Like every major sales and communications advance that preceded it, e-commerce's 12-year existence has moved along in phases, as it slowly abandoned earlier methods to accept the new reality.
Offline and online brands were initially kept distinct, then they were awkwardly merged. Initial e-commerce efforts were flashy brochure sites, with rudimentary shopping carts and checkout. Read more...
With more home deliveries and installations, retailers and restaurants are facing the point-of-sale challenge of verifying payments away from the POS while paying higher credit card fees for card-not-present purchases. Read more...
One of the more intriguing movies with a technology theme in the last few decades was a 1983 flick called "WarGames," starring Matthew Broderick in his second movie.
Critics of the movie from the IT community at the time said that the film's plot—about a sophisticated war game computer that confused its NORAD masters into thinking that a simulated nuclear attack was real—was unrealistic because every computer has more failsafes than the one in the story. Read more...
In what Yahoo is carefully characterizing as mere research, the portal is asking some of its users whether they would be willing to perform all—or at least most—of their searches on Yahoo in exchange for discounted music downloads, frequent flier miles, video rental discounts and even charity donations. One of the Web's first search engines, Yahoo has taken a distant number two position behind Google in search market share, while MSN is a distant third. Read more...
The IT director at bath products retailer Crabtree & Evelyn wants to move away from the homegrown applications that run point-of-sale and back-office systems, but he says he's trapped.
The multimillion-dollar cost of moving to off-the-shelf apps would easily outweigh the cost of sticking with apps that work quite adequately. Read more...
The National Security Agency, whose NSA initials are typically preceded by "super secret" or a similar cool-sounding phrase, is known as the home for code-breakers extraordinaire.
After 9/11, the NSA was given even more freedom to do whatever it takes to track terrorists and identify their plots. The New York Times recently reported about their efforts to conduct more domestic surveillance without warrants or any court authorization. Read more...
The ease of use of a gift card is making them popular, with e-commerce sites expecting a tidal wave of gift card redemptions during the holidays. The question is whether they will be met with a similarly enthusiastic number of thieves hoping to use replicas of the cards in brick-and-mortars and the numbers themselves online. Read more...
Betting that price comparison sites will play an increasingly prominent role in e-commerce, credit information vendor Experian was spending almost half a billion dollars to take over PriceGrabber.com.
Following on the heels of the June 2005 purchases—just days apart—where E.W. Scripps paid $525 million for Shopzilla and eBay paid $620 million for Shopping.com, Experian's move seemed to continue a trend. Read more...
Trust and credibility—often associated with a brand—are arguably the most powerful assets of any e-commerce site. Without it, the Web is just an electronic version of the Wild West, with the shootouts won by the lowest-price site, until that site is shot down by another low-cost site. Consumers and B2B shoppers purchase from a branded site because they have faith they will be treated fairly and honestly. Read more...
The Internet continues to take its toll—both pro and con—on the U.S. Postal Service, but the post office may be starting to win the fight. In 2005, for the first time in several years, the USPS reported an increase in first-class shipments, albeit a nominal one of one-tenth of one percent. Read more...
Major retailers were given a teaspoon of good news that their sites fared well during what was expected to be a super-intense traffic day. But the real wave of intense traffic was expected to hit in late December, so the strong Black Monday performance might have proven to be a brief-lived cause for celebration. Read more...
Several Web sites have popped up—like the thermometer timer on a turkey—to announce to the world Black Friday retail specials before the retailers want them to. Is this nature's way of telling the retailers to grow up?
Old ways die hard, and there's no industry that is more resistant to change than retail. Read more...
E-mail is a wonderfully flexible and powerful application, but have corporate users bent it so far that it's about to break? More to the point, have users forced e-mail to do so many things that it's no longer any good at its core function? This is not an academic discussion. In 2006, e-commerce sites that use e-mail extensively are going to have to evaluate alternative communication and distribution methods.Read more...
The argument that e-commerce allows price and product quality to trump large marketing budgets has been crushed by, well, large marketing budgets. One of the core beliefs among e-commerce cognoscenti is that the Web serves as the great equalizer, allowing 20-employee retailers to effectively compete with Fortune 100 giants with $100 million ad budgets. Read more...
When Office Depot sued Staples over search engine keyword purchases, it touched on more than marketing strategies.
The suit could force the discussion of the ethics of Web advertising tactics, a discussion that many in the industry would rather not have. Read more...
Soaring gas prices have been pushed by natural disasters and an unfriendly global climate. But some e-commerce players are looking on the bright side: Maybe this will push people to drive less in the fourth quarter and instead log in and buy more online. Gas prices could impact e-commerce activity in two opposite ways: by increasing the out-of-pocket costs of driving to stores, making e-commerce a better option; or by increasing the costs of shipping packages, making brick-and-mortar shopping the more cost-effective route. Read more...
Like a Java version of the sword of Damocles, the threat of a Web tax has loomed over e-Commerce players since the Web was formed a little more than a decade ago.
But fitting for an October deadline, this sword is more of the tissue-paper and cardboard type, one that looks scary only from a distance. Upon closer examination, e-commerce shops are discovering it's a twist on the Halloween tradition called Threat Or Treat. Read more...
Several indications—from reduced ATM interest, increased use of online bill payments and sharply improved consumer bank perceptions—show that banks are starting to understand their customers. Given that it's a business where almost everything comes down to moving numbers from one column to another, one might think that online banking should have been one of the first e-Commerce segments to mature. From that perspective, it's an Internet natural. Read more...
With the nation's worst credit card security disaster on its resume and AmericanExpress and Visa cutting its contract, payment processor CardSystems has few long-term options.
In what might signal the closing chapter in the CardSystem credit-card security breach saga, CyberSource announced its intent to acquire all of CardSystem's assets for an undisclosed amount. Read more...
TSAP and Oracle are fighting a marketing battle that recalls the grand days of vaporware. By making acquisitions to fill product holes, instead of filling product holes, they promise to deliver a solution that is greater than the sum of its parts. But retailers need to wait months and years to see if it pans out. The software industry has for years had a proud tradition of announcing product long before an actual product existed—vaporware, in other words: software specs and capabilities that didn't really exist but might exist in the future. Read more...
With an estimated $10.5 billion of idle spare change lying around American households, Amazon sees that found money as found money. And it will now accept it for purchases. Pity the poor penny, the neglected nickel, the despondent dime and the queasy quarter. The times are changing and for change, it's for the worse. Read more...
The concept of e-commerce micropayments—small Web purchases typically less than $2—is nothing new, but it has never gained widespread acceptance among e-retailers because credit card fees took too much of a bite out of a micropayment to make the exchange profitable.Read more...
Generous people wanting to help victims of Hurricane Katrina should direct their financial contributions carefully, so that the money isn't diverted by e-commerce thieves.
Scammers taking advantage of the disaster don't need much capital or personnel: The Web provides them all they need in the way of cover, illusion and false identities.Read more...
Yahoo Inc. has gone into beta on an enhanced version of its e-commerce hosting service, which is positioned for the small business that can't justify its own Web team nor the time to outsource it to programmers and Web designers. Read more...
It has been said that CIOs at large companies today have limited direct power and—more than almost any other C-level executive—need to push the IT/business agenda by persuasion and by maintaining good relations with other stakeholders. Taking that to heart, the CIO of Overstock.com recently sent off a note to key business partners taking the heat for a wide range of technologies that weren't working out. Read more...
Cards issued by European banks when used online cross border don't usually support AVS checks. So, when a European card is used with a billing address that's in the US, an ecom merchant wouldn't necessarily know that the shipping zip code doesn't match the billing code.
-Marc
