Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

When a federal court judge issued rulings on Tuesday that the $60 billion retailer needed to stand trial on charges that it's Web site is not sufficiently accessible to visually-impaired shoppers, it sent a strong signal to much of the E-Commerce space.

Target has long been the most prominent opponent of forcing E-Commerce site executives to adhere to accessibility rules designed for their brick-and-mortar counterparts.

Consumers trying to make purchases won't be able to phone for help anymore. Is it to save money or because, as Wal-Mart says, the technology works so well that phone support is no longer needed? Gosh, that's a hard choice.

Pointing to improvements to its Web site, Walmart.com, Wal-Mart officials say that phone support is no longer needed and is shutting it down. Critics label the move as a reckless act of cost-cutting that will quickly haunt Wal-Mart. When Amazon.com decided that customers were frequently asking questions that the Web site could easily handle, "they didn't eliminate the phone service. They were just very smart about how they used it." What Amazon did, however, was hide its phone number and make it only appear when a customer was several layers into a purchase.

Giant pizza chain Domino’s has placed an order for mobile marketing for go, hold the reboot. On Thursday, the $5 billion pizza parlor group said that customers with web-enabled cell phones could place their order from almost 2,500 of Domino’s 5,128 U.S. stores on mobile.dominos.com.

With a password, “all orders saved on the system will carry-over to their mobile device — including any coupons associated with the order,” said a Domino’s statement. Designed for the mobile screen, the statement claims the service “automatically adapts to the size of any cell phone screen, no matter what service carrier customers use.”…

When it comes to global downtime, Google doesn't seem to play favorites. Among 32 key countries Google plays in locally, its home country of the U.S. came in near the bottom, in position 26 of 32 with 31 minutes of downtime, according to Web performance survey results released Thursday by Pingdom.

"Google Search users in the United States are 10 times more likely to encounter a problem than users in Brazil," said the report.

Consider: In the early days of E-Commerce, a typical retailer and manufacturer might have between eight and 12 products that it is actually marketing, especially with search engine links. Today, that same company would typically be doing the same kind of Web marketing with some 12,000 products, said Tim Armstrong, who serves Google as its president of advertising and commerce for North America.

Armstrong argues that this is morphing ad budgets into operational budgets. Is a Google ad akin to a traditional piece of advertising—something that an ad budget should fund—or closer to the cost of a car dealer building a new showroom and dealership?

Is the E-Commerce world ready for another payment option? What if it’s a payment option that charges 0.5 percent, which is almost one-fourth of the typical 1.9 percent rate?

The effort is dubbed Revolution Money and is being pushed by AOL co-founder Steve Case, along with former top execs from AOL, Charles Schwab, the U.S. Treasury Department, Fannie Mae and MasterCard. At least those are the resumes from the board of directors. It’s unclear how much those folk will be working on the company’s day-to-day operations.

Revolution Money hopes to circulate 100,000 RevolutionCards in the next few months and hit 1 million in a year, a spokesman told the Washington Post, in this story where the service is said to combine “a PayPal-like money transfer service with a credit card that can also be linked to a bank account.”…

Initial indications suggest that Oracle’s $25 billion retail app buying spree may have been quite shrewd, according to this Bloomberg story.

The story painted a picture of a move that at the time seemed quite risky. Risky, that is, to anyone who didn’t work in retail. “With margins as thin as 1 percent, retailers were among the most conservative software buyers, typically purchasing the cheapest programs and using them for as long as possible,” the story said. “Department store owners and other retailers changed as supply and inventory management became more complex, merchants offered goods from more overseas companies and Internet sales expanded.”…

The good news is that major companies are now actively pushing mobile. The bad news is that they're pushing in different directions. The mobile phone e-commerce activities you're seeing today are going to fall victim to the same amnesia fog that envelopes all of those early Web searches done on text-based browsers.

Although the Web had been around for years, it was the graphical browser that got the industry to agree on one way to create Web pages that could fire the imagination of businesses and consumers. That defining moment has yet to hit mobile commerce. Forget design and programming issues. There hasn't yet even been broad agreement on how m-commerce is supposed to work. Let's start with simple payment.

With Borders just seven months away from having to fly on its own without Amazon.com, the nation's second-largest bookseller has quietly launched its beta site. When Borders announced in March that it was ending its agreement with Amazon—where Borders all-but-surrendered its online presence to Amazon—it's executives outlined an unusually aggressive plan to turn its stores into models of merged-channel strategy.

