Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Just in time for the holidays, those wacky partying people at the National Retail Federation introduced on Tuesday their latest data-exchange XML schema, with the backing of some key retailers–including Blockbuster, Circuit City, RadioShack and Target–and suppliers, including Reebok and IBM.

The new standard replaces the previously-released Digital Asset Management (DAM) schema, according to a statement from the NRF’s Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS). The schema’s goal is to more efficiently create and manage images and text used to present products to consumers everywhere from shelf-edge and digital signs to catalogs, E-Commerce sites and kiosks.…

Is a standard cellphone format for contactless payment in the offing? Unlikely, but some major players are going to make a lot of noise trying. Sony and NXP Semiconductors (formerly Philips Semiconductors) on Monday announced that they will work together to–by mid-year 2007–“plan, develop, produce and market a secure chip that will include both Mifare and Felica operating systems and applications, as well as other contactless card operating systems and applications.”

That’s quite an undertaking. The pair officially got the backing of the GSM Association, a major telco organization representing 14 mobile network operators: Bouygues Telecom, China Mobile, Cingular Wireless, KPN, Mobilkom Austria, Orange, SFR, SK Telecom, Telefonica Móviles España, Telenor, TeliaSonera, TIM, Vodafone and 3. The Sony/NXP objective, according to a joint statement the companies issued, is to combine what they will create with an NFC chip to create a universal contactless IC platform for cellphones.

To be fair, these kinds of relationships are essential for truly interoperable mobile payments systems to be deployed. But the hurdles on doing something like globally are huge. Then again, so are the incentives.…

Noticed a statement issued today from a major East Coast mall and initially thought it was actually a promotion from some consortium of E-Commerce sites poking at the ways malls think. But, no, a mall was indeed behind it, suggesting that they had perhaps downed one eggnog too many.

The King of Prussia mall in PA announced that it would be giving away 1,000 Black Friday Survival Kits that each contain “an ergonomic canvass backpack that includes a voucher for a free neck massage,” a Starbucks gift card, bottled water and a store directory.

What an effective way to remind people of the advantages of not shopping in a mall. Maybe they should have included aspirin, a walking stick and perhaps a “Get Into Debt Free” card. Why would a call purposely emphasize the negative things about brick-and-mortars? Why not stress (there’s a good word to avoid) the ability to try on clothes, try out electronics and inspect merchandise? Or the ability to walk out everything right away? Not trying to flack for malls, but come on, people. Give yourselves a fair shot.…

There are some things on this planet that are simply not predictable, but we mortals try anyway. Into that category goes an announcement on Monday from CyberSource that they have calculated what the busiest online shopping day will be this year: Mon., Dec. 18th.

The vendor said they crunched the date by looking at both historical shopping patterns and the mail delivery schedule.

“A rule of thumb has emerged about holiday peak shopping days: they typically happen on the Monday occurring closest to Christmas where there is at least a week available for shipping. We expect that to be the case this year—Monday, December 18th. CyberMonday, the Monday after Thanksgiving, is a good eCommerce shopping day, but beyond that it’s just hype. It represents no sort of sales plateau. If anything, it’s about the halfway mark for holiday sales,” said Doug Schwegman, CyberSource director of market and customer intelligence. “”If the peak does occur earlier this year, say Monday, December 11th, this will mean the early shopping incentives have prevailed over the procrastinators,” said Schwegman. “But I believe the rule will hold up. eCommerce is all about convenience.”…

StorefrontBacktalk was asked to pen a column about the impact of the cellphone on today's retailers for the Retail Systems Alert Group.

We argued that those devices are taking on lives on their own in a myriad of ways, from using their photo lens to read barcodes on advertisements to acting as a portable POS to an integrated loyalty card and coupon-generator. To read the full column,

Macys.com announced on Thursday that it’s revising its merchandising and financial analytics set with more software from SAS.

Kent Anderson, president of the Federated Department Stores division, said the online face of a major brick-and-mortar chain has very different needs that it’s physical counterpart: “Macys.com stocks warehouses, not stores,” he said.…

An interesting report was published Tuesday by CyberSource, in the form of its annual E-Commerce fraud report. Beyond touting some $3 billion in fraud in the U.S. this year—a 7 percent increase compared with 2005—the report talked about 1.4 percent of retail revenue lost to fraud this year, a slight decrease from the 1.6 percent reported the year earlier.

What's interesting is not the percent drop (a 0.2 percent change is not likely statistically significant) but this claim in the news release accompanying the report's release: "Approximately one percent of accepted orders ultimately turn out to be fraudulent, but merchants also reject four percent of their incoming orders due to suspicion of fraud—some valid orders are almost certainly being left on the table."Read more...

Traffic monitoring firm Hitwise reported Monday that traffic to the nations’ 100 largest E-Commerce sites increased 6.2 percent for the week ending November 11, 2006 compared with last year’s identical period.

“Online retail strengthened in Q3 and in the six weeks since October 1, 2006 visits to the Hitwise Retail 100 Index have been up an average of 5.7 percent, which indicates strong growth for online retailers during the 2006 holiday shopping season,” said Bill Tancer, general manager of Research at Hitwise. “Historically, Thanksgiving Day is the peak day for market share of visits to the retail category, and this year, based on our data, is poised to surpass 2005. The strongest pre-Christmas spike should come the second weekend in December.”

