Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

At the end of every week, StorefrontBacktalk.com will assemble some of the industry’s top consultants, analysts and IT executives to discuss that week’s retail tech developments. We inaugurated our StorefrontBacktalk Week In Review on July 21.

The July 21 panel included Pete Abell from IDC, Paula Rosenblum from the Retail Systems Alert Group, Greg Buzek of IHL and Mark Rasch, a former federal prosecutor who today serves as VP for Solutionary.

The panel–moderated by StorefrontBacktalk Editor Evan Schuman–ripped into a wide range of topics. Listen to Rasch, Rosenblum, Buzek and Abell discuss the new PCI changes announced by Visa or Rosenblum, Rasch and Buzek debate how multi-channel will likely do this holiday shopping season. Abell tackled HP’s RFID-rival Memory Spot alone while Rasch, Buzek and Rosenblum ganged up on self-checkout trends, including a fascinating discussion about self-checkout obliterating impulse purchases. Rosenblum and Buzek also argued about workforce management technology, concluding that the larger companies are–much more than they initially thought–avoiding workforce technology.

Please listen and shout your feedback to us.…

Outsourced live chat is nothing new and as long as there is no law passed requiring live chat personnel to answer the questions being asked and not just read from a script, its value will be limited. But one veteran provider of these typing services has been toying with an interesting twist. Live Person is now pushing a database-driven process that automatically pops up a live chat session when it concludes the customer is having some difficulty, such as with an abandoned cart or he/she seems to be waffling between two similar products.

But the interesting part is that the software looks at the nature of the products involved in the confusion and assigns an appropriate product specialist to handle that query, to allow–in theory–a much more sophicated and specific exchange. Said one company exec: “If you’re buying a snowboard, you’re matched only with a snowboard gearhead.” This is an effort we’re going to be watching.…

Coupons are a time-honored retail tradition, but like secret Black Friday promotions and regional pricing, there is a good argument that they may no longer make sense. There are many Web sites today that are designed to empower consumers, often ostensibly against the interest of big business, whether those are major retailers, government agencies or large publishers.

Some of the more interesting ones help consumers get around mandatory free site registration—such as www.bugmenot.com--or get to a human voice when locked inside a voice-system hell (www.gethuman.com).Read more...

Just what retail IT execs need in the middle of a July heatwave: reminders that the holiday shopping season is waiting around the corner, like a heavily-armed drunk street gang. (Sorry. Heat waves in New Jersey have a way of souring a guy.)

What brings up this merry thought is a statement from Keynote Systems, the Web performance tracking people. Torturously reminding everyone that Black Friday is only 130 days away, Keynote said it was doubling the capacity of its main load testing service, LoadPro. They’ve added three new cities for testing: Seattle, Denver and Miami, for a total of ten locations across five Tier-1 backbones, as well as increasing network bandwidth capacity by almost 60 percent. What Keynote is doing is fine and necessary, but did they have to spoil a perfectly good summer and announce it now?

To listen to top industry analysts discuss the upcoming holiday season and what it will likely mean for multi-channel marketing efforts, please click here.…

Vendor-initiated surveys have a remarkable history of establishing that the vendor’s service or product is every bit as wonderful as the vendor’s always said. Given the tremendous discretion involved in phrasing the questions, choosing who is being asked and how the answers are analyzed, self-serving vendor research shouldn’t change a lot of minds.

That said, MasterCard PayPass on Tuesday released “internal MasterCard data”–some of it dating back to last September–that showed the average ticket being about $20 and that consumers used credit cards about 18 percent more once they became contactless. “Though PayPass technology can also be used for transactions exceeding $25 (at which point a signature or PIN is required for verification), roughly 75 percent of all PayPass transactions were for purchases below $25 and approximately 45 percent of all PayPass transactions were for purchases below $10.”

