In the Visa data theft case, much has been made of a security audit that cleared the clearinghouse that improperly handled the data. But security experts see audits rarely shedding much light on what the CIO doesn't already know. Read more...
The Overstock.com Web site is all about pricing, as it pitches itself as saving consumers as much as 80 percent compared with other retailers. But in its rapidly growing IT department, the obsession is speed. How fast? During a major deployment of some large Teradata packages—including CRM, profit analytics and an enterprise data warehouse—Teradata bid on the assumption that such large installations typically take between nine and 12 months to deploy. Overstock's IT department finished the deployment in 70 days, said company CIO Shawn Schwegman. Read more...
When it comes to privacy issues, the online airline/travel industry is moving in the opposite direction from most industries and is using personal data more aggressively than it did just a few months ago, according to a new report from an industry consulting firm. Read more...
In the Information Age that we're in, quality of information trumps quantity every time. And for CIOs, that's good news. But there's a big piece of bad news, too. The flood of information at the command of customers is both good and bad, and many customers—especially consumers—rarely can tell the difference.Read more...
The CIO of Reitmans needs sales associates to know a customer's history before the sale starts. Given that most customers use loyalty cards at the end of shopping, that's a tough sweater to pull on. In the retail world, selling clothing is mostly about convincing customers what looks good on them. And it certainly helps if the salesperson already knows what's in that customer's closet, what her favorite colors are, her price range and her size.Read more...
During congressional testimony, executives from bank and credit card companies involved in the largest credit card data loss ever pointed fingers at a new culprit for gaps in security: the auditors who had certified the credit card processing systems as being up to snuff. But in an interview those auditors said one of the CEO witnesses was either lying or very mistaken. Read more...
In analyzing more than 6,500 data points from the top 19 e-commerce sites, a new Keynote Systems report found sites that were too slow, failed too often and often glitched during the crucial checkout period. In analyzing more than 6,500 data points from each of 22 top e-commerce sites, a new Keynote Systems report found that many sites were too slow, failed too often and often glitched during the crucial checkout period. Read more...
Corporate Web sites are becoming bloated bandwidth hogs, which should surprise absolutely no one in high tech. But a survey is proving that the reckless use of multimedia, animation, JavaScript and other impressive but non-informational offerings is starting to have a negative impact on site traffic. The site visitor's pain from overdesigned or overprogrammed sites—those being two different but equally sinful efforts—is more than mere time-wasting.Read more...
Trying to make eBay as attractive and comprehensive as possible for small businesses that represent a huge portion of eBay's revenue, the auction company is offering to help customers create their own Web sites to complement their eBay presence. Read more...
A major pharmacy chain's program designed to let customers view a history of their purchases in e-mail had weak enough security to make it vulnerable to identity thieves, forcing the chain to temporarily shut down its Web site while it reconsidered security. The chain was CVS Corp., which has more than 5,400 stores in the United States. Read more...
Hoping to at least slow down the wave of electronic fraud threatening retailers, a group of major credit card firms—led by Visa—asked all merchants to submit recognized security audits. The firms also wanted full compliance with 12 key elements of the PCI Data Security Standard, but those have already been required, although compliance has been spotty. Read more...
It has been said that a university's role is not necessarily to preach the right answers, but to teach students how to ask the right questions. To the extent that's true, a recent University of Pennsylvania report seems to be properly performing its role. The report itself was hard to ignore; it reported that 64 percent of consumers "do not know that it is legal for an online store to charge different people different prices during the same time of day, a practice used by some companies that base their prices on what they know about a customer's buying habits." Read more...
Global retail IT spending among midmarket companies is expected to sharply increase in the next few years, from about $22 billion last year to almost $31 billion by 2009, an almost 41 percent increase, according to a new report from technology analysis firm AMI Partners. AMI defined the midmarket retailer as one with between 100 to 999 employees.Read more...