The top sites–in order from most visited–were Amazon, Wal-Mart, Target, Overstock, BestBuy, JC Penney, Toys R Us (U.S.), BizRate, CircuitCity, Sears, QVC, Shopping.com, Half, Shopzilla and HSN. …

CyberMonday may be a misnomer, with new research suggesting that there are actually four CyberMondays each holiday season, according to traffic analysis results reported today by DoubleClick. For years, Cyber Monday has referred to the Monday right after Thanksgiving—when workers return to gulp from their employers’ network connections—and was supposed to be the busiest E-Commerce day, a Web version of Black Friday.

The DoubleClick division that handled the research, Performics, said that while Mondays tend to the most active online shopping day of the week during major E-Commerce seasons, the first Monday after Thanksgiving doesn’t appear to be materially busier than the three Mondays that follow. This year, Dec. 25 happens to be the fifth Cyber Monday.…

A Rutherford, NJ, vendor is pushing an interesting service, aimed at boosting customer service quality: Take the recordings that many retailers already capture with their customer service reps and make free copies available to that merchant’s customers.

The company, Nice Systems (which is apparently not going to partner with Naughty Systems for the holidays, even though it would be a retail writer’s dream come true), specializes in call recording technology. They’re the people often behind that oddly-phrased “This call is being recorded for quality assurance purposes.” Invariably, the call that they happens is anything but quality and that’s the point. Many customers would rather talk with someone about a problem or an order with, but they also prefer the automatic transcript that an E-mail thread offers. Even IM discussions leave an explicit record of what was ordered and what was promised. The Nice folk want to offer free digital recordings of the conversation so the customers can later prove what was said and how it was said.

Don’t know how many retailers will take them up on it, but it seems like a cost-effective way to encourage customer service reps to be less naughty and more …. you know.…

Web buyers who want to let their eyeballs do the walking may have found a new way to shop with a site called Like.com.

The site’s approach is based on people who see news figures or other celebrities and want to wear what they’re wearing or use the accessories they are using. (We will not suggest that this is a trait that is overwhelmingly dominant in one gender.) According to an Associated Press story, Like.com uses face recognition technology, whereby it creates a digital signature that describes the photo’s content and enables a more accurate search for similar looking items. It then links to some 200 E-Commerce sites where those items are sold.…

For powerful retail brands, the lure of a branded Web site can change almost everything. Consider HomeDepot’s findings with its catalogue business, where the retail giant is folding two catalogs it had launched barely a year ago.

The two discontinued catalogs–Paces Trading Company and 10 Crescent Lane—will now have their products touted instead on homedepot.com as well as the core Home Depot catalog, according to a report in Direct Marketing News.

Lois Boyle, president of direct marketing agency J. Schmid & Assoc., Shawnee Mission, KS, was quoted as saying the move was “no surprise. Just because you have a database of names, it doesn’t mean you understand their wants and needs or that they want to relate to you in that way.”…

When EBay announced its June that it would launch a contextual Web ad service (a la Google's AdWords) to be called EBay AdContext, officials there said the service was slated to launch in December. On Friday, officials said private beta test results are still being dealt with and that the launch is now slated for next year's first quarter.

The delay is not especially severe, but the program could see more delays next year. On June 21, EBay spokesperson Ali Croft said EBay "expects" AdContext to be live "later this year," but she added at the time that "the official launch timing will depend on how the Beta goes." On Friday, Croft said that EBay was working through the private beta feedback and that the program was now slated to launch in January, but she quickly amended that to "first quarter."Read more...

A recent report that raised serious scientific questions about how secure the new contactless credit cards are could ultimately depress online sales, as consumers might doubt overall credit card security protections.

Jupiter Research retail analyst Patti Freeman Evans told the rest of the panel that the problems with contactless security perceptions could impact a lot more than merely those contactless cards. It could easily impact E-Commerce sales as it plays off of the existing consumer fears that it's easy to get ripped off online because security is so lax. "This just feeds into all of the fears that people were having about this kind of technology and it undermines the credibility of the credit card security systems overall," Evans said, adding that fraud concerns are "the biggest inhibitor to people transacting online. This just fuels the fire of consumer fears that they already have."Read more...

Retailers have for years argued that their online and offline operations should be seen as one. A recent survey suggested that the persuasion was working and that some retailers may regret it.

The survey by Gomez, an internet performance tracking company, shows that many consumers who have a bad online experience are now avoiding the in-store experience from that same retailer. In some instances, that truly is a Catch-22 situation. Nordstrom, for example, has a reputation for delivering extremely personalized and attentive customer service for people visiting their stores. That high-touch attribute is quite difficult to replicate online, setting themselves up to disappoint online visitors. Those disappointed unhappy online visitors would then potentially punish the brick-and-mortar locations as well.