To the extent that the point is that consumers are carrying less cash than a year ago, they clearly are. But a lot of that involves cultural changes, making it not clear how much of that 18 percent increase would have happened anyway.…

Albertsons will give up its online shopping business as of next week after a 4-year effort. The decision to halt its online shopping and delivery service in the Bay Area, Sacramento, Dallas-Fort Worth and Phoenix markets on July 21 comes a month after ownership of the grocery chain changed, according to a report in Wednesday’s San Jose Mercury-News.

Albertsons began offering its online grocery shopping service in the Bay Area in March 2002. Customers who shopped online could either pay $4.95 to have their orders made ready for pickup at an Albertsons store in the online delivery area or pay $9.95 for home delivery. But, like many other online grocery ventures over the years, Albertsons.com was not profitable, an industry expert said. “I’d heard it’s been struggling for some time. I think online is not necessarily a viable way to sell groceries,” said George Whalin, president of Retail Management Consultants in San Marcos. To read the San Jos Mercury-News story, please click here.…

SAP has bought out Praxis Software, a Minneapolis-based 12-employee E-Commerce/CRM SAP partner since 2003, for an undisclosed amount.

Praxis’s software will now be combined with SAP’s Business One software, which helps small and midsize users manage accounting, inventory, customer relationships, and other functions. To read the full story in Red Herrring, please click here.…

Giftcards are quickly becoming an extremely popular retail payment option, but the traditional analog cards suffer from a lack of security when used for E-Commerce. One company has a two-factor—and possibly three-factor—way of dealing with that.

Imx Solutions said the products are initially being used by Sears, Kmart and CompUSA along with television’s Ultimate Shopping Network (USN). The giftcard is a mini-CD that uses a company-issued–and hidden–password plus it takes a page from the one-time-password-issuing devices because it has a series of encrypted codes on it that needs to match up with a list of encrypted codes on an Imx server and the correct code “changes twice a minute.” To read the full story, please click here.…

Wednesday's decision supports leather goods manufacturer Louis Vuitton's claim that a search for Vuitton should only return sites and ads that mention Vuitton and not those that mention knock-offs or competitors.

A French court of appeals on Wednesday sided with leather goods manufacturer Louis Vuitton and ruled that Google had violated trademark, unfair competition and advertising laws by showing ads for Vuitton rivals when people searched for Vuitton. The closely-watched case—which involves Google having to pay a fine of about $250,000—has huge implications for wide range of search and related Web activities. Read more...

The CIO for billion-dollar clothing retailer Guess Inc. had a challenge. He knew their search engine was delivering terrible results and that he would take many months to replace. What should be done in the meantime?

Even CIOs at billion-dollar retailers have to put their jeans on one upgrade at a time. But Guess Inc. CIO Michael Relich found himself in an especially difficult position when web analytics told him that 60 percent of his E-commerce site's search results were delivering "not found" responses to prospects. Read more...

In theory, a smartphone can bring into the store the depth of data possible on the web, merged with enough site- and user-specific data to make even the stodgiest CRM system blush. But can it work in the real world? NeoMedia is arguing that it can. Read more...

The old BidPay online payment service—which boasted more than 4 million registered users when it shut its doors in December 2005—has relaunched under the umbrella of new owner CyberSource. But the service has been significantly revamped.

CyberSource has a fondness for bargains, especially when the potential acquirees have as little negotiating room as possible. Read more...

The Web is all abuzz with the Grass Is Always Greener On The Other Side Of the Firewall stories about Google preparing an online payment system (a la EBay's PayPal) to be called GBuy while EBay is preparing a contextual Web ad service (a la Google's AdWords) to be called EBay AdContext.

But the most reality-based analysis is that Ebay and Google are proving to be the quintessential example of coopertition (is there an accepted spelling yet for that blend of cooperation and competition?). Read more...

As the rules for payment data get tighter and well-publicized incidents invite regulatory scrutiny, hungry lawyers and bad publicity, many smaller E-Commerce shops are hungry for an easy way out. Being the kind-hearted altruistic souls that they be, vendors are flocking to help these folk out. Read more...

