Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

The timing of this nation-wide hiccup couldn't have come at a worse time for retailers. Merchants and giftcard exchange sites have been pushing giftcard convenience more aggressively this year than ever, positioning it as the ultimate hassle-free gift. To have that network crash on Dec. 26—one of the busiest days for gift returns and gift card redemptions—is certainly not ideal. Read more...

Also roughly the same was the sequencing of the top—and bottom—players, with Netflix, Amazon, QVC, L.L. Bean and Apple faring the best and OfficeMax, CompUSA, SonyStyle, Overstock and Buy.com grabbing the worst slots.Read more...

As small groups of Web thinkers sketch out what Web 3.0–the so-called Semantic Web–may look like, how much attention should E-Commerce execs be paying?

In an interesting RetailWire story and discussion, questions are raised about whether this will be a broad transition or merely a niche enhancement for those who bother. But if major e-tailers want to change, the sad reality is that they need to get involved early or surrender the ability to complain later. Given how much E-Commerce execs love to complain, that latter option seems unrealistic. ;-)…

When Amazon.com releases its holiday sales stats on Wednesday, there wasn’t anything truly newsworthy in it. Still, the volume of sales being churned out by the world’s largest E-Commerce outfit is worth a brief look.

For example, on one day (Dec. 10), Amazon sold more than 5.4 million items and shipped more 3.9 million units. An Amazon statement calculated that it sold 62.5 items every second on Dec. 10.…

The latest developer fad spreading through the Web—allowing consumers to drag and drop their personal photos onto virtual models—is now moving into E-Commerce.

My Virtual Model is working with Sears, Best Buy and Lands’ End to move products and catalogues into 2D and 3D. But the ability to personalize models so that the clothing choices can factor in the person’s face-shape and eye-color and those over-sized Dumbo ears is intriguing. The problem is that the photo choice is done by the consumer, which often leads to some humorously mismatched sizes, with the virtual model looking less like something out of Vogue and more like a cartoon in Mad Magazine. …

During the watched period, Mastercard's site was down for almost five hours (4 hours, 54 minutes), compared with the second-worst site (Discover's) with 45 minutes of downtime and the third-worst site (Visa Europe) at 14 minutes of downtime. The next two sites were Diner's Club (nine minutes of downtime) and Visa (five minutes of downtime) with AmericanExpress and Maestro both experiencing zero downtime during the watched period. Read more...

In a move with significant potential impact for online marketing, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has cleared Google’s $3.1 billion takeover of DoubleClick.

Saying the deal is “unlikely to substantially lessen competition,” the commission voted 4-to-1 to approve. But the transaction still faces substantial antitrust scrutiny in Europe and Google has said that it won’t close the deal before it has clearance from European regulators,” said this Wall Street Journal story. The European Commission has set a deadline of April 2, 2008, to complete its review, the Journal said.…

Sports Authority, some Staples, KB Toys, The Limited and Express got on the naughty list because of their use of The Return Exchange's database to limit customer returns.Read more...

Consumers who have been fairly nonplussed by repeated reports of retail data breaches are expressing more worries about gift card frauds, fueled by retail lobbing groups.

This story in the California daily newspaper, The Fresno Bee details how at least one gift card exchange site, Otartel.com, “has disappeared completely.”…

Many of the initial media and analyst reviews of the device were less than favorable, pointing out things like an inability to flip through pages and the buttons obscuring some viewing areas. But in two very significant ways, Kindle is falling victim to the focus on specifics obscuring big-picture reality syndrome. Read more...

In the customer service area, one of the things that has gotten the most favorable attention has been click-to-call, with some of the larger merchants—including Amazon, BestBuy and LLBean—pushing the technology as a way to stop abandoned shopping carts, said Customer Respect Group President Terry Golesworthy. Read more...

Amazon also weighed into the alternative payment space, saying that it would make an equity investment in Bill Me Later. To varying degrees, this gives the three most powerful online companies a stake in each of the three top alternative payment players, with Google pushing its own Google Checkout, EBay banking on its PayPal service and Amazon owning a slice of Bill Me Later. Read more...

