing, we held the inventory, the products were great and we lost an enormous amount of money. It’s not what we’re good at,” Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia CEO Susan Lyne said, according to this Internet Retailer story.…
New E-Commerce figures from e-Marketer show continued growth over the several years, but the rate of growth will quickly drop. The firm reported, for example, that last year’s E-Commerce sales hit $127.7 billion, a figure that they are projecting to steadily rise to hit $218.4 billion in four years.
But the percentage of growth shows an opposite story, with last year’s 19.8 percent growth dropping to 14.3 percent this year, 12.5 percent next year and down to 8.9 percent in four years. A senior analyst for eMarketer, Jeff Grau, said the declines were not necessarily horrible E-Commerce news. “A drop in the number of new online buyers is an inevitable sign of the maturation of the online retail channel,” he said.…
About 36 percent of all E-Commerce shoppers who abandon their shopping cart did so because the purchase total was a lot more than they had expected. That’s one takeaway from an April PayPal survey of U.S. e-tail consumers.
The survey offered few surprises, but the quantification of the stated reasons was intriguing. The top cause was the expected “shipping charges were too high” (43 percent). The remaining cart surrender reasons were the consumer wanted to do more comparison shopping (27 percent), the prospect “could not contact customer support to answer questions” (16 percent) and some 14 percent said they gave up because they had forgotten their username and/or password.…
MasterCard Canada this summer will start a 4-month NFC-phone trial, with the backing of some of Canada’s largest retailers, including Loblaw, Petro Canada, Tim Hortons’, Pioneer Petroleum, Rabba Foods, a major NHL arena and McDonalds.
One unusual aspect of the trial is that it will eventually support more than one payment card on each phone, said MasterCard Canada’s Nagesh Devata.…
Amazon is preparing to expand its entertainment offerings, with a planned streaming video launch “in the next few weeks,” according to a speech given Wednesday (May 28) by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
Amazon already offers video downloads and has a deal with Tivo to let consumers watch Amazon-purchased videos on their televisions. But a streaming feed would allow much more control over viewing limits and would also allow for near-instant viewing.…
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