Shortly after the media began reporting this weekend on its data loss from a car thief, Expedia hired a PR firm to call reporters and stress that the incident was not in reality exposing its customers to identity thieves, but merely to credit card thieves.

Now there's a comforting distinction. First, what does it say about Expedia that it not only felt that exposing customers to credit-card theft was a lot nicer than exposing them to identity thieves, but it was willing to pay money to try and make that difference clear? Even better, one could make the argument that if you give a clever con artist sufficient access to a consumer's credit card data, they will easily be able to extract enough personal data to try for an identity theft. Read more...

More than a quarter-of-a-million Hotels.com customers are now at high risk for credit card theft after a password-protected laptop computer containing their credit card information was stolen from an Ernst & Young auditor's locked car in what appears to be a "randon petty theft," a Hotels.com spokesperson was quoted as telling the Associated Press. The Seattle incident at Hotels.com, a subsidiary of Expedia.com, is just the latest in a series of data-identity cases recently centering not around criminal hackers but around the garden-variety thug breaking into locked places. Read more...

Just as E-Commerce players are getting used to the idea of people buying products using their cellphones, whether in a physical location beaming right to a POS or making purchases online, the cellphone wants to make the next leap forward. Nokia has ported the Apache webserver to Symbian, which will theoretically allow cell phones to directly serve Web content.

According to a report in LinuxDevices.com, Nokia installed its experimental port, initially, on a Nokia 6630, which it then accessed over a Bluetooth PAN (personal area network). This proved somewhat useful, in that it brought “the possibility of accessing functionality on the phone using a big screen and proper keyboard.”

However, the project’s goal was to enable access to the phone of the cellular network, the story said. This proved challenging due to firewalls explicitly deployed by operators to prevent such access.

This is the logical next step with the growth of the Web. The Internet’s early days were made powerful because of the networking of millions of PCs around the globe. The potential to expand that now with the networking of huge numbers of connected cellphones is, to say the least, powerful.…

Just what major retail E-Commerce sites need these days: Security holes associated only with their site. The Washington Post reported today that the security hole, which has existed for more than two weeks on the Circuit City site, created a “back door” for hackers to assume control of the victim’s machine and use it to send SPAM. The problem, which only reportedly impacted users who were not current with their Internet Explorer patches, lived on Circuit City’s customer-support portion of its site.

Users are tolerant of–nay, even used to–browser and OS security holes. But when the fears start routinely becoming site specific, E-Commerce players may finally take patches and security seriously. …

Some of the largest Web retailers—including including CircuitCity, CompUSA and RitzCamera--use the same product-comparison database. But a comparison of those sites with each other—and with the full database—show what they're choosing to keep from their customers. Read more...

The vision of convergence circa 2000 was a remote control influencing live network broadcast action. That never happened, but BET has gotten close, But BET's executives found the profit rested in knowing the particulars of its large niche audience. What will this mean for E-Commerce? Will broadcast, cable, cellphones and PCs finally learn to play together, with smart advertisers along for the ride?Read more...

The world's largest retailer wants to attract more customers and it sees selling computer parts as one way. That includes PCs with no operating system and spare parts to create your own desktop. But it shows a lack of understanding of how people buy technology. Read more...

When federal authorities started unsealing court documents about the Secret Service's Operation Rolling Stone, they also gave a peek inside how they are trying to combat cyber-crime. Read more...

In sharing information about an undercover federal investigation of Web frauds involving credit cards and stolen tax refunds, the Secret Service demonstrated that it can adapt with the times.

The seven initial arrests stemming from what the Secret Service has dubbed "Operation Rolling Stone" show that federal investigators have started to learn how to crack through deceptive IP addresses and encrypted IM communications. Read more...

Although the market for content for cell phones and PDAs is still in its infancy, the two applications that are expected to seize major market-share the fastest are reservations for airplane seats and hotel rooms. Read more...