Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

At $388 billion in annual revenue, handling Wal-Mart’s ERP financial application is nothing if not challenging. But when Wal-Mart last year turned to SAP to take over many of the financial functions that the chain had been handling with in-house software, it was a concession that it can’t push its homegrown apps as far as it used to. This is especially true as the company continues its aggressive global expansion.

Wal-Mart CFO Tom Schoewe said this month that the first phase of the global roll-out is expected to be completed in the next two years, with two remaining phases kicking in over the next five years, according to Wal-Mart spokesperson John Simley. “It is a departure for us to standardize on something (from a third-party) rather than homegrown,” Simley said. …

The new machines are called e-Spot automated retail shops and are designed to deliver consumer electronics—initially offering iPods, digital cameras, camcorders, mobile accessories and headphones priced anywhere from $15 to $350—as though they were candy, literally. The machines function just as a candy or sandwich vending machine does, in that they accept the payment (typically a credit card or a gift card) and then drop the product to where the customer can retrieve it. Read more...

The idea of offering consumers financial bribes if they use a particular search engine has been tried before, without success. But Microsoft's entry into this field—the latest in a series of Redmond gambits to try and breathe life into its search engine—is different from earlier efforts. Read more...

The 59-year-old Mervyns department store chain, with 177 stores in seven states and about $2.5 billion in annual revenue, certainly can’t be accused of rushing into technological fads. On Tuesday (May 20), some 15 years after the World Wide Web launched, Mervyns announced that it would launch an E-Commerce site sometime “in the fourth quarter of 2008.”

The site—which a Mervyns statement said “could quickly grow into a $50 million business”—will be outsourced to an unspecified “nationally recognized provider of turnkey order entry and fulfillment services.” What’s next? Maybe next year they’ll explore these new-fangled push-button telephones.…

As more consumers use search engines to find products filtered by a single attribute–such as price–shopping cart abandonment rates are increasing, according to E-Commerce vendor MarketLive, which tracks such matters.

The shopping cart abandonment rate went up 2.7 percent, from 57.88 percent in Q1 2007 to 59.43 percent in the first quarter of this year, while “one-and-out” visits to E-Commerce sites jumped 18.9 percent, from 32.94 percent to 39.15 percent, based on MarketLive Performance Index figures that rely on activity from nearly 100 E-Commerce sites, according to this Internet Retailer story. The piece quoted Jaye Sullivan, senior Internet strategist at MarketLive, as saying that about two-thirds of consumers now start their research at search engines, “which means many visitors are new to E-Commerce sites and more likely to click off quickly if they don’t find what they want. More people are doing research and they’re price-sensitive, so they’re opening up more carts to check out the price.”…

Although this doesn’t shed any light on this year’s recession, American consumers were certainly spending-friendly last year, having spent with retailers $201 billion more last year than the year before, according to new figures published Tuesday (May 20) by The Nilson Report.

But in a trend that might prove to be bad news for retailers, Nilson reported a sharp move away from credit card and toward debit cards. “Purchase volume on Visa and MasterCard debit cards increased by $97.11 billion in 2007. Visa’s increase was $58.16 billion, while MasterCard’s increase was $38.95 billion,” the report said. The bad part? These figures confirm that consumers often spend a lot less with debit cards: “The average annual purchase volume per Visa debit card was $2,046 in 2007, down from $2,350 in 2006. The average annual purchase volume per MasterCard debit card was $1,715, up from $1,583.” …

To use a chess analogy, many e-tailers today see the strength of their multimedia entertainment offerings as akin to controlling the center of the board. On top of recent moves by Sears, Blockbuster and Netflix, Napster on Tuesday (May 20) announced what it dubbed the world’s largest music download site, with some 6 million selections.

Napster’s all-MP3 launch reflects an interesting E-Commerce trend. Although pure entertainment plays like Napster, Netflix and Blockbuster will likely be content with the healthy profits of downloadable multimedia (Blockbuster will likely be thrilled with any profit, but that’s another story), it’s the Sears and Amazons of the world that see entertainment as a way to lure in younger consumers, to set up much more expensive purchases down the road. But unlike similar historic strategies, the entertainment downloads are anything but loss-leaders.…

Sears is in a fascinating online position. On the one hand, the $50 billion 3,800-store-chain says its online numbers are soaring, with the number of unique visitors in February 2008 reportedly rising 20 percent in that month. But Sears.com has also run into quite a few speedbumps. Read more...

A tech blogger noticed something strange when trying to purchase a Linux laptop on BestBuy.com. The system’s automatic recommendations for that Linux-based laptop included Windows versions of Microsoft Office and Norton Antivirus.

Rich Menga, who reported the item for a PCMech.com story, commented better than I could: “Hey, Best Buy. It’s a distinct possibility that Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 for Windows and Norton AntiVirus 2008 for Windows won’t run correctly on an EeePC with Linux. Just a hunch.”…

That which keeps consumers satisfied seems to be part of an E-Commerce site’s culture, as top (and bottom) players tend to show little movement, year to year. The latest results from measurement firm ForeSee Results seem to reinforce that.

