Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

PayPal expanded its global reach Thursday, adding ten new currencies: the Czech Koruna, Danish Krone, Hong Kong Dollar, Hungarian Forint, New Zealand Dollar, Norwegian Krone, Polish Zloty, Singapore Dollar, Swedish Krona, and Swiss Franc. PayPal had already supported U.S. Dollars, Australian Dollars, Euros, Pounds Sterling, Canadian Dollars, Japanese Yen and Chinese RMB.

PayPal also announced that residents in 48 new markets can now use PayPal in their local markets to send money online. These new markets include Indonesia, the Philippines, Croatia, Fiji, Vietnam and Jordan. PayPal currently has 114 million accounts globally. In the second quarter of 2006, PayPal’s total payment volume — or the total value of transactions — was $8.9 billion.…

A major tradegroup on Tuesday unveiled new E-Commerce product format guidelines, which might help consumers more accurately compare products. But first, retailers have to reverse their proprietary ways. The new standard data exchange formats were introduced by the Association for Retail Technical Standards (ARTS), which is a part of the National Retail Federation (NRF).

The intent of the new rules was clearly to help lighten the processing burdens of retailers as they submit product details to various product-comparison Web sites. But a possible unintended consequence of the move is that it might help those product-comparison sites more easily identify which products are identical. For years, product-comparison sites have complained that retailers deliberately make such comparisons difficult. Read more...

An upcoming retailer/supplier trainwreck collission over store localization, Amazon's abandonment of key features of its A9 search engine, whether a new giftcard service will change retail approaches and the privacy controversy surrounding Hitachi's new RFID tag. Those were the topics for this week's StorefrontBacktalk Week In Review audiocast.

This week's panel featured Forrester Research's Nikki Baird, the Retail Systems Alert Group's Steve Rowen and Ken Morris of The Lakewest Group, along with StorefrontBacktalk Editor Evan Schuman moderating.Read more...

To the sadness of absolutely no Web surfers, pop-ads—and other forms of disruptive media—dropped this year by 9 percent, to the point where it’s worth barely 0.7 percent of all online advertising dollars, according to an Interactive Advertising Bureau report released in London. “The random scattergun approach is dying out,” said IAB chief executive in the U.K., Guy Phillipson, according to a story in The Guardian newspaper.

Here in the U.S., “pop-ups are irritating advertisers” and it’s not even something that the U.S. chapter even looks at, said IAB’s U.S.-based Senior VP Sheryl Draizen. “We don’t even think about it anymore. It’s not what online is all about anymore. Popups were an issue for us four years ago.” Draizen was pushing stats that show online ad purchases—for the first six months of 2006 compared with the first six months of 2005—increasing by 37 percent. That compares to the same period ending 2005 of 26 percent, 39.7 percent for 2004 and 10.5 percent for 2003.…

The A9 search engine’s highly-touted street-level images and the ability to remember almost everything a user has ever searched for have been abandoned by Amazon, according to an Associated Press story. Amazon removed those capabilities—”along with several others”—late Friday, the AP report said. It quoted Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener as saying that Amazon is “shifting its priorities to areas where it can provide the greatest benefit for customers.”

This is not good news. Amazon was pushing the HTML envelope on creative search techniques. When Amazon starts pushing and starts retreating, what does that say to the industry? On greater concern to many, what does it say to Google?…

As the established large E-Commerce sites pour millions of dollars into security and enterprise-league hardened POS systems, cyber crooks have been giving more attention to much smaller and less well-protected merchants.

Those smaller merchants can't even necessarily protect themselves by opting to not have a Web site, as the thieves are grabbing credit card information as its transmitted over the Internet to POS servers. "In general, the smaller retailers, whether they're operating E-Commerce sites or physical stores, don't have the resources to think about security," said Gartner Group retail security analyst Avivah Litan.Read more...

The marquee names of the participants in lockstep agreement couldn't have been more impressive: Wal-Mart, P&G, Kellogg's, Coca Cola, Miller Brewing, Disney, Walgreens and more. They were all coming together to support a method for tracking aisle traffic for the purpose of properly pricing promotion fees. But according to a panel of retail technology experts this week, they couldn't be more wrong.

The dramatic infrared sensor announcement will offer no true advantages over the old-fashioned mechanical counters and is a puzzling move, said Paula Rosenblum of the Retail Systems Alert Group.Read more...

A new price-comparison site went beta this week. On its own, that’s certainly not worthy of note as new such sites crop up fairly often. But this site—called www.pronto.com–is making two interesting claims. First, it’s billing itself as world’s most comprehensive comparison-shopping site, backing that up with a further claim of 45 million products from 50,000 retailers. But the second claim is that it will display results with no influence from ads or purchased placement.

Traditional comparison sites today only show products that retailers want to be shown, while Pronto claims to show all, just as the very initial meta-sites did, in the early days of the Web. “Many top retailers advertise less than one-third of their inventory on leading comparison shopping sites and consumers pay the price for this lack of comprehensiveness,” said Pronto CEO Dan Marriott. “Most people don’t want to shop in a store where two thirds of the retail space is empty so why would they do so on the Web?”…

There’s not that much that is retail-specific about this, but it’s difficult to not at least note the introduction of a 16-GByte, which claims the title of the world’s highest-capacity card. The card, with a suggested price of $1,050, truly has the potential to shake up the IT world. When that much memory can sit atop a fingertop, it is going to enable some fascinating things.

