Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

An interesting mobile phone payment trial is going on in Taiwan, with consumers being allowed to download MasterCard PayPass cards–plus promotions and coupons–over the cellular networks into a near-field communication (NFC) phone.

The trial, being run by MasterCard, Taipei Fubon Bank, Taiwan Mobile and VivoTech, zaps coupons to consumers “by simply touching mobile phones on smart posters located throughout the region and at retailer’s storefronts,” according to a joint statement from the group. Participants, however, need to use ViVOwallet software to view and select cards for payment and coupons for redemption and then only at ViVOpay-enabled POS stations.…

With a $450 million three-year plan. Nordstrom is pushing to truly achieve a single view of all inventory across all of their channels, said Jamie Nordstrom, the company’s executive vice president.

The high-end retailer is in the middle of the second year of its three-year project, with the goal of full integration of customer and product data across Web, store and catalog channels, according to an Internet Retailer story. “It’s useful internally to manage inventory, but it also gives inventory visibility to our customers as well as our salespeople on the floor,” Nordstrom said, according to the story.

The system now enables store associates at the point-of-sale counter to special order products from online inventory. As the project continues, Nordstrom will extend access to integrated inventory records to front-line employees and customers so that a store associate can view on a computer screen real-time updates of available inventory across all channels and online customers can view real-time updates of inventory available in stores. The latter will support Nordstrom’s plan to offer in-store pick-up of online orders. Nordstrom’s goal for the web channel is sales of $1 billion a year within the next four to six years.…

When it comes to the places that e-retailers fear as the most fraud-friendly, Nigeria, Russia, the UK, Indonesia and Mexico are the top countries, while the North American cities that are seen as the most felony-favoring are New York, Miami, Los Angeles and Montreal.

Those datapoints come courtesy of the annual online fraud survey from security vendor CyberSource. The survey of 351 company executives “of companies involved in E-Commerce” was conducted Sept. 14 through Oct. 6, the company said.

The results are entirely perceptions—as opposed to an examination of where frauds have actually happened—but those are the perceptions that drive where retailers choose to focus extra scrutiny. The survey showed more retailers focusing on where transactions are coming from.…

An innovative RFID trial in Tokyo is using RFID-tagged lipstick to record when various samples are tried as well as to give store clerks full customer history of products purchased as well as tried.

The trial—involving retail chain Mitsukoshi, cosmetics company Shiseido and RFID vendor Fujitsu—also offers consumers a "virtual real-time makeup" session featuring a camera-equipped kiosk, display and RFID tag reader "that will enable customers to view on the display how particular products would look on their face by waving tagged cosmetic products such as lipsticks or eyeshadows over the tag reader," the companies said in a statement.Read more...

The Massachusetts Bankers Association has now confirmed TJX-related fraudulent credit/debit card purchases in Florida, Georgia and Lousisiana plus in Hong Kong and Sweden. “Thus far, nearly 60 banks have reported into the MBA that they have been contacted by the card companies about compromised cards, and these banks are notifying customers and in many cases reissuing new cards,” the association said.

The ABA has been lobbying for rules that would require the disclosure of a retailer’s name when they “caused a data breach,” as a way of both discouraging retailers from being cavalier about security as well as protecting their member banks from being blamed for something they didn’t do. They also are trying to force retailers to pay for the damage if its’ caused by that retailer’s reckless security procedures.…

The online ad business is heating up and is putting Google in a decidedly defensive posture. Yahoo’s moves this week to add significant functionality to its search is just one issue. Ebay’s much anticipated AdContext program appears to be having difficulties launching.

AdContext was initially supposed to launch by the end of last year. In early November, Ebay started to step back from that date, saying that a January launch was likely and at least a first quarter launch.