“Retailers have been very slow to understand that, to the consumer, it’s one brand,” said Paula Rosenblum, a retail technology analyst for the Retail Systems Alert Group. “They’re not structured for it. They’re not compensated correctly for it and, in many ways, their technology isn’t set up to accommodate that.” To read the full story, please click here.…

When a group of university-based scientists decided to test the security of contactless credit cards, even they were unprepared for how remarkably non-secure they’d be. That was the backup for the highlight of this week’s StorefrontBacktalk Week In Review show, featuring panelists Patti Freeman Evans, from Jupiter Research, Paula Rosenblum, from the Retail Systems Alert Group, Greg Buzek from IHL, former federal prosecutor/security expert Mark Rasch and Jessica Bryan from Gomez, along with special guest Kevin Fu, Computer Science Professor at the University of Massachusetts and the chief author of the contactless payment report. StorefrontBacktalk Editor Evan Schuman moderated.

To hear what the panel thought and to listen to the arguments, please click here.…

Consumers are now saying they insist on customer service above all else. That, coupled with a growing lack of perceived online/offline distinction, is behind a National Retail Federation survey result released this morning showing Amazon.com as number one.

Compared with earlier surveys, the NRF stats showed consumers placing their customer service demands much higher. After Amazon, the other top ten retailers–for customer service–were Nordstrom, L.L.Bean, Overstock.com, Lane Bryant, Boscov’s, Kohl’s, REI, Lands’ End and Macy’s.…

A New Gomez report said that a good chuck of frustrated buyers will vindictively shun the brand’s offline presence as well.

Physical and online parts of a retail brand need to be very different and to stress those differences, said William Agush, the firm’s marketing VP. Otherwise, consistent branding could actually serve to undermine the retailer. “If you don’t see any differences and you have a bad online experience, why would you use” the brick-and-mortar?, he asked. “Retailers need to exploit those differences.”…

Accusations that RFID-based contactless credit cards can be easily read by thieves are nothing new, but this time, a group of scientists at the Univ. of Mass. has gone quite far to try and prove it.

The group tested about 20 samples from various contactless credit cards and concluded that "the cardholder's name and often credit card number and expiration are leaked in plaintext to unauthenticated readers" and "our homemade device costing around $150 effectively clones one type of skimmed cards." Perhaps of greatest concern is the report's conclusion that "RFID-enabled credit cards are susceptible in various degrees to a range of other traditional RFID attacks such as skimming and relaying." To read the full story,

The latest batch of test results from Keynote Systems released Tuesday is giving more evidence to those who argue that E-Commerce sites must be simplified, reliable and fast even if it means that they are not as gorgeous.

Consider the clothing retailer that came out as number one in both of Keynote's rankings (for speed and reliability): Zappos, a $600 million shoe merchant, which easily beat out much better funded rivals including JC Penney, Kohl's, Banana Republic and Nordstrom. On the other end of the spectrum, the Gap had a lock on last place in both categories. A quick look at the sites of Zappos and the Gap shows why. Zappos' homepage uses tiny images and lots of text. It's design is a bit crowded, but it's functional and efficient. The Gap's site's homepage autoplays music over a brightly-colored Flash presentation that autoplays. To read the full story,

A major Wall Street analyst firm delivered a good news/bad news joke to Yahoo on Tuesday: The good news is that your online advertising space is doing much better than we feared. The bad news is that you're not.

The Cowen and Company report downgraded Yahoo to Neutral from Outperform after it included that Yahoo's recent drop in marketshare--attributed by Yahoo to an industry-wide drop in banner ads and paid search--was a Yahoo-only situation. Don't mean to pile on, but another report today—from eMarketer, which tracks Web ads—also pours HTML unhappiness unto Yahoo's yodel. The eMarketer report gives Yahoo nemesis Google control of 25 percent of all U.S. online ad spending in a calendar year, which is the first time any company has controlled that big a slice of the Web ad market. To read the full story,

One of retail's most important IT executives--Circuit City CIO Mike Jones--has left the $11.6 billion chain, with the chief IT job going to his VP of business applications.

Jones had a very creative and visionary perspective for the chain and a company statement left unclear the circumstances of his departure, although the vaguely ominous phrase "to pursue other interests" was used. The statement said Jones will relinquish his CIO role "immediately" but added that "he will remain at the company until mid-November to transition his duties to his replacement."Read more...

The changes for this holiday’s shopping season—both online and offline—were the highlights of this week’s StorefrontBacktalk Week In Review show, featuring panelists Patti Freeman Evans, from Jupiter Research, Cathy Hotka, from Cathy Hotka & Associates, Richard Mader from the National Retail Federation and former federal prosecutor Mark Rasch. StorefrontBacktalk Editor Evan Schuman moderated.

Jupiter’s Evans anticipates more sophisticated search capabilities as the most interesting development expected, along with earlier purchasing. The panel also explored whether more indirect issues—such as interest rates and gasoline prices—influence shopping behavior. The panel also explored whether new standards proposed by the National Retail Federation to make it easier for e-tailers to send data to price-comparison sites will also make it harder for retailers to hide selling identical products for higher prices. To listen to the pricing and standards discussion, please click here. To listen to the E-Commerce prediction discussion, please click here. To listen to the shopping influences discussion, please click here.…