Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

With so much of E-Commerce analytics dependent on industry-accepted definitions of pageviews, visitors and visit length, changes in the way that is tracked can have a huge impact. So when Nielsen/NetRatings on Tuesday announced that radical changes it how it tracks Web site popularity, it’s something to be seriously examined.

The first impact of the change—which will now measure popularity by how long users linger on sites, not by how many pages they view—was that it sent AOL, Yahoo and MSN way up, leapfrogging Google, according to this well-done Washington Post story. The story reported that IM and E-mail usage was a key factor.

The change in audience measurement comes as the frequent use of online video and streaming sports scores and stock quotes make the number of page views increasingly irrelevant to a Web site’s popularity, the story said. “New technology has also altered the way consumers engage sites. For example, a system called Ajax automatically refreshes Web page content without the user clicking to reload the page, which reduced the number of page views in the old rankings. Now new e-mails also appear without pressing the “check mail” button. Nielsen rival ComScore addressed these changes in March by measuring the frequency with which users return to sites.” A piece very much worth reading.…

For those companies who may be plannng for Google to become less powerful over the next several years will get a rude awakening from a report published Wednesday from Cowen & Co., a major financial analysis firm.

The report sees Google today controlling 50-55 percent of search in the U.S. and about 70-75 percent in Europe. But when analyzing the competitive moves by rivals Microsoft and Yahoo, the report predicts Google's marketshare will continue to soar, hitting "at least 90 percent of the search market over the next decade."

The bandwidth, input and software limits of smartphones makes even the most basic mobile purchases difficult. PayPal's market entry is a quintessential "more is less" strategy.

EBay's PayPal unit formally entered the mobile payment space Tuesday, arguing that their checkpoint gets more valuable as they reduce the number of features. (Now if only Microsoft could think that way.)

Tuesday actually marked the day PayPal issued a news release about MobileCheckout, which has been fully functional and available since June 11, a full month before the announcement, according to PayPal spokesperson Jamie Patricio.

Wal-Mart's version of the virtually ubiquitous buy-online-pickup-in-store strategy has reduced customer shipping costs by $5 million while sharply increasing new customer acquisitions and in-store upsells, according to figures released Tuesday from the world's largest retailer.

In announcing that it is extending its Site-to-Store program to more than 3,300 stores in the U.S., Wal-Mart released a handful of carefully selected stats to show that its approach to the strategy is working. Wal-Mart's approach is slightly different than the traditional approach, which uses the Web to help move in-store merchandise. The twist to Site-to-Store—which was launched in March--is that Walmart.com promotes "tens of thousands of products" that are not available in stores and then offers to ship them free to a local Wal-Mart.

Noticed this interesting Bloomberg story about how well EBay's PayPal is faring against Google Checkout and *sighed* at how weak a foundation it was built on.

First, the story seems to be based on the statement that "In recent surveys, the world's largest auctioneer found that less than one out of five users of Google's Checkout online payment service was happy with it." But it doesn't say what those surveys were, who was being surveyed nor exactly what they were being asked nor when. Read more...

Are recent Google incidents with an EBay party and Sicko blog comments a pattern or anomalies?

When red-hot startups grow very quickly, lead by intelligent founders with a clear vision, they tend to grow quickly until they get into the danger zone. This is that awkward stage where strange decisions start getting made, a stage that quite a few companies haven't lived through. Burn rate is the ability for these companies to go through tons of money very quickly. This isn't Burn Rate. Let's call this Burn Up And Implode Rate.

The average time it takes a consumer to make an E-Commerce purchase decision has jumped from about 19 hours in 2005 to 34 hours and 19 minutes this year, according to a report that is slated to be published next week.

The report, created by a security service called ScanAlert and based on about 128 million visitors to 470 web sites, makes the reasonable conclusion that the increase is based overwhelmingly on the increase in the number of E-Commerce sites today. In theory, this allows for much more extensive—and time-consuming—comparison shopping. Comparison shopping is certainly a very good possibility, but as the novelty of E-Commerce purchases becomes more of a distant memory for most, other more innocuous options are also possible.

Look for Yahoo next week to try and push Web ads to the next customized level, with “a new system dubbed SmartAds that allows advertisers to compile ads on the spot based on a Web user’s Internet profile, including such data as their location, recent product searches and, in some cases, age or household income,” according to this Reuters story.

From one perspective, this is nothing new, as Google and others have been trying to get close to this for more than a year. But Yahoo is making the right noises, with announced plans to merge its display and Web search advertising businesses. The next rev of Web advertising was going to happen sooner or later, almost certainly by early year. Yahoo’s dollars will simply guarantee that it will be sooner. …

I have to confess a certain fondness for Google, an admiration that has grown out frequent innovation and creativity. Then again, my livelihood doesn't overwhelmingly depend on the whims of Google so the idiosyncrasies of their search and other services is professionally interesting and not much more.