On Wednesday (Jan. 24), the same spokesperson who had indicated the January target stepped back from any targets. “I don’t have an update at this time,” said eBay spokesperson Ali Croft. “AdContext is still in beta and when we are confident that it is ready to roll out to the Community, we will roll it out.” …

Multi-channel ISV Junction Solutions purchased a $4 million POS vendor called ISS Retail this week. Junction CEO Brian Carpizo wouldn’t say precisely how much the company paid to purchase ISS, but he said that the company recently received $7.5 million in financing and that it’s reasonable to conclude that the purchase—consisting of cash, stock and non-cash items such as seller notes–was funded with that money.

The two firms were initially preparing an OEM relationship but concerns developed that Junction would “invest millions” into ISS and ISS could then fall into the hands of a competitor, Carpizo said. The OEM talks then quickly morphed into an acquisition negotiation.

Next week, Junction will announce that it is also acquiring a California E-Commerce software company called ThePage.com, for an undisclosed amount. …

TJX is learning that the trickling out of bad news is a great way to keep a negative story alive and to send distrust as high as possible. Remember that mid-December unauthorized access that it didn’t report until mid-January? Turns out it had taken place almost seven months earlier, back in May 2006. I guess they wanted to make sure the thieves had plenty of time before the public was alerted.

“We had said in our press release that we had discovered the breach in mid-December but we did not put in when it occurred,” TJX spokeswoman Debra McConnell was quoted as saying in a Computerworld story.

Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, regulators there have decided that the credit card theft was, ironically, too big to require consumer disclosure. “Under a new state law that took effect in June, businesses are required to notify Pennsylvania consumers by letter, telephone or e-mail if sensitive personal data is lost or stolen, exposing them to the risk of identity theft,” reported the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “But the AG’s office, which enforces the statute, said yesterday that personal notice is not required if more than 175,000 consumers are involved or if the cost of notification would exceed $100,000.”…

The retail technology world of 2007 is absolutely in transition and nowhere is that more clear than here at the industry's largest gathering, the National Retail Federation's tradeshow and conference.

There are primarily two transitions. The first is an in-store transition, from a world where technology was virtually all behind-the-scenes as far as consumers were concerned to one where the bits-and-bytes are what the industry coyle dubs customer-facing.Read more...

While working the NRF show this week, a theme that emerged in almost every conversation was the online/offline struggle and I usually asked how much of that CIO's chain's revenue was virtual as opposed to physical.

That's where one particular CIO—who put his own chain's online revenue significantly south of the industry standard of about 5-6 percent—offered a wonderful insight. When asked what the percent would likely be when his company would take online-offline integration seriously, he said, "The day that neither myself nor my CFO has a clue what the percent breakdowns are, that will be the day we've got it right. As long as my numbers are sufficiently segregated that I can easily identify what's online and what isn't, we'll still have a long way to go."Read more...

Oracle on Monday will official launch its Retail Returns Management package, which will support highly-customized returns policies, such as one allowing a frequent purchaser to return more products than a less profitable customer.

Oracle is pushing the package’s ability to track–and enforce–returns across mutliple channels, making it theoretically easier to deal with in-store returns of catalogue and online purchases, as well as those from a store in another state.

This has some strong potential as many retailers are feeling the pressure to liberalize their return policies. This suite could at least allow merchants to formalize exceptions, which might at least take away some of the sting of aggressive return policies. Also, the integrated CRM capability across multiple channnels couldn’t hurt with that elusive single-view-of-the-customer goal.…

Out of 30 top E-Commerce sites analyzed this past holiday season by web traffic tracking firm Keynote Systems, only two sites made it all the way from Black Friday through Christmas Eve without crashing: Target and Barnes&Noble.

This holiday season saw several notable E-Commerce site crashes—including Wal-Mart and Macys–but to lose its crash-free virginity label, a site needed to record only one hour’s worth of outage. Target and B&N achieved that distinction, with two others—OfficeMax and CircuitCity—getting close with just one hour of downtime apiece, said Keynote senior manager Ben Rushlo.

“A lot of these sites were unable to pull off a flawless holiday,” Rushlo said, adding that his team also looked at responsiveness, where JC Penney, Ambercrombie & Fitch, CircuitCity, OfficeDepot and Staples fared well. In general, apparel sites fared the worst, with one site—which Rushlo wouldn’t identify—showing a routine slowdown of about 70 percent.…

A software package that will—without human intervention--add and remove products based on inventory and item profit margins will be introduced next week by Mercado Software.