In the preliminary beta site triggered live on Sept. 6, only the most faint hints of that strategy is evident. The layout/design is intended to visually reinforce the chain's roots. "The site now feels like a bookstore," said Kevin Ertell, VP of E-Business at Borders.

Sometimes, it’s good to be the king, even if it’s the king of online search. Google’s founders have landed a great new parking space for Boeing 767-200: an airport run by NASA that is typically closed to private aircraft, according to this New York Times piece.

The deal is certainly unusual, but it’s not especially one-sided. While Google brass gets their nearby mammoth parking, they are paying $1.3 million a year plus NASA officials have “signed a unique agreement last month that allows it to place scientific instruments and researchers on planes used by the Google founders. NASA gets to collect scientific data on some flights of those jets, which in addition to the Boeing 767-200 includes two Gulfstream Vs,” the Times story reported.…

For e-tailers that use their in-store inventory also as their online inventory, they are discovering a problem with the supply-chain blackhole: which products invisibly enter when they leave the shelf and don't re-emerge until they are paid for.

This is particularly an issue with retailers trying to make shop-online-pickup-instore work. Without item-level tracking, the concept of a realtime inventory is almost impossible to deliver. This problem is only going to get worse during the holiday onslaught, especially when online purchasers are trying to get the hottest and most popular gift.

In the ongoing saga of retailers being sued for not properly truncating consumer receipts, this week came word that Apple’s brick-and-mortars have now been added to the mysterious case of “Truncated Receipts Don’t Tell Tales.”

Apple’s bite of the forbidden receipt fruit comes from this Florida lawsuit filing.. The lawsuit is different from other FACTA lawsuits in that the plaintiffs were online shoppers and the receipts were electronic files E-mailed to the plaintiffs.…

The folks at ExactTarget discovered a few bits of space in E-Commerce land that weren’t already supporting advertisements. Such blatant examples of straight communication could not be tolerated. Their target: transactional E-mails.

Here’s how they described their plan in a message sent to reporters: “Transactional E-mails, as defined by CAN-SPAM, are those sent after a purchase, confirming a subscription or sharing product update news. In the past, transactional E-mails have been limited to IT systems that used a server to generate an automatic confirmation message. There was no marketing messaging, or up-selling possibilities included in the messages. This was a huge missed opportunity.”

Maybe. Or maybe it was intentional, as they didn’t want critical confirmation messages to be ignored or deleted. My favorite part is where they bring up the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003—which was intended to prevent unsolicited ads from being sent to consumers—as though it supports this action. …

E-tailers looking to expand their footprint in Europe are finding a vibrant growing marketing--$133 billion in sales last year, with annual 25 percent growth for each of the next five years, according to a new report from eMarketer.

But those merchants will also find a Europe that is changing, with vastly different country personalities and preferences. Europe may be moving to one consolidated currency, but its residents still use those Euros quite differently. The money may be Euros, but Germans still purchase differently than the French, Italians and the British.

U.S. consumers lost more than $7 billion over the last two years to viruses, spyware, and phishing schemes, according to a report issued this week by Consumer Reports.

The magazine survey “showed that consumers face a 1 in 4 chance of succumbing to an online threat and becoming a cybervictim, a number that has slightly decreased since last year,” the story said. “The number of consumers responding to e-mail phishing scams has remained constant at eight percent. Consumer Reports projects that one million U.S. consumers lost billions of dollars over the past two years to such scams.”

The most interesting part is that the percent of consumers being scammed–at least via Phishing–has stayed roughly constant, suggesting that cyberthieves are ratcheting up their tactics at the exact same rate that consumers are becoming to their old ways. Not one of the more encouraging stats.…

Amazon.com has started beta-testing an update its payment offering, tweaking its redirect service to be more competitive against PayPal and GoogleCheckout, according to this story in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

The Amazon Flexible Payment Services was launched Friday as a beta test, and it is the first one built specifically for software developers, the company said. The program allows developers to send and receive money, create specific instructions on how payments can be made, aggregate micro-transactions such as a penny into larger transactions and view account balances. Amazon.com receives a fee for every transaction, the story said, but the Seattle-based company has a sliding scale based on whether payments occur through credit cards, bank drafts or from transfers within Amazon accounts. …

It’s taken a bit longer than other parts of the economy, but the restaurant industry is finally embracing online sales and discovering some advantages that have not been issues for other segments. Increased order accuracy and faster meals are among the advantages digital diners have discovered.