But to a growing legion of small and mid-sized E-Commerce players today, Google's evolving rules and exact methodologies can devastate—or make wildly successful—and these are matters where they have virtually no say.

Despite efforts by Yahoo and others in recent months, no one has come close to touching Google's overwhelming marketshare for Web search. In the olden days, this was called "cornering the market" and it was a good thing, to be congratulated in the nearest wood-paneled corporate watering hole.

background-image: url(“/images/copy/Pier1.jpg”); background-repeat: no-repeat’

In an against-the-trend move, Pier 1 will shut down all of its online operations, focusing solely on select physical locations.

“We are exiting all non-Pier 1 stores activities,” Pier 1 president and CEO Alex W. Smith told Wall Street analysts on the company’s first-quarter conference call, according to an Internet Retailer story. “We are exiting the e-commerce and catalog business.”

The move may not be permanent, however, according to a report from Marketwatch, which quoted Smith as saying that pier1.com will continue, but purely for marketing. “We’re not saying this is forever,” Smith said. “We’re just saying this is where we need to be today.”

Although the trend is a push toward a unified merged channel–combining online and offline–when having to choose one over the other, online is typically seen as being less costly to operate. The other major retail chain to have similarly pulled back has been TJX, which pulled back from its E-Commerce efforts for T.J. Maxx and HomeGoods in late 2005. But there’s a connection: Alex Smith had been a Senior VP at TJX when TJX pulled back from E-Commerce and this is the same Smith who today runs Pier 1.…

As the summer vacation season has arrived, travel web sites are getting a serious workout. Perhaps a bit too serious a workout, according to one uptime monitoring service, which reports that one site had 2-and-a-half hours of downtime.

Although the survey looked at 16 major travel sites—including Orbitz, Travelocity, Yahoo and Priceline—Expedia was not among them. Why not? Expedia's system apparently didn't take kindly to being watched and blocked the nosey system inquiries from report conductor Pingdom.

When looking at CRM programs, many retailers today focus on what they can do and not what their prospects want them to do.

Nothing radically new here, but i just stumbled upon this great Microsoft commercial about the consumer-retailer disconnect. When you see the guy with the “advertiser” shirt, think ‘retailer” and this really works. Sorry that it happens to be a vendor commercial, but even Microsoft can make a valid point from time to time.…

Electronic payment vendor CyberSource has agreed to purchase fellow e-payment player Authorize.net for $565 million in cash and stock, the companies announced Monday.

Steve Rowen, a research analyst at Retail System Research in Miami, Fla., said the merger of these two players is not in and of itself earth-shattering or surprising, but the size of the deal does reveal a lot about retail interests.

"CyberSource acquiring Authorize.Net is a highly logical move. Is it an industry-changing deal? Not at all," he said, but a deeper look at the metrics behind data-theft suggests an importance lying elsewhere surrounding this $565 million deal.

Lands’ End is hoping technology can deliver a better swimsuit-purchasing experience online than in-store. With few items of apparel are the subtle distinctions more important than with swimwear. The battle: to approximate the exact look-and-feel of the swimsuit online (advantage: brick-and-mortar) while minimizing the awkwardness and embarrassment of the process (advantage: online).

The Camden Courier-Post did a revealing (sorry. Couldn’t resist) look into how Lands’ End is trying to play this one, with options to “send messages to a personal shopper and match suits to their body types through a search mechanism that lists six elements.” Worth a read.…

In Sunday's New York Times, there's this intriguing piece talking about how E-Commerce sales are quickly running out of steam. Perhaps "intriguing" is the wrong word for it. A more apt term might be "dangerous" or "out-of-context" or ..... nah, I think I'll stick with "dangerous."

The piece is not dangerous because it reveals some deep, dark secret. It doesn't, not does it claim to. It's dangerous because it perpetuates the misguided—but commonly held—belief that online and offline retail efforts today are distinct. Even worse, it seems oblivious to the rapidly-increasing influence that each has on the other.

The story is built on stats showing a sharp decline in online sales. But those statistical issues are not the key problem with the Times story. The problem is that it still sees online and brick-and-mortar as rivals. The reality is that we are just starting the age of the merged channel.

For those of you who may be near Philadelphia next week, I'll be delivering the Keynote Address at a PCI Summit in the city of brotherly contempt on Thursday. For the moment, let's set aside the very legitimate question of why they asked me to keynote, given that it's hard to imagine scraping the bottom of the speaker barrel any more pathetically than to ask an ink-stained journalist to talk.

That's actually literal. A few weeks ago, I didn't check my pockets carefully and did the clothes washing with a blue pen still embedded. Voila! The perfect shirts to wear in full ink-stained wretch mode. Wretch Wear! I was delighted by the discovery. My wife much less so. Then again, I've been relieved of clothes washing for awhile so this might be seen as a win-win.