The significance of the rollout of Mercado 4 is not in the integration between web analytics and the E-Commerce platform—which has been offered by various vendors—but in the package's ability to instantly make site changes without employees getting involved.Read more...

With a backdrop of renewed E-Commerce fraud fears, EBay’s PayPal is doubling its buyer protection effort–to $2,000–for some eBay transactions, according to a statement eBay and PayPal issued Wednesday.

The program will be offered by American and Canadian eBay sellers who qualify by “maintaining a 98 percent positive feedback rating and having at least 50 feedback points.” The program covers products that are not delivered as well as “items that are significantly not as described,” the companies said.

Effective Jan. 17, PayPal said the program should cover “more than 95 percent of items listed on eBay.com.”…

Despite cross-channel initiatives of every kind at virtually every major retailer, it seems that certain capabilities at any one company either shine offline or online, rarely both.

The best evidence of the great online/offline divide can be traced to the earliest days of the Web. As the Web was just creeping into prominence, if you had asked any hotshot market observer who would likely run the biggest online bookstore in the new medium, the answer would have been Barnes & Noble or Borders, anything but Amazon.com.Read more...

The final figures are starting to trickle in for the 2006 holiday E-Commerce season and one new report pegs the growth from last year at about 25 percent. The figures–released by ComScore–average out to a perfect 25 percent, with the full year’s E-Commerce sales increasing 24 percent (total of $102.1 billion) and the holiday season alone jumping 26 percent (to $24.6 billion). They pegged the top spending etailer days–in order–as Wed., Dec. 13, Mon., Dec. 11 and Mon., Dec. 4.

ComScore also said consumers are buying later than ever. ” The final three weeks of the holiday season (Weeks 7-9) saw a major surge in spending as the procrastinators came out in full force, driving a 31-percent increase versus the corresponding weeks in 2005. The week leading up to Christmas (week ending December 24, 2006) saw the biggest surge with a 45-percent increase versus the corresponding week a year ago, as consumers showed their faith in online retailers’ ability to ‘deliver the goods’ in time for Christmas,” the report said.

Like all surveys, it’s wise to not put too much reliance on the figures, as the methodology and accuracy is questionable. ComScore, for example, guesses at these numbers based on what it describes as a “global cross-section of more than 2 million consumers who have given comScore permission to confidentially capture their browsing and transaction behavior, including online and offline purchasing.” But given that these results are similar to other results, they are probably worth noting.…

Major e-tailers this holiday season kept their customers happy for the most part, according to a report issued Thursday by the Gomez Retail Benchmark.

But there were still some order process response time laggards including the Gap (35.09 sec.) and OfficeMax (20.73 sec.), who were quite slow compared with J.C. Penney (6.23 sec.), CircuitCity (7.27 sec.) and Dell (7.75 sec.). The benchmark average for response time was 13.97 seconds.

On availability, the laggards were Williams-Sonoma (88.83 percent), HP (92.57 percent) and QVC (93.82 percent) and the most available sites were Target (99.86 percent), CDW (99.75 percent) and Apple (99.68 percent). The benchmark average for availability was 97.59 percent.…

Global Data Synchronization Network (GDSN) efforts got a major boost this month from Wal-Mart, as the retail giant set this month as the deadline for many of its suppliers to comply or die trying.

The Jan. 1 deadline was included in an October letter that was dispatched to an unspecified number of suppliers demanding both compliance and an aggressive data-cleansing effort, according to a report in Computerworld.

The story said the letter claimed that GDSN is no longer a “bleeding edge” technology but is “now a mature solution providing tangible benefits for retailers and suppliers.” Touted benefits reportedly included improved purchase order accuracy, fewer administrative errors, better supplies of stock and greater speed in getting product onto the shelves.…

Amazon has launched a new site—called Endless.com and focused solely on shoes and handbags—that will offer free overnight shipping for all purchases. Could the move start a shipping war?

