Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Taking a calculated risk, CircuitCity this week unveiled a social interaction feature to its E-Commerce site, where it’s customers can exchange on-topic messages. CC’s premise and hope: customers will bash and praise various manufacturers, while pretty much ignoring other retailers. If the chain’s new “CityCenter Community” facilitates unhappy customers warning others away from CircuitCity, that’s when the chain’s commitment to a social Web site will be tested.

“Circuit City wants to empower consumers with innovative approaches to shopping,” said Mark Oldani, vice president and general manager of Circuit City Direct. “We were the first multichannel retailer to incorporate customer-centric features such as ratings, reviews and discussion forums, and our new CityCenter builds on this tradition, adding blogs, personal profiles and photo galleries to Circuit City’s growing online community.”…

‘Tis the season to send lots of cease-and-desist letters? It’s that wonderful time of year when Black Friday sales means the lawyers take out their green and red pens and send off Yuletide greetings to Web sites daring to publicize their sales.

There’s a wonderful piece in today’s New York Times that finally makes a case that there is absolutely no legal legitimacy to such threats, as sales are not copyrighted information, nor are the widely-announced details trade secrets. BestBuy seems to be the only retailer that has stopped the meritless threats and embraced the free publicity. Definately worth a read.…

But in what could be called the Boomerang Strategy, what consumers will see in-store this season will be quite far removed from the utopian epitome of merged retail channels, with the customer shopping through whichever channel is most convenient and store management apathetic about that customer choice.Read more...

The program is crafted for more than 600,000 targeted Tesco customers and "everyone on the database will automatically become members of fashionfile and be invited through an E-mai to activate their own online space." Read more...

But there's something else going on here. This is a company that has decidedly made the Web a very low priority. Could Starbucks be learning that man doesn't live by bricks alone? That a well-crafted Web presence doesn't merely generate pageviews and generate a little E-Commerce revenue. Read more...

Retail software sales last year were $7.3 billion, with a compound annual growth rate of 7 percent through 2011, "catapulting the market to $10.4 billion," the report said. Read more...

"Whether orders come in the mail, by telephone or over the Internet is secondary to the point that customers should receive the products they ordered, at the price they agreed to pay, and within the time that was promised," NRF Senior Vice President and General Counsel Mallory Duncan said. Read more...

In dropping the second shoe of its holiday video strategy, Amazon Wednesday launch a program to encourage customers to post video reviews of Amazon products. Amazon last week announced that it had posted its own videos of some 450- top-selling products.

The site posted a few user-generated video examples, but whether consumers will routinely take the time to create such postings is unclear. But if Amazon can take the YouTube-trained video-crafters and get them to generate even a small fraction of the consumer comments that have become the Amazon trademark, this could be a major step for E-Commerce video.…

Almost 90 percent of recently surveyed retailers required suppliers to use advance shipping notices, but found the ASN accuracy to be weak. “As a result, compliance-related deductions are higher around ASNs than any other supply chain document,” according to this powerful RetailWire story.

The story attributed the problems to a large number of purchase order changes, a lack of standards, EDI not being tied into E-Commerce, inadequate funding and a lack of measurement metrics. The comments are quite interesting, too.…

For years, American technology leaders have gotten used to seeing the U.S. no longer globally technologically dominant. But nowhere is that lack-of-dominance more pronounced than with cellphone technology. That's why I saw this week's Google Android news as something that was exciting in its potential to shake the industry up. Trust me: this is one sector that truly needs a lot of shaking up. Read more...

"There has been a lot of talk about social shopping," said Patti Freeman Evans, the report's lead analyst, but that talk hasn't translated into sales. "Social and community sites still rank low in shoppers' minds as useful places to research and shop for gifts. Only three percent of users who plan to buy online this holiday season—and six percent of those in the segment who are ages 18 to 34—plan to add a wish list or gift list to their MySpace, Facebook, or similar Web site page to help their friends and family select gifts." Read more...

In the reversal of age-old television advertising pricing models, Best Buy wants more money for delivering a much smaller audience. There's a logic to it. Instead of consumers sharing their private videos with the world, they'll pay a few extra dollars—Best Buy wants $7 for 100 minutes of video hosting—to exclude anyone who is not on their list.

Amazon on Thursday announced that for more than 450 of its top toys this holiday season, it will offer full videos. Read more...

Although the numbers do show a sharp increase, they also reflect the fact that 35 percent—more than one out of every three—large retailers today are still not PCI compliant, despite the passing of the Sept. 30 deadline and the start of the promised $25,000/month fines for non-compliance.Read more...

The problem of retailers relying too much on technology and cutting off customer feedback is only half the problem. Customer service outsource companies are finding it quite easy now to interpret policies however they want and to then hide unhappy customers from their retail clients. Read more...

A consumer shopping for a home entertainment system accesses a 3-D CADCAM representation of his home and drags it to an entertainment E-Commerce site. This large digital file, however, is much more than a mere architectural depiction of the consumer's home.

It includes window placement and the times of day—during different months—that the sun shines through various windows and at roughly what intensity and for how long. Someone has entered the style of thickness of the rug and wall-coverings and a database lookup has associated those with their likely sound-dampening characteristics. Read more...

The Akamai deal is directly related to an Apple/Starbucks deal announced month, where visitors to the coffee chain will be able to download music from the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store at Starbucks using a variety of Apple hardware, including the iPod, iPhone and a Mac running iTunes. Read more...

The court's decision was being closely watched in E-Commerce circles because it spoke to how far federal law will go to protect online businesses from new and potentially threatening technologies. In this instance, though, the judge didn't address the E-Commerce issues in those broad terms, finding more than enough specifics in this case to justify the preliminary injunction, she said. Read more...

Waiting for EBay’s long-awaited AdContext program? Pull up a chair, as you may have a very long wait. Indeed, this is one of the lenghtiest public betas I’ve ever seen. In the early summer of 2006, EBay announced that its program to scan news stories for references to products that they have on auction, to be called AdContext.

It was supposed to ship by the end of the year. In November, that “end of year” became “January.” In December, “January” became “first quarter 2007.” In March, no timing was mentioned at all.

On Thursday, an EBay senior manager said the product was still in beta and he couldn’t even guess at a new target for launch. Guess this kind of functionality is more difficult than it seemed. At least more difficult for EBay.…

On Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Audrey B. Collins will likely charter new E-Commerce ground on Monday from her Los Angeles courtroom, when she rules on a preliminary injunction request from Ticketmaster against a 10-person Pittsburgh ISV called RMG Technologies. The Ticketmaster case is interesting because of its non-traditional legal issues—where Ticketmaster's core argument is that it's being damaged by a potential loss of consumer goodwill—plus the fact that these are claims that couldn't happen outside of current-day E-Commerce. Read more...

Barnes & Noble is gently testing the mobile-commerce waters, as it prepares to announce a deal on Monday to sell books, CDs and DVDs, but only on BlackBerry phones.

The deal with Digby will deliver a small version of the book chain’s site—optimized for mobile, presumably—to allow faster and easier ordering. Downside: the BlackBerry version will only be updated once a day.…

‘Tis the season to be discreet. Fa La La La….

When retailers start pushing holiday sales before Thanksgiving, consumers get annoyed. If they knew retailers were starting holiday sales weeks before Halloween, they’d go ballistic. And yet, that’s precisely what The New York Times says many major chains are doing: Celebrating The Euphenisms.

“Shattering records for an early start, Wal-Mart is cutting prices on toys in mid-October, but the company is not calling it a holiday sale. L. L. Bean has started advertising free shipping — but it is shying away from the H word. And Toys “R” Us is marketing a temporary store in Manhattan, but consumers have to study ads to find the name: Holiday Express,” the story said. Well worth a read.…

Retailers started using the credit card numbers to identify purchases with specific consumers, given that they had to store them anyway. It turned out to be a convenient link into CRM systems, especially for customers who weren't using the traditional retailer-issued loyalty card. Read more...

Call this the season of the Battle of The Books, with Barnes & Noble this week following Borders with major Web site revisions. And both of those sites are clearly trying to undermine Amazon.

The B&N enhancements are aimed at differentiating themselves from the others by trying to become a place for book lovers rather than mere book buyers. Among the new twists: a literary online magazine; podcast interviews with “leading writers, muscians and filmmakers”; readings and social networking.

But B&N barely matches Amazon on being able to scan through books and other services that speak to the purchase decision.…

WalMart.com wants to make it clear: they're not shutting down their online phone support. They're just hiding it. In an effort to force their online shoppers to use their online tools—and only their online tools—Walmart.com has decided to continue its online telephone helpdesk, but—I swear I'm not making this up—not tell anyone the phone number.

In the most literal example of "don't call us, we'll call you" attitude I've seen in quite some time, Walmart.com's customer service people—at their discretion—may call some customers who are having difficulties, but they won't disclose their phone number, which is a fairly effective way to discourage callers.

When pressed if there was any way customers could still call the online helpdesk, Walmart.com spokeswoman Amy Colella said that the old phone numbers still work, if you happened to have written them down.