Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

The retail move to embrace 2-D barcodes that began with a Sears trial in December and strong interest from BestBuy, the Gap and Target is inching forward, with a 500-store trial starting Thursday in San Francisco.

The trial, involving CitySearch, Antenna Audio and Scanbuy, is a fairly basic mobile integration effort. “More than 500 restaurants, shops and businesses reviewed by Citysearch are placing printed bar codes in their windows, and people who have Scanbuy software loaded on their phones can simply take a picture of the code and their phone’s Internet browser will immediately take them to the restaurant’s corresponding Citysearch page,” said a statement from the group.…

Social networking giant Facebook suffered a major privacy glitch this week, where strangers were able to download members’ supposedly private restricted photos.
The Associated Press broke the story this week. “The Associated Press verified the loophole Monday after receiving a tip from a Byron Ng, a Vancouver, Canada computer technician. Ng began looking for security weaknesses last week after Facebook unveiled more ways for 67 million members to restrict access to their personal profiles,” the story reported. “But the added protections weren’t enough to prevent Ng from pulling up the most recent pictures posted by Facebook members and their friends, even if the privacy settings were set to restrict the audience to a select few.”…

Saks is seeing how far it can take Web multimedia, by trying to morph its online catalogue with live video and creating a live model runway show.

The test focuses on Saks’ three best-selling departments: Contemporary ready-to-wear, handbags, and shoes, according to this MediaPost story. “Since Saks knows that about 99 percent of its shoppers have broadband access, ‘it’s been great for us,'” said Denise Incandela, president of Saks Direct. “You can have movement, voice-over, music and information, with narrators talking about what’s important in each look.”…

The change to the Starbucks Card Rewards program shows not just an understanding of customer service, but a realization that the best way to make a CRM program successful is to focus on benefits—true benefits—for both the customer and the retailer. Instead of merely tracking purchases and offering small discounts (adjusting the price of a cup of flavored coffee down from ludicrously overpriced to merely absurdly overpriced. Buy one more croissant and tomorrow you can enjoy a cup of Joe that is only insultingly overpriced), Starbucks is getting creative about rewards. Read more...

Among the retailers that are referenced as most intelligently embracing merged channels–the true channel-agnostic merchant–is Borders, whether it’s with their new concept stores or their breakup with Amazon.com.

It’s therefore an especially troubling note that they are having financial difficulties, as detailed in this New York Times piece. It’s an age-old business belief that few chains truly buy into and adopt major strategic changes until it’s too late. I hope that Borders turns out to be the exception.…

The European Union has given the greenlight to Google’s multi-billion dollar takeover of Doubleclick, saying that there will still be plenty of online ad competition.

The European go-ahead followed a similar decision by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission late last year. “Google is hoping to offer a fuller set of online-advertising offerings and capitalize on DoubleClick’s relationships with Web publishers and advertisers to sell ads on behalf of more sites, with Google taking a commission,” the Wall Street Journal reported.…

"We need to do a little more training," said Michael Verdesca, the chain's VP for systems development. Read more...

The laptop label that the company, Cybersource, uses is not actually based on the computer's unique identification, as such data can't be easily learned by the clues they drop when surfing. Instead, it's based on the intersection of several routine characteristics, which combined make it fairly likely it's the same machine. Some of the individual details would include the browser version, the exact operating system ID and the time differential on the system's clock ("clock drift"). Read more...

As Wal-Mart toys with various approaches to grow and continue to dominate retail, a Wal-Mart experiment in Michigan is fascinating in its difference. It has crafted a store focused on the local Middle Eastern community, complete with Muslim greeting cards, Lebanese pop CDs and kusa and batenjan among the produce offerings.

Technology is not a key factor in this store’s approach, according to this detailed Newsweek story, but the store truly catering to the local residents is impressive nonetheless. How’s this for not acting like Wal-Mart? “The insular company even agreed to be scrutinized by a community advisory board made up of local Arab-American leaders to ensure it isn’t harming the mom-and-pop shops. One example: Wal-Mart agreed to charge one dime more than local grocers for a six-pack of pita bread.”…

Hello, blog readers! We’ve been approached by a company that wants to create a 3-D environment for StorefrontBacktalk, complete with avatars for all readers. Before we explored this more seriously, we wanted to ask our readers whether we should proceed. Therefore…

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The reality is, though, that brands still matter very much. Those brands come with all of the good and the not-so-good reputations of that retailer. Will Wal-Mart The Usurper's reputation be tamed with a friendly and candid blog face? Read more...