Here's a story that makes you wonder if the adults at eBay hadn't taken a few days off this week. The New York Times had this wonderful story about eBay's annual big convention for its largest sellers and how Google scheduled its own party at the event. Google thought this would be a good way to sell GoogleCheckout to people who might otherwise have gone for eBay's PayPal.

What Google forget is that eBay is a huge Google customer, not to mention deliciously vindictive.

A price-comparison site is supposed to find a product and show lots of Web sites offering it for sale, ranked by price. Such sites have encountered two problems: a consumer doesn’t really want to see the top 50 options, when the first four or five is all they’ll consider; and low-price is easy to scam, with bait-and-switch ripoff artists common, where they offer an item at a low price, claim to be out-of-stock when you try and buy it and offer a higher-priced alternative.

On Wednesday, DiscountMore.com introduced a mega-price-comparison search engine, which claims to simultaneously show the results of some 26 price-comparison sites, including Shopping.com, PriceGrabber.com, ShopZilla.com, PriceRunner.com plus general sales sites including eBay.com, ubid.com, Amazon.com, Walmart.com, Overstock.com and Buy.com.

But will such a mega-site address either of the two shortcomings of today’s price-comparison sites? Thus far, it doesn’t look like it. Quite the contrary, in fact.…

Shoe chain Aerosoles is one of many retailers trying to figure how far they can go in the multi-channel race.

In talking with lots of retail marketing and IT execs recently, there appears to be this growing realization—concession?—that a true multi-channel approach is a shock to the retail system. Indeed, even the word "multi-channel" sends the wrong message. Isn't that the opposite of the true goal? Perhaps the phrase "merged channels" is closer, with "multi-channel" usually a pseudonym for what Google's head of retailing has dubbed "multi-silo-ed."Read more...

A survey of 20,000 consumers offers good news For Amazon, QVC, Netflix, bad news For Macys, BestBuy, PCMall and SaksFifthAvenue.

The survey, done for years by consulting firm ForeSee Results, takes the top 100 revenue-grosssing Web sites and applied the methodology of the University of Michigan's American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). ACSI scores have a 100-point scale, with the scores closest to 100 being the best.Read more...

After months of investigation, the state of Connecticut sued Best Buy on Thursday and accused the chain of tricking customers with two identical-looking web sites in its stores, the only difference being one had higher prices.

"Best Buy treated its customers like suckers, not patrons to be prized," said Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal. "Best Buy gave consumers the worst deal: a bait-and-switch-plus scheme luring consumers into stores with promised online discounts, only to charge higher in-store prices."

This week, Minnesota became the first state to mandate PCI requirements for retailers who want to be protected from banks and credit unions for data breach losses.

The Plastic Card Security Act kicks in in August, according to this St. Paul Pioneer Press story. Minnesota is not likely to be the last state to put its weight behind PCI, with Texas, Massachusetts and Nevada–among others–heading down similar paths.

“It’s a credit-card world. If you’re in business in this day and age, you have to be able to accept credit-card and debit-card transactions,” Buzz Anderson of the Minnesota Retailers Association, which opposed the bill and argued for pushing back the penalty deadline, told the newspaper. The penalties from Visa and MasterCard can run to hundreds of thousands of dollars, he added, and act as a significant deterrent. Those penalties, he said, “would drive most small businesses out of business.”…

If you're going to be in the Boston area June 5th and 6th, would love to hook up with some of you at the ERIexchange show at The Boston Convention Center.

That show is actually shaping up to be quite significant, with keynotes from BestBuy CIO Bob Willett, CircuitCity CIO Bill McCorey and Metro Group managing director Gerd Wolfram, among other notables.Read more...

Amazon is truly trying to make a go of the online grocery segment, and the Subscribe & Save feature it introduced on Tuesday is a good example of how. But the new program—which promises customers automatic delivery of grocery products with discounts of 15 percent and free shipping—is also an illustration of Amazon's initial weakness.

Several E-Commerce sites have tried to make a profit with grocery online, with Priceline probably the most notorious at making a big noise and a big loss. One of the few that seems to be making some serious headway is Peapod, which has the pedigree to do grocery right: It's owned by Stop & Shop.

A new survey of U.S. and U.K. mobile web users shows that the number of people engaging in cellphone/PDA Internet activity is already almost one-fifth the size of their PC counterparts. The study from ComScore and Telephia found 19 percent in the U.K. and 17 percent in the U.S.

The U.K. study found 5.7 million people used a mobile device to access the Web during January 2007 compared with the 30 million people age 15 or older who accessed the Web from a PC. The U.S. figures for the same month showed 30 million opting for the PDA/Cell route, compared with 176 million U.S. PC Web users. “Similar to the Internet 10-15 years ago, men under the age of 35 are the early adopters of new technology and more likely to use mobile devices to access the Mobile Web than women or men aged over 35, ” said Bob Ivins, managing director of comScore Europe.…