Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

In this age of digital content, Amazon is acting as though it has the right to deal with one dispute on one piece of content as license to steal back all of that customer's paid-for content. With the newness of digital rights issues, it's frighteningly possible that Amazon may be right—for now, pens Legal Columnist Mark Rasch.Read more...

The potential here isn't just to track generic music influences. The stores can already play different songs in different areas of the store and specific dressing rooms, with the sound bleeding out of the store and into the mall. What if specific songs influence—or attract—shoppers focused on specific types of clothing? Which tunes pull in tire-kickers and which are good buyer lures? Critically, though, this is all based on the psychology of how teens interact with apparel. It has very little to do with actual tailoring.Read more...

Amazon insists that it doesn’t do differential pricing, but on October 18 a high-profile tech blogger went ballistic because the E-tail giant apparently did just that. Tim Bray, who also happens to be a Google engineer, fumed that amazon.com had a $9.48 price on an e-book he wanted, but when he logged in to buy it, the price immediately jumped by more than $5—to $15.17. “Maybe there’s an explanation,” Bray wrote. “I don’t care what it is, it’s not good enough and it’s not reasonable

and I’m not paying that price and maybe you shouldn’t be either.” Whew!

The likely problem: Bray, a Canadian, was visiting Amazon’s U.S. site, where Amazon sets its own e-book prices under terms of a price-fixing settlement. Once Bray logged in, Amazon spotted him as Canadian and gave him Amazon Canada’s price, which is set by the publisher. (The fact that publishers also run their own sale prices may be why e-book prices also seemed to drop for Bray as soon as he bought books.) But it’s still aggravating to customers. And that cross-border quirk means Amazon does differential pricing after all—no matter how much it tries not to.…

Shoppers who tried finding the details on target.com were locked into an endless loop. Clicking on the link provided on the chain's news page took shoppers (and us) to a "More reasons to love Target" page, which had a link taking us to an "Our low price promise" page, which looped back to the "More reasons" page. As of Wednesday (Oct. 24), Target had finally inserted an updated price-match page, complete with details, into that loop. The details, though, paint a very different picture than Target's announcement did. For example, the program has a "limit quantity of 1 online price match, per identical item, per guest." So if a shopper has two children and wants to get them the identical toy, and if that toy is being offered at Amazon for less, Target will only grant the lower price on one of them? Read more...

Most relationships between retailers and shoppers are dictated by some form of contract, typically online, pens Legal Columnist Mark Rasch. This may be true even for purchases made in brick-and-mortar stores, as courts increasingly look to the online contract to determine the rights and responsibilities of parties even if the consumer never went online. But online contracts present a problem for merchants: How do you change them?Read more...

As more chains struggle with fully embracing merged-channel operations, we have a delicious contradiction. The benefits of such a merged-channel approach are definite and intense. However, the risk of damage being inflicted by a less than precise execution is equally certain. Hence, it’s a path that needs to be traveled—but oh so carefully.

StorefrontBacktalk and ChainLink Research have collaborated on a report that looks at some of the less-covered pitfalls and opportunities of this approach. Take a peek.…

Tesco, you'll recall, put billboards full of products on South Korean subway platforms, so consumers could use their phones to click on QR codes and order groceries for delivery while they waited. Nothing so small-minded for Yihaodianmdash;it plans to create 1,000 "augmented reality" supermarkets (you'll have to use a smartphone to see them) along streets in four Chinese cities, and each store will cover 1,200 square meters (more than 12,000 square feet) of wall or fence space.Read more...

Unfortunately, with those so-called "low and slow" attacks—which require a lot less firepower from attackers but can still crash your site—brute-force DDoS defenses won't work. Your E-Commerce and network security teams may need to take a lesson from associates and loss prevention in thinking about online defense.Read more...

Yeah, that's the type of motivational shopper message Best Buy wants to send out: "Come on over to Best Buy for the holidays. And if our sales reps feel like matching your Amazon.com price, they will. Trust us." The motivational value of price matching is rooted in its certainty. You can have as many published limits as you'd like (and, yes, both chains have certainly done their lawyers proud with impressive limits of every type). But the point is that a customer who brings in a rival's price that meets those limits will absolutely get that price.Read more...

The big test will come on December 24. Given the huge financial value placed on every holiday shopping day, it's interesting that many holiday shoppers are forced to give up online shopping after about December 19 or 20. Could a robust same-day delivery program make December 24 fully E-Commerce viable?Read more...

"If your organization is spending too much time and money maintaining legacy systems, it's because you either made poor decisions in favor of short-term gains or lacked long-term vision," pens Retail Columnist Todd Michaud. "If your IT leader (I won't even assume you have a CIO) is trapped working for your CFO or your IT budget is based on a percentage of your sales, you deserve the spaghetti diagram that is your IT infrastructure. Showrooming is a self-inflicted wound."Read more...

Given all of those interesting attributes being tested, the trial—which starts October 14—is going to have to extrapolate data from an unusually small product sample: 20 toys that will be featured on endcaps. Granted, those are literally the expected 20 hottest toys from this upcoming holiday season. But it's still only 20. That's statistically tiny within a store with an average of 70,000 SKUs.Read more...

The shift is part of an IT revamp that includes a merged inventory system, ship-from-any-store capability and improved turnaround on returns—in addition to a new West Coast datacenter that effectively works as a disaster recovery hot site for the company's existing East Coast IT operations.Read more...

When Todd saw last week's StorefrontBacktalk story by Frank Hayes about how top retailers did not seem to know that Android tablets existed, he was surprised, because those results were quite different than his own research done just a few months earlier. But Todd's research focused solely on the iPad. So what is causing us to have such different experiences, beyond Android versus iPad? It appears that the 7-inch form factor is the culprit.Read more...

If there truly is no expectation of privacy in what is called "historical cell data" (where you were, as opposed to where you are right now), then there would be no problem with retailers' collecting this data about their customers with or without the knowledge and consent of those customers, pens Legal Columnist Mark Rasch. Just as video cameras in the mall capture images of customers (and their locations), retailers could use cell data to find out where their best (and worst) customers are. Accepting the government's argument before the federal court, there would be no privacy violation for a retailer doing this.Read more...

But even Kantor admitted PayPal could fix the problem with a simple change in its merchant terms. A much trickier problem for retailers post-settlement may be deciding what price to put on each item—or whether there even is a single official price.Read more...

"It undermines the strategy," said Finish Line CIO Terry Ledbetter. "But quite frankly, it was hard to imagine how resistant customers would be to telling you who they are. 'You don't need to know who I am,'" he said, adding that the chain is exploring using an opt-in feature on its mobile app that would broadcast to all associates when a customer walks in the store.Read more...

Among the largest retailers, only the Amazon, Home Depot, McDonald's, Kohl's, Apple, JCPenney, Gap and Overstock Web sites showed up in a tablet or full-screen version. Staples.com showed up on a seven-inch tablet with slightly more content added to what was still clearly a site designed for a phone screen. But Walmart, Target, Walgreen, CVS, Lowe's, Best Buy, Sears, Macy's, Rite Aid, TJ Maxx, Nordstrom and even