First up was a gift card exchange site called Leverage. Leverage didn't offer to make good on the Sharper Image gift cards, but it did offer to make whole any of its own customers who bought Sharper Image gift cards through Leverage's site. That move will cost Leverage "a few thousand dollars," said Leverage CEO Mark Edward Roberts. Read more...

The two-employee a-cappella.com was deluged with requests for an old DVD when a YouTube copy of the video--which had been lying dormant on YouTube for almost a year--suddenly started getting 400,000 daily views. Seems that a-cappella.com was the only merchant to have the video for sale. Read more...

This move comes on top of an incident earlier this month when an undersea cable was cut near Dubai, also wreaking havoc with global Internet traffic. Are more robust safeguards needed? Is these kinds of disruptions can be happen so easily by accidents, how vulnerable would they be to deliberate terrorist efforts? Read more...

The stops and starts of mobile commerce in the U.S. has been well reported, along with the fact that many parts of Europe and Asia are well ahead of us. But here is a fascinating CNN report out of Kenya that details mobile-commerce efforts among–so help me–goat traders.

No, we’re not talking about Wall Street sorts, as in oil traders. We’re talking people working the fields selling and buying goats, where all funds quickly get converted into virtual dollars. There are no bank accounts nor credit cards behind these transactions. It goes from cash to mobile. …

For example, one of the digital services for their in-store kiosk was from an E-Commerce site called Shutterfly.com. That decision went beyond the attraction of digital photos, said Kevin Ertell, Borders' E-commerce chief. Read more...

But it's been difficult to quantify the ROI of such chat functions, mostly because it's impossible to know reliably what the customer would have likely done had a chat session not happened. Forrester Research this week this to quantify the slippery ROI arguments for interactive chat and made an eloquent case for chat investment. Read more...

Amazon's own change involves it selling access to its pages to direct rivals. The backstory involves the stunningly thin margins that an E-Commerce behemoth like Amazon enjoys and the realization that Amazon might be able to enjoy better profits by taking a cut of a rival's revenue than by selling the item directly. Read more...

With CRM systems trying to interact with Web analytics, mobile databases, purchase and returns histories and tons of other non-payment databases, the amount of non-credit-card data that is at risk easily dwarfs Visa transactions. Read more...

Tie-ups with Disney and Google are also being considered, as Microsoft says that Yahoo reneged on an earlier deal to cooperate with Microsoft to fight Google. Read more...

That conclusion came out of a Borders analysis of a weekly newsletter it has been sending to most of its loyalty program members. Although newsletters drove people into the stores, those consumers who wanted coupons were 31 percent less satisfied—and were 13 percent less likely to make a purchase—than those who sought content. Read more...

The top entries from those countries that made the list were China's Bailian Group (7.5 billion Euros), which entered the list at number 101, and Russia's X5 Retail Group NV ($3.6 billion) at number 191. The complete list itself also shows other changes in the world, with Tesco PLC ($80 billion) assuming its place as the world's fourth-largest retailer, pushing Germany's Metro AG ($75 billion) down to fifth. Read more...

Yahoo’s board of directors on Monday will officially reject Microsoft’s $45 billion bid to takeover the Web portal leader, concluding that the offer “massively undervalues” Yahoo, according to a store in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal.

Not only is the $31/share bid too low, but it “also doesn’t account for the risks Yahoo would be taking by entering into an agreement that might be overturned by regulators,” the story said, adding that a board source said the board would be “unlikely to consider any offer below $40 per share.” Whether this turns into a hostile takeover situation is up to Microsoft, but the move was expected as few boards would accept such an offer without trying to negotiate for more. Microsoft would be equally unlikely to have opened bidding with its top price.…

Breach letters are being sent out so frequently that I wonder if it's going to pique the business interests of Hallmark. A card for every occasion, when you care enough to breach the very best. Perhaps a merger with their Get Well cards? "Sorry to hear that you're not getting around these days.... [open card] .... but your CVV sure as heck is. Call 1-800-DATA-OOPS for your free year of credit monitoring, courtesy of your neighborhood retail chain." Read more...

The Yahoo deal suffers from the same shortcoming that hangs over so many "unlimited" offerings, namely that there truly is some kind of a limit but that customers won't learn what those limits are until after they've bought and started using the service. Read more...