Several of the top sites this year (Netflix, QVC, Amazon, DrsFosterSmith, Shutterfly and Newegg) changed only a few percentage points—and often less—from last year’s numbers. The percentage change for those at the bottom of the list (PCMall, PCConnection, Efollet, Bidz and Home Depot) is even smaller. ForeSee CEO Larry Freed said that a score of 80 percent or higher is “a really good score,” in the 70s “is in the average realm today” and anything below the 70s needs some serious work. Netflix came in at 86 percent, QVC at 84 percent and Amazon at 83 percent, while Home Depot and Bidz were both 69 percent, Efollet was at 68 percent and PCMall (the lowest) was at 67 percent.…

For e-tailers who still think that Web video may be a fad, consider this stat: In March 2008, U.S. Internet users watched 11.5 billion online videos. That’s a 13 percent gain from the prior month and a 64 percent gain from the identical month the prior year, according to Comscore.

In March, Google Sites once again ranked as the top U.S. video property with more than 4.3 billion videos viewed (38 percent share of all videos), gaining 2.6 share points versus the previous month. YouTube.com accounted for 98 percent of all videos viewed at Google Sites. Fox Interactive Media ranked second with 477 million videos (4.2 percent), followed by Yahoo Sites with 328 million (2.9 percent) and Viacom Digital with 249 million (2.2 percent).…

Thanks in no small part to soaring traffic on YouTube, Google for the first time took the top slot in American consumer reach in April 2008, besting Yahoo.

But it took that top slot just barely, reaching 141 million Americans in April. Yahoo ranked second with 140.6 million visitors, followed by Microsoft Sites with 121.2 million visitors. …

When TJX announced a MasterCard agreement last month to pay $24 million for data breach costs stemming from the industry’s worst payment card data breach, it was contingent on at least 90 percent of the banks agreeing.

No surprise, but TJX made that acceptance rate with room to spare, coming in at 99.5 percent, the retailer announced May 14. …

Retailers focused on contactless payment might want to circle July 24, 2008, on their calendar. That is when the U.S. Federal Trade Commission will hold a hearing in Seattle “to explore the growth of contactless payment systems and the implications for consumer protection policy.”

Here are the details of the FTC’s hearing along with a link to submit comments electronically. There are lots of legitimate pros and cons on this issue, but the panel should at least understand the merchant’s perspective.…

Guess this is what the cliche-afflicted would call a “sign of the times.” Macys is killing the Bloomingdale’s catalog while Amazon.com is selling copies of Bloomingdale’s 1886 catalog for $12. (Can you imagine the number of out-of-stocks in that thing?)

Current Bloomie’s owner Macys is killing the classic catalog “by early 2009” to focus more on its Web site and “reduce redundancies” (corporatespeak for pinkslip panic). A Macys statement even came up with a politically correct reason to zap the catalog: “Eliminating the paper catalog is also consistent with our sustainability and environmental policies of communicating more with customers electronically and less in paper.”…

The story began on May 8 when a woman visited a Baltimore Home Depot to buy a few odds and ends, including plants, pots and tile sealer. Read more...

Not only was Twitter's 37 hours and 16 minutes of downtime the worst in the group, it was almost double the amount of downtime from the second worst-performing site (Reunion.com, with 18 hours and 55 minutes of downtime). But even Twitter's numbers amounted to an uptime that sounded good: 98.72 percent. Pingdom's Peter Alguacil said those percentages can be misleading. Read more...

The $24 billion 5,000-store pharmacy chain joins an expanding list of national retailers who have agreed to make such changes, including 7-Eleven, RadioShack, Safeway, Trader Joe's and Wal-Mart. The most prominent retailer who has fought such efforts is Target, whose legal battle continues. Read more...

As retailers continue to experiment with mobile commerce, one potential problem is when mobile customers prove to be truly mobile. Let’s say a national chain sends an E-mail blast to the cellphones of 10,000 Boston-area customers, inviting them to visit the store for a free sample on Wednesday. The chain limits the offer to the Boston area through area code and other data.

But it just so happens that there’s a huge convention in San Jose that day of the Society Of People Who Live In Boston. Your San Jose locations get flooded with people asking for their free gift, leading to a lot of baffled employees and angry customers. This observation comes courtesy of a colleague who has far too much time on his hands to think up such things.…

Like it or not (place this father defiantly in the “not” category), children are using the Internet’s social network sites at a younger age, with retail marketers hovering close by. How young?

New stats show 17 percent of boys aged 10-12 used such sites last year, which is more than double the 8 percent who used social sites in 2006, according to the Harris Poll. For 10-12-year-old girls, the figure is 27 percent, more than 2-and-a-half times the prior year’s 11 percent. In the 13-15-year category, boys jump to 46 percent and girls jump to 54 percent. Oddly enough, that 54 percent for 13-to-15-year-old girls actually dropped three percent from 2006.…

Microsoft is “leaning toward going hostile in its pursuit of Yahoo,” with an announcement “likely” on May 2, according to a report in that day’s edition of The Wall Street Journal.

Although such a move would not likely have a direct impact on the IT side of E-Commerce with major retailers, it could sharply impact tens of thousands of smaller merchants that rely on Yahoo to sell their wares.…

Google says it has concocted a better way of searching for Web images, one that involves image-recognition to “see” what the image depicts as opposed to just reading the accompanying text.

This technique, called Visual Rank, has tremendous potential to shake up E-Commerce, which heavily relies on product images. The details were discussed by Google last week at the International World Wide Web Conference in Beijing, where two Google scientists described Visual Rank as “an algorithm for blending image-recognition software methods with techniques for weighting and ranking images that look most similar,” according to this New York Times story.…