The SanDisk Extreme III CompactFlash cards claim minimum write and read speeds of 20 MBytes/sec. and are slated to ship by late December, SanDisk said.…

Edgar Dworsky, a former assistant attorney general for consumer protection in Massachusetts, has launched a Web site solely focused on catching misleading retail advertisements.

“My comments to advertisers who pull this stuff: Why antagonize potential customers with hidden ‘gotchas’?” Dworsky said. “Not only will you likely lose their business, but they will tell their friends—and hopefully also the state attorney general—about the deception.” Initial examples? A Chrysler campaign touting a “if not satisfied, return within 30 days” that only in the fineprint mentions some $2,000 in associated charges, a Charles Schwab promo touting $9.95 commissions, but using a microscopic footnote to point its only for those with “$1 million in qualifying assets” and Mazda, which pushed low prices that required very large down payments.…

A survey released Monday morning tells us all what we already knew, that consumers still run into a lot of problems when trying to make online purchases. Although the high percentage of consumers reporting problems (88 percent) is eye-opening, the upshot isn’t.

The lead with the announcement of the Harris Interactive survey–paid for by TeaLeaf– pretty sums up the “and this surprised you in what way?’ response: “Online transaction failures can wreak havoc on Ebusiness.” I read that a few times and tried to figure out what point Harris was trying to make. Were they expecting online transaction failures to help E-business? Perhaps they had anticipated consumers saying that they would ignore online transaction failures and continue to work with that site regardless. The word itself–“failure”–pretty much telegraphs the answer.

That all said, if the survey makes IT execs say, “OK. We knew about these relentless glitches, but we sort of hoped no consumers would notice” take notice, that’s fine. But I’d just as well hope that IT execs who think that way get punished. There’s something just about that.…

When Amazon.com has server problems, it shares them with other key retail players, including Target.com and Borders.com. At least that's the E-Commerce lesson those three retailers—and perhaps others—are learning this week. All three retailers began seeing a sharp drop in server response times starting Wed., at about 9 AM, according to sources familiar with their servers. The three are connected because, to varying degrees, Amazon is hosting chunks of the E-Commerce sites of both Borders and Target.

How sharp were the drops? Amazon's uptime is typically one of the best, hovering between 98 percent and 99 percent, the sources said. Starting Sept. 20 at about 9 AM, it plummeted into the 80s and by the night of Sept. 21, it had dropped to 73 percent. But early Sept. 22, it had dropped to 60 percent before the problem was apparently fixed at about 4:30 AM Sept. 22. The drop in response time for Borders and Target fit "the exact same pattern," starting at the same time and increasing and decreasing at the same rate, one source who examined the data said. Read more...

When a federal judge in California agreed that a lawsuit from the National Federation for the Blind can proceed against Target, E-Commerce executives should have breathed a collective sigh of relief.

The lawsuit essentially argues that Target's online operation violated the American with Disabilities Act because it is not designed to easily accessible to blind users. Target's defense has been that the ADA does not explicitly talk about Web sites so, Target reasons, it's not covered. That argument is wrong for so many reasons. For the moment, let's set aside that the argument is wrong legally (the California judge already dealt with that one). From Target's perspective, it's more relevant that the answer is wrong from a marketing, customer service and an IT and design perspective. Read more...

After Yahoo announced today that it would scale back its third-quarter financial expectations because of weak recent Web ad sales, Google and Ebay joined Yahoo in a shared stock-fall ride. Let’s set aside for the moment that Wall Street’s “what have you done for me lately?” financial analysis is not the way to run an E-Commerce company. But there does tend to a lack of there there with much in E-Commerce today.

Yes, online ads are much easier to measure. But consumers are clicking less and less and advertisers are starting to question how strong a sales lead a clicker is anyway. Advertisers are absolutely pulling dollars away from print and putting it online. But will the online ROI keep them for the long term? I have serious doubts. (But, please, while you’re debating that point, click on a bunch of our Google ads. I love being proven wrong.)…

Motorola has taken over RFID and barcode vendor Symbol Technologies for almost $4 billion in cash, which came to about $15/share.

Wall Street saw this as good news for Symbol and not-so-great-news for Motorola, as Motorola shares dropped 50 cents in afternoon trade on the New York Stock Exchange, while Symbol shares increased 3 cents at $14.70 on the NYSE. But its stock price had already soared about 15 percent on Monday when it absorbed rumors that it might be purchased.

Motorola CEO Ed Zander issued a statement that the positions Motorola well for a digital future: “Everything is going digital and everything digital is going mobile. This is especially evident in the way businesses are run today. Motorola and Symbol share the same vision of a digital, mobile world for enterprises that matches the world people enjoy at home and at play.”…

Recent changes to credit card security rules reflect a maturing of the payment rules, with wireless monitoring requirements made much more strict while file software integrity monitoring frequency and the encryption demand have both been softened.