The move, which had been expected ever since U.S. District Court Judge William Young ruled that the case shouldn't be considered a class-action, will mean a different set of rules for the few financial entities that decide to pursue the case anew.Read more...

In a creative approach to address consumer search engine privacy concerns, Ask.com Tuesday unveiled a way for consumers to delete identifiable remnants from their searches.

The service—which the Web site has dubbed AskEraser—”deletes all future search queries and associated cookie information from Ask.com servers, including IP address, User ID, Session ID, and the complete text of their queries,” the company said. It’s an interesting move, but it’s unclear that it will much of an impact unless larger search engines such as Google and Yahoo adopt it.…

For all marketing and public relations professional throughout our audience looking to try and communicate to a retail audience, StorefrontBacktalk joined the Tech PR War Stories audiocast this week to discuss that very topic with David Strom and Paul Gillin. To listen to the discussion (it’s wrapped in just less than 10 minutes), please click here.…

Leverage's vision is not radically different than other giftcard firms—such as PlasticJungle—but it's focus on the CRM aspect is. With a formula that will likely deliver about 40 percent of its giftcards directly from retailers with the remainder consumer to consumer exchange, Leverage plans on selling information about their consumers to retail and manufacturing advertisers, said Leverage CEO Mark Roberts. Read more...

"We are here to ask you to level the playing field between sellers that collect sales tax and those who cannot be required to collect the tax because they do business in the community on a virtual rather than physical basis," J.C. Penney Corporation Inc. Vice President and Associate General Counsel-Tax Wayne Zakrzewski said. Read more...

It’s certainly not unexpected that traffic is increasing to shopping comparison sites around the holiday season, according to the latest stats from Hitwise. But what is more intriguing is the Hitwise suggestion that younger consumers are abandoning the top comparison sites, to instead use much lesser-known sites.

“The composition of those visitors is changing markedly, becoming significantly older,” said an Internet Retailer story. “Hitwise finds that 51 percent of the visitors to those dozen sites were 45 and older, compared with 38 percent last year. Among web users 55 and older, the market share of the 12 top comparison shopping sites was up 56 percent, but it was down 27 percent among web users aged 25 to 34.” Does this suggest a change in consumer preference or merely that this segment is especially fickle? Or perhaps merely that they get bored much more quickly? …

This RetailWire story nicely sums up the action, but the essence is that Facebook tried sharing--without permission--customers' purchases with people on their friends list. Did Facebook cross the line? I'd rather say that they made this move inappropriately. The difference is that I do agree with Facebook that something very similar to this program could work, but it needs to be presented properly and at least start with more-than-ample opt-out options. Read more...

This is not merely a multimedia ad-displayer. It has the potential to interact with smartphones, smartcarts and contactless credit cards. So where are the retail IT leaders in all of this? Nowhere near, as IT isn't seriously involved with—and certainly not in charge of—most of the major retail digital signage deployments today. Right there, in a Unix shell, is what's wrong with corporate IT departments today.Read more...

Pioneers have to be very careful or else their well-intentioned errors could mar the technology for anyone else to deploy. Put another way, is a bad experience in a very early trial proof of a good execution of a flawed idea or the flawed execution of a good idea? Regrettably, both results look exactly the same. Read more...

Although Costco fared far worse, Gomez also saw sharply slower performances from CompUSA, ToysRUs and TigerDirect, Poepsel said. "A couple of retailers kind of fell apart today," Poepsel said in a Monday afternoon interview. Read more...

Payment is then made solely by mailing a check to that address, to the name on that credit card. The check isn't issued until the buyer receives that giftcard. The guarantee is also capped at $1,000.Read more...

But those three sites were far from alone, said Shawn White, Keynote's director of external operations. "Almost a third of the thirty leading retail sites we monitor for our holiday shopping index experienced significant slow-downs that impacted the product search and check-out processes — and presumably will impact online sales," White said.Read more...