The site is focused on the highly-competitive footwear and handbag sector, where sites like Zappos.com have long offered free shipping. But by upgrading the free shipping to overnight, Amazon is trying to shake things up a bit.Read more...

Was the inefficient technology deployment a reason for HomeDepot’s CEO resignation? An interesting Retail Systems Alert Group analysis suggests it absolutely was.

The group’s Paula Rosenblum writes that HomeDepot was relying too much of technology–and cost cuts–alone and was surprised when customers started to disappear.…

Online auction behemoth eBay is having an unexpectedly strong impact on brick and mortars, with piles of retailers set up just to provide physical purchase and pickup points for eBay merchandise. One such merchant–iSold It LLC, with about 200 locations–manages about 50,000 different auctions per month.

An interesting story in CIOInsight reports on the software challenges as the merchant tries to links directly to various eBay sites for pricing and listing information. It’s trying to deal with this by using a community of roughly 40,000 ISVs, all of whom are using eBay’s own APIs.…

A major E-Commerce customer satisfaction survey is showing traditional brick-and-mortar retailers quickly catching up with the traditional pureplay Web retailers.

Although the figures released this week by ForeSee Results still show the same players safely on top—including Netflix, Amazon.com, LLBean.com, QVC.com, Apple.com and Old Navy.com—and the same players (including Costco, CompUSA and CDW) on the bottom, ForeSee CEO Larry Freed sees surprising advances by some of the at-one-time Web challenged multi-channel retailers.Read more...

Amazon.com this week touted sales figures that make the 2006 holiday season its best, with one day (it was Dec. 11th, for those who track such trivia) ringing up more than 4 million items.

The company also boasted of some impressive speed sales, such as selling 1,000 Xbox 360s in 29 seconds and 1,000 Axion DVD players in 34 seconds. (Note to marketers: Add more Xs in your brand names.)

Let’s look at some of the wonderfully trivial Amazon holiday claims for this year. The company announced that “one of Amazon’s most remote shipments” was a copy of Mission Impossible—the Complete First season that went to Wainwright, Alaska. It actually sold a $20,000 MP3 player, which is cast in 750 gold (18 karat) with 63 diamonds (one-karat). The last Prime order placed in time for Christmas delivery contained a Bogen-Manfrotto Classic Tripod (Silver) delivered to Norman, Oklahoma on December 23rd. Its top-selling toys were Radica 20 Questions, Laugh & Learn Cuddly Learning Puppy and Princess Genevieve Doll — Barbie In the 12 Dancing Princesses. The top-selling Kitchen items included the Matfer Exopat Nonstick Baking/Roasting Sheet, Santa Fe Quesadilla Maker and Calphalon’s Commercial Hard-Anodized 12-in Everyday Pan.…

Efforts by the Web’s top auction site to have a service that sells products without an auction are stumbling, according to a report in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal. (Note: Subscription may be needed for that link to work.) The story discusses lackluster sales results for longtime eBay sellers and cites Hitwise stats identifying eBay’s traditional auction site as the number one consumer destination among online retailers in November, while the non-auction unit (eBay Express) sat at #87 for the same month.

Much eBay Wall Street discussion recently has put pressure on eBay Express as the way of the future for eBay to compete. I respectfully disagree. Although it would certainly be pleasant for eBay if this new service went well, there’s a simple explanation for its weak showing. It’s not what people expect from eBay. Consumers are creatures of habit and comfort. If they want the auction experience, they go to eBay and that has been a stunningly successful strategy for them. But moving into the non-auction world is diluting their branding and is playing into the strengths of others. People love to have their expectations realized, even if the quality is better somewhere else. Sites that have focused on text stories but then offer multimedia versions are finding low clicks on the multimedia content because it’s not what their readers expect from that site.

Lesson for eBay: monkey with your consumer expectations at your own peril. Better is terrific. Different—for a consumer—can be very bad.…