SAP AG opened a volley in what has become a series of charges and countercharges between it and its former Retek acquisition target by amending its Safe Passage program to provide incentives for Retek customers to jump ship. Among the lures: a partial credit of the user's original Retek software licensing (no floor mentioned, but a ceiling of 75 percent) to be used to pay for SAP for Retail packages; "an on-site business case benefits assessment of migrating from Retek to SAP, delivered by SAP or one of its retail industry partners"; and SAP training. Read more...
Little E-Commerce turned 11 years old in 2005 and, like its human counterparts, it was an awkward part of its corporate adolescence. It was no longer the cute little tyke from '95 and '96, with those adorable Web sites selling dog food from around the world, which its corporate parents dutifully placed on their boardroom freezer door. Read more...
Back in May 1999, near the height of the dot-com insanity, one of a host of media darlings was an underwear sales dot-com called Underneath.com. Sending boxer shorts to various reporters, this dot-com was written up in BusinessWeek and the New York Daily News, and it made Time Magazine's picks for the best e-commerce sites. Read more...
When I reported some of the problems that Cingular was having selling and supporting data after its merger with AT&T Wireless, some Cingular officials said it was not the typical experience of its data-buying customers. Read more...
Years ago, I was talking with the CEO of a major privately held consumer products company. He casually mentioned that he would never again work for a publicly held company.
Asked why, he said, "For the life of me, I can't think why I would want to publicly air all of our mistakes if I didn't have to." Read more...
Webmasters no longer know what their customers are seeing when they visit their sites, and they have anti-virus, ant-spyware, anti-popup and alternative browsers to thank. In the early Web days, all that an e-commerce site developer/programmer needed to worry about were operating system version and browser.Read more...
Under The Damned-If-You-Do category, Best Buy in-store Web displays seem to show different pricing. It's innocuous, but it shows why regional pricing may no longer be worth the effort.
Sometimes, pushing the technology envelope is simply not worth it. The thought leaders tend to get criticized for the flaws of the new approach and, if it does take hold, they rarely get the credit years later for having taken the chance. Read more...
Are "smart-carts" state-of-the-art and cutting edge for retail technology? It's a matter of perspective. Compared with the best European and Asian retail chains, American retailers are electronic laggards, especially in the grocery segment.
Even compared with U.S. retail technology discussions, these carts are merely deploying and productizing capabilities that have been publicly discussed for more than a year. But compared with what is actually being used—and even offered—with today's American grocery retailers, these Fujitsu carts are positively Jetsons. Read more...
Controlling how people listen to a song on a CD is as easy as humming compared with controlling how 70,000 people every day navigate an e-commerce site, executives at Tower Records have discovered. Like every other e-commerce outfit, Tower's Web team makes a long list of assumptions about how people will interact with the site right before launching a new site capability. Those assumptions are often wrong because, among other reasons, the thinking process of a Web developer/designer doesn't always mesh with the thoughts of the site's visitors.Read more...
Somewhere in Arizona—they insist that their exact location be kept secret so that e-commerce bandits won't recognize their address—sits a team of 18 Internet experts who hunt down people and companies that are either selling products illegally or are violating copyrights.
But the real work is done overnight, where a suite of homegrown applications crawls literally millions of Internet e-commerce locations, including Web sites, RSS feeds, Usenet newsgroups, private discussion groups (such as Yahoo's), IRC chat rooms, mailing lists and spam. Read more...
In many ways, CIOs are in the prediction business. They must make one-, two- and sometimes even five-year plans for technology buying, when even a two-month prediction in many sectors—especially retail—is barely more accurate a predictor than a dice toss.Read more...
Shoppers wanting to see a store's neighborhood before venturing out into a potentially rundown city street corner will be able to do that by looking into a new interactive Yellow Pages sitefrom Amazon.com.
The site—to be housed at the home of Amazon subsidiary A9.com—includes data covering more than 14 million businesses.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
