Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

The new feature—dubbed Virtual Waiter and introduced by the fast-food chain on April 24—is based on "technology that gathers data from millions of online orders and suggests menu items that best match customers' orders." But a demo showed that the technology was much more sophisticated than that suggested.Read more...

EBay’s PayPal is following the path set by other alternative payment players and is starting to appear in physical stores.

It’s not a huge chain, but it’s a start. Moosejaw Mountaineering and its seven stores will now accept PayPal and the chain is also starting to use in-store kiosks to display online customer reviews, according to this Internet Retailer story. Neither move is a first. BillMeLater is already inching into online payments, and the Fair Indigo chain in Wisconsin already started the kiosk-search-through-Web-customer-reviews effort last year. Still, any movement toward Merged Channel is welcome.…

This question comes to mind when looking at some recent earnings reports. Wal-Mart's been faring well, but it points to increased grocery and other low-cost items, suggesting that they may be taking sales away from higher priced grocery rivals. That might be a recession sign. But this week's Amazon figures raise questions about such analysis. Read more...

Starbucks on April 23 cut back its financial projections for the year, citing continuing declines in its store traffic, especially in California and Florida. This is announced just a few weeks after Starbucks said it would shake up its Web presence.

But as we’ve noted before, Starbucks has always had an unusually weak Web presence, especially for a chain that for years dominated social networking buzz among younger consumers long before MySpace, Facebook or YouTube were factors. Is this the price that must be paid for years of Web neglect? Could an enthusiastic Web site have helped in-store sales?…

The E-Commerce folk over at the National Retail Federation–Shop.org–are not so quietly putting out feelers for a new VP gig to pull in other e-tailers.

The position details are what would be expected–overseeing research, coordinating with government lobbyists, developing best practices, etc.–but if there are any readers who want to try and shape how E-Commerce players are treated, it might be interesting. Scott Silverman, Shop.org’s executive director, is begging for interested folk to drop him a line at hr-shop@nrf.com. …

With that in mind, StorefrontBacktalk has been asking retailers, lawyers and other experts (and gadflies) for their favorite credit card security issue brain teasers. How many can you figure out? (No, there are no right answers, other than accepting cash.) Read more...

Those North Face executives are far from alone. As retailers and consumer goods manufacturers have been watching—mesmerized—consumers watch more than 10 billion U.S. Web videos in February, they have tried to figure out ways to make it work for them. Read more...

Linda Shea, the polling firm's senior vice president and global managing director of customer strategies, said the inability to answer questions was particularly telling, and it was the result of an E-Commerce double-whammy. It reflects a rapidly increasing set of consumer expectations when it comes to E-Commerce sites at the exact same time that retailers are slashing customer service budgets, she said. Read more...

The National Retail Federation’s Shop.org is lobbying the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to not flag consumers when their shopping behaviors are being tracked online, arguing that it would merely serve to frustrate those consumers.

In considering voluntary guidelines for E-Commerce behavioral advertising, the FTC is considering asking sites to display a “pop-up” notification whenever information is collected. Wrote Shop.org: “We all know how frustrating pop-ups can be when you are simply trying to read the latest headlines on a newspaper website. Now transfer that experience to a retail website where customers have come to expect a seamless experience from homepage to checkout. These types of ‘hiccups’ could be devastating.”…

In case there are two or three of you who are still skeptical about whether Web video will have an impact, consider these new figures. In February, U.S. Internet users viewed more than 10 billion online videos, which represents a 3 percent gain versus January (despite February being two days shorter) and a 66 percent gain versus February 2007, according to ComScore.

Google/YouTube was overwhelmingly the top source (at 35.4 percent), following by Fox (5.8 percent), Yahoo (2.9 percent), Microsoft (also 2.9 percent), Viacom (2.2 percent), Time Warner non-AOL (1.3 percent), Disney (1.3 percent), AOL (1.1 percent), ABC (1.0 percent) and Comcast (0.9 percent).

One more stat: Nearly 135 million U.S. Internet users spent an average of 204 minutes per person viewing online video in February.…

A DVD rental kiosk outfit has rolled out a kiosk that keeps track of orders and awards free videos for frequent shoppers. The idea of a kiosk that has a long-term memory and an active CRM component is a wonderful next step (OK, a baby step) for intelligent kiosks.

The new units from DVDPlay use E-mail addresses in lieu of a loyalty card. “By entering an E-mail address during the rental process, the stand-alone DVD rental machine’s patent-pending software recognizes the number of customer rental transactions and, after every tenth rental, generates a promotional code for a free movie that is automatically sent to the customer’s E-mail account,” said a statement issued by the company. …

Wal-Mart is pushing to create online communities for its customers, where Wal-Mart employees can sit on the sidelines, take notes and be influenced, or so suggests the chief marketing officer for online operations at the world’s largest retailer.

