When major customers walk into a Circuit City location, CIO Mike Jones wants to whisper customized sales pitches into their ears—literally. Jones's scenario is simple: As customers walk into the store, they receive a very light wireless headset. Read more...
eBay has done almost everything correctly, so it's to be expected that the Web pioneer will try to boost its margins slightly. It could issue five more price increases and it would likely still be a bargain. eBay is in a very exclusive club of the early Web innovators who have stuck to their original playbook and been true to what makes the Web powerful. This week's news that eBay is boosting some prices shouldn't be a surprise, nor should the Garage Sale Goddess' right to enhance its margins a bit. Read more...
The traditionally long lines in post offices during the holiday season are noticeably shorter this year, and figures show why.
About 1.1 billion fewer pieces of snail mail were sent in 2004, and that's on top of an almost 3.5 billion drop from 2003 and a 1.3 billion drop from 2002. All told, the government's figures show that Americans sent 103.7 billion pieces of first-class mail in 2001 and only 97.9 billion pieces in 2004, a loss of some 5.8 billion pieces of mail or about a 6 percent drop. Read more...
Running the technology operations for a billion-dollar retail clothing chain is difficult enough during the holidays, let alone if most of your customers are too young to get their own credit cards, or even drive. Just ask Ron Ehlers, vice president for Information Systems at Pacific Sunwear of California Inc., which runs 743 PacSun stores in 50 states and Puerto Rico. Read more...
If the "Max" in Office Max is supposed to refer to the amount of time its e-commerce server takes to respond, it's aptly named. And Target's target is apparently not lightning-fast e-commerce experiences. Those conclusions are courtesy of the latest round of Web traffic analysis from the folks at Keynote Systems. Read more...
With the rush of holiday shoppers heading to the malls and their keyboards, Black Friday marks the start of the holiday shoplifting period. Online merchants are not exempt.
Friday is the much-cited Black Friday, where merchants hope the rush of holiday shoppers will push their financials into the black. But retailers know that, among those online and offline crowds, there will be thieves, taking advantage of the anonymity of crowds and the less-trained eye of seasonal workers. Read more...
In many ways, 2004 will be seen as a technological turning point for retail: the year that many technologies that have been hyped for years started to become real. Traditionally, retail has always been a mixed barcode for being technologically advanced. Read more...
Consumers are looking for black coal to put into their brick-and-mortar retailers' stocking this holiday season, with complaints soaring about bad customer service experiences. But those same consumers are seemingly ecstatic with online customer service. Read more...
One of the most logistically challenging situations for any large retailer is the return. Newgistics Inc., a Texas retail service firm, launched a tracking service intended to alleviate some of the uncertainty involved in the process. Read more...
There's no shortage of legitimate reasons why the Sears-Kmart merger will not cause anyone in Bentonville, Ark., to lose much sleep. But most of the arguments boil down to two points. One: Historically, big mergers rarely succeed. Two: Adding weak plus weak doesn't equal strong. Read more...
When Kmart and Sears announced their plans to merge and create the nation's third-largest retailer, it shook the retail technology world.
Although it will take months for the two retail leaders to merge their almost 3,500 stores with a projected $55 billion in annual revenue, the combined operation will have the ability to significantly influence retail technology trends. Read more...
Reigning over 175 home entertainment stores in 21 states, Tweeter CIO Bill Morrison looks cautiously at the calendar as the year-end holidays approach. While many of his counterparts are trying to train oceans of seasonal employees and hoping that errors don't obliterate consumers service, goodwill and inventory accuracy, Morrison sits back, confident in the chain's decision to forgo any customer-facing seasonal help. Read more...
In the first year or two of e-commerce, one sign of sure trouble was seeing a high number of abandoned shopping carts.
I've always loved the term "abandoned shopping carts" because it's one of the rare examples in technology where the term quite accurately—and explicitly—describes what it means to describe. It refers to a customer who starts to shop, puts some items into a virtual shopping cart and then simply goes away before buying anything. Read more...
The time-honored tradition of retail rebates assumes that many customers won't bother. Staples Inc. hallenges that approach with an online campaign aimed at making rebates point-and-click easy. Read more...
Forrester Research projected online holiday sales in 2004 would hit $13.2 billion, which represents a 20 percent increase compared with last year. That was great when compared with a projected brick-and-mortar sales percentage increase of 4.5 percent for the same period, but much less so when compared with 2003's online retail growth of 31 percent compared with 2002. Read more...
Best Buy is a great example of a company that brilliantly deploys technology—but then drops the ball in communicating.
As the holiday season approached, we had good news and bad news on the major retail multichannel front. The good news was that some retailers were getting a lot better at handling the technology. The bad news was that their employees often didn't know about it, making the advantages moot. Read more...
Although it is almost universally accepted that a truly integrated multichannel retail approach is the ideal, few retailers have been able to get anywhere close, reports a recent Aberdeen Group research report.
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While many retailers are struggling to make multichannel operations work at all, Best Buy is taking a leadership position in making the retailer a single brand with multiple points of access.
But Best Buy is an almost perfect example of the difficulties in making all channels appear as one to the customer, as it excels in certain areas while sending mixed messages in others.Read more...
When America Online announced its yawn-oriented shopping portal ("Gee," asked executives from Microsoft and Yahoo simultaneously, "why didn't we think of that? Oh yeah. We did."), it renewed the perennial offline/online e-commerce debate. Since shortly after the Web came into being and browsers became graphical, the Web was without form, and void and darkness were upon the face of the browser. And Andreessen said, "Let there be commerce." And Barksdale saw the commerce and that it was good. And Barksdale divided the online from the offline. Read more...
In the clothing business, selling a suit that doesn't fit a customer makes little sense, even if it's highly profitable. The same can be said for retail e-commerce strategies: There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all Web site. Casual Male, with more than 533 stores in the United States and Puerto Rico, dominates the "big and tall men" apparel niche, which it identifies as a $6 billion market. Read more...
One problem that retailers have with the World Wide Web is that it's so ... well ... worldwide. A group of newspaper publishers tried to address that issue with the launch of a Web site intended to match consumers looking for specific products with local retailers that have those products on special promotions.Read more...
When Toys "Were" Us announced that it was going to abandon the toy business, the toy chain was widely seen as another victim of Wal-Mart. But the truth is, the move stemmed from the company's own inability to use technology to get closer to customers.
The traditional fear of technology is that it replaces people and makes business transactions more impersonal. Anyone who has gotten locked into a battle of voice-mail prompts—furiously hitting "0" and "#" in a futile effort to break through to a person—understands the frustrations of automated responses. Read more...
To persuade customers to give up data, some retailers are considering using blind-taste-test third parties. At the very heart of any robust retail CRM system are the benefits consumers—and retailers—receive when the retailer knows as much about a customer as possible. But what happens when the customer doesn't want such an intimate relationship? Read more...
Pity the poor retail CIO who is a CRM advocate. In acts of backstabbing betrayals worthy of the ancient Roman coliseum, our hero finds himself having to deal with a host of villains: Overzealous software sales reps, who conveniently forget to mention the money and person-hours the retailer will have to spend to make the CRM deliver. Installing—and, from the rep's perspective, paying for—the package is only one-fiftieth of the battle. Read more...
To companies trying to understand and predict customer behavior, the Web promised the kind of information of which marketing dreams are made. The Web can electronically track every customer's action and make some very good guesses about their thoughts. For instance, are buyers just looking at products that are blue and green? How many seconds did they spend looking at a particular product? 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