In this interesting New York Times piece, the story looks at generic long-standing complaints about restaurant take-out orders, including long hold times and errors with order description and delivery addresses.

Communication difficulties with phones in noisy restaurants—made worse with language problems and entry-level employees—had allowed errors and delays to wipe out the convenience pitch. These were all issues that found an effective ally in online. And the only demographic that made a huge difference was a fast-growing one: consumers with broadband. …

The E-Commerce spend in the U.S. for this year's second quarter jumped 19 percent, to $47.5 billion, compared with last year's identical quarter, according to a statement released this week from ComScore.

In a different E-Commerce report this week, Keynote Systems found Amazon and BestBuy as the strongest in online customer experience while CircuitCity took the top slot for site reliability and Staples got kudos for site responsiveness.

Keynote traditionally doesn't release the names of the sites that fared the worst, but the sites that were examined but not mentioned in the top slots were Buy.com, Costco, Office Depot, Sears, Target and Wal-Mart.

As the big Sept. 30 deadline for retailers to comply with credit card security rules, Visa and others ponder the carrot-and-stick argument.

A few days ago—on July 31—it was the deadline for some 6 million of the nation's smallest retailers to report whether they're compliant with PCI standards. It's an interesting group called Level 4.

Although it's the group that includes the smallest merchants in the U.S., many of them are not that small. It could include a retailer that makes 999,999 Visa transactions a year, including as many as 19,999 E-Commerce transactions. So it's important to remember that this group isn't solely mom-and-pop hardware stores and Oliver's Bait Shop.

JCPenney has been experimenting with ways to bring online depth into its brick-and-mortars, with some healthy (107 percent sales boost) initial increases in test stores, according to this DMNews,com story.

The pilot–which was launched late last year in 40 stores–is interesting in that it matches some attractive numbers with bringing online into offline, but it’s unclear if the “this is different” newness factor was isolated. If it wasn’t, the sales bump might be more a result of the trial than what the chain would see in the longterm. Also, this appears to be true multi-channel–as opposed to the desirable merged channel–as the systems don’t appear to talk to each other. Still, it’s an encouraging step.…

Google this week launched a new cookie program, aimed at appeasing privacy advocates. The search giant changed the cookies' expiration date from 2038 to two years after the consumer's last visit to Google.
At first glance, it sounded like an accommodating change. In reality, it's far from clear whether it truly gives privacy groups anything. First, giving up the 2038 date was easy, given that it's highly likely the Google cookie of today (or of a few years ago) will be entirely irrelevant to the Web user of 2038.

Gomez decided to look at the Web performance of the major presidential candidates. That's fair, but it then suggested a linkage between page response rates and the donations that candidate can bring in.

"While there is more to solidifying a candidate's relationship with web-savvy voters than just the speed of the campaign web site, it surely is one element that affects the impression a voter receives about each candidate," the Gomez statement said. "Gomez believes it also can affect the success of a candidate's online fundraising."

What's wrong with that picture? I can just some of the larger lobbying firms saying, "This one has the best shot at victory and is open to our position, but his homepage's refresh is so 20th Century. We'll pass."

Two Rochester Institute of Technology students have launched a clothing site for the visually impaired, featuring sound and text instead of images, apparel recommendations based on a questionaire and clothing arrives with braille tags attached with descriptions and washing instructions.

The pair are relying entirely on designer donations to supply their inventory, but will be charging full price in an effort to stop sighted buyers from taking advantage of any deals, according to this TechCrunch story.…

Are the brick-and-mortars that have materialized, hanging from the EBay empire, long for this world? This interesting AuctionBytes.com story out of London suggests they may have some hurdles.

The story details one company’s decision to shut down its EBay drop-off stores and will focus on home collection efforts. “The company’s main demographic are busy professionals who don’t necessarily have time to visit Auctioning4u’s shops and prefer the company’s handy home collection service; they want collections from their homes and business at times and dates of their choosing.” Interesting read.…

At the heart of Web analytics is the belief that by pouring into the almost unlimited number of stats that Web sites today can churn out, we can figure out what our visitors are thinking, what they want and how to get them to do what we want them to do.

This gets into one of the great conundrums in E-Commerce today: You have to know your audience quite well before you choose the criteria by which you'll get them to know them much better. I bring this up because of an interesting Web traffic analysis change announced this week by the Nielsen/NetRatings folk, which itself follows similar changes implemented by ComScore.