"This is a bow to reality," said Mark Rasch, a former federal prosecutor who now specializes in retail security issues. "The first version was more of a Utopian of what Visa and MasterCard thought were workable standards based on what people should do. This is a minor tweaking based upon what people are doing." Read more...

This week’s show included a special guest, David King, CIO of the Regal Entertainment Group, which is the nation’s largest movie theater chain, bringing in about $2.7 billion a year from theaters in 40 states. King lead a spirited discussion about the new PCI changes and how his chain is viewing them, including a new wireless requirement. On the RFID front, the panel looked at the new Gen2 support promised from both Wal-Mart and the Metro Group as well as what may be truly behind it. Metro’s experiment with physically separating payment from checkout also prompted a debate of whether two lanes would be seen as being slower even though it’s faster.

Other than CIO King, our panel this week featured the Retail Systems Alert Group’s Paula Rosenblum, IDC’s Pete Abell, Chris Noell from TruComply and former federal prosecutor and security consultant Mark Rasch. StorefrontBacktalk Editor Evan Schuman moderated.…

Our panel this week whipped up some sweet insights into Starbucks’ headaches with an electronic coupon that they had intended to be strictly localized but the Web had other plans. It also jumped into the renewed interest from some major retailers into using closed-circuit video feeds for a lot more than catching thieves, including CRM and preventing child abductions.

Our panel this week featured IHL President Greg Buzek, the Retail Systems Alert Group‘s Steve Rowen, Forrester Research‘s Sucharita Mulpuru and The Lakewest Group‘s Sunita Gupta. StorefrontBacktalk Editor Evan Schuman moderated.…

Plenty of options is typically seen as a good thing, unless the screen involved is the size of a cellphone monitor. But which options are displayed and which are hidden? A Santa Clara, CA, cellphone software firm has been awarded a patent on its method of allowing the cellphone itself to make that selection based on the buying pattern of the consumer.

July Systems, which announced the patent today, argued that the system's support of realtime personalization is "key to overcoming screen size and other limitations" to help "the mass adoption of mobile video, games, music and other services." Read more...

Think of it as a marriage between Amazon's consumer review comments and Youtube's homemade videos. But will anyone turn little movies into big money?
Buy.com is trying to merge two of the Web's most powerful sales tools—consumer-written reviews and homemade video—into a salestool that will both tap a younger demographic and theoretically add more credibility to heretofore anonymous content. Among the initial roadblocks are that a relatively small number of people will likely take the time to record and transmit a video review (which is a lot more troublesome than typing out a few sentences of comments) and the essential review-and-approval today must be done manually (which, if the technique becomes popular, could quickly translate into a huge labor and cost challenge). Read more...

For your listening pleasure this week, you can hear us discuss video. (That’s probably more fun than watching us discuss audio.) Buy.com’s video reviews effort, to be precise. Will consumer-generated video content shake up E-Commerce? Also, the panel looks into why fewer than half of all retailers today even have a formal plan for dealing with consumer data security breaches as well as whether technology deployments today are often hurting retail sales.

Our late summer panel this week featured IHL President Greg Buzek, the Retail Systems Alert Group’s Steve Rowen and ABI Research’s Michael J. Liard. Special industry guest was Dave Samuel, co-president of Grouper Networks, which is now part of Sony Pictures Entertainment. StorefrontBacktalk Editor Evan Schuman moderated.…

Please click to listen in on this week’s audio discussion, as the panel rips into Google’s substantial new challenges, with both Google Checkout and marketshare, the question of whether the major E-Commerce sites are ready for the holiday rush or the holiday crash, and a European look at RFID pricing and ROI struggles.

Our inquisitive panel this week included returning panelists Paula Rosenblum from the Retail Systems Alert Group and former federal prosecutor and security expert Mark Rasch plus Safa Raschtchy, senior research analyst with Wall Street’s Piper Jaffray (who authored the initial report that questioned Google Checkout’s retailer acceptance) and Ben Rushlo, from Keynote Systems Evan Schuman, Editor at StorefrontBacktalk, moderated.…

When Amazon.com crashed for almost two hours on Monday, it might have meant little were it not for the fact that a major industry report had foreshadowed it just three days earlier. Do related problems with Wal-Mart and Google show a trend? Late last week, Internet traffic monitoring firm Keynote Systems issued a report that said many of the largest E-Commerce players will face major load-handling challenges for the holidays if they don't make major changes quickly.

To help out, Amazon generously knocked out its own servers for almost two hours on Monday. OK, OK. Amazon probably didn't crash just to help Keynote make a point. But it's timing was impeccable nonetheless. Read more...

Google's stock got slapped around again on Wall Street on Wednesday, after what initially appeared to be an isolated report of a search marketshare drop turned out to be not so isolated. Google shares lost about 1.3 percent of their value.

Google started off the week with a report from Piper Jaffray that that Google Checkout is not winning over a lot of retailers, mostly because those retailers don't want to surrender that much customer information to Google. This follows a report that Levi.com had officially abandoned Google Checkout. Read more...