“Consider 130 million customers in a community sharing information on products they buy and use,” said Cathy Halligan, in this Marketing Daily story. “We learned you need to listen to these customers and implement the top-requested features.” …

With the exception of in-person pickups and cash-on-delivery, plus a handful of large-ticket items (specifically cars, motorcycles, aircraft, boats, caravans, trailers, commercial trucks, services, real estate and businesses) for sale, sellers will be required to offer eBay-owned PayPal as a payment method by May 21, in anticipation of the June 17 ban on anything else. Said eBay: "If we think these changes will significantly improve the buyer experience, we may expand them to additional segments of sellers or categories." Read more...

McDonald's is launching iced coffee as part of some new menu options and "part of our objective was to create additional awareness," especially among the younger consumers who McDonald's assumes will be receptive to a mobile coupon campaign." Read more...

That E-Commerce figure will hit $204 billion this year (when it's percent of total retail will climb to seven percent) and will continue to have major gains for the next several years, hitting $335 billion in annual sales by 2012, Forrester said. But one of the report's authors, Forrester Research Director Carrie Johnson, said that this isn't necessarily cause for retail celebration, as she projected that many of those increased sales are little more than online cannibalizing in-store sales.Read more...

The Web world defies prediction—or does it? Conventional wisdom would have the new up-and-coming retailers faring better online, while the old-style bigbox merchants lag behind. And yet, Starbucks has had far more online troubles than it should have while Sears, according to this intriguing Chicago Tribune feature, is soaring online.

The number of people who visited Sears.com and Kmart .com at least once in February—an industry metric known as unique visitors—rose 20 percent, to 14.7 million, from the same period last year. That makes Sears’ Web business the second-fastest-growing site among mass merchants in 2007. Sears clearly has some serious challenges, but go tell that to the company’s Web people.…

When Best Buy removed annual fees from its bonus card, the company yielded about 10 times the number of shoppers opting to sign up for its rewards program, according to this Forbes.com story.

A location that gains a reputation as a “flat-screen store,” for example, is identified as one frequented by more people with disposable incomes. Hence, salespeople are trained to pitch complimentary products, like sound systems and attachments. Interesting story…. …

The European Commission is cracking down on search engine data-retention, with a new proposed rule that search engines should delete personal data about their customers within six months.

The BBC News site said this recommendation is likely to be accepted by the European Commission and could lead to a clash with search giants like Google, Yahoo and MSN. “Google and MSN anonymise user data after 18 months, while Yahoo does the same after 13 months,” the BBC reported.…

ISPs have been quietly expanding their use of deep-packet inspection. They are capturing everything a user does–to the point where “at least 100,000 U.S. customers are tracked this way, and service providers have been testing it with as many as 10 percent of U.S. customers, according to tech companies involved in the data collection,” said a new report in The Washington Post.

The service providers exploring and testing such services have largely kept quiet–“for fear of customer revolt,” according to one executive involved who was quoted in the Post story. Each company allows users to opt out of the monitoring, though that permission is buried in customer service documents.…

covers a variety of uses (see the Patent's full text here as well as some illustrations that accompanied the federal filing), but its core functionality would require consumers to download a small applet to their phone, which would then be associated with a payment method plus a password and potentially some other authentication approach such as any form of biometrics. Password-only protection is the default scenario. Another piece of software would be installed in the retailer's POS system. Read more. Read more...

The service can also support Web searches—but that's hardly new—and is being positioned by Amazon as an easier way for consumers to make Amazon purchases. The transactions can be almost solely done via text, with an old-fashioned phonecall used to verify the purchase.Read more...

Although the coupon redemption rate has been steadily declining for at least 10 years, a new vendor survey suggests the recession may turn that around.

Of the 1,529 U.S. consumers who responded, 67 percent said they are much more likely, or somewhat more likely, to use coupons during a recession, according to the survey performed by ICOM Information & Communications. Technology is helping, though, with CRM doing better job targeting households and Web coupons finding new fans among the paper-repulsed young.…

Bankrupt Pay By Touch—officially using the name Solidus Networks—has sold off two key units for a total of $4.8 million.

Phoenix Check Cashing dropped $4.2 million to pick up Pay By Touch’s check-cash¬ing division, known as BioPay Paycheck Secure, according to The Nilson Report. Acculink paid $600,000 for ATM Direct, a unit trying to introduce PIN-based debit card payments for E-Commerce sites, the publication reported.…

The security exec then asked an annoyingly thought-provoking question: What do you think would happen if retailers were given perfect encryption? Answering his own question (because I certainly wasn't able to do it), he painted a picture of retailers who would use their perfectly-protected data and would confidently let it ride atop the public Internet. At that point, paying for the private security tunnels of a Visa or MasterCard would no longer be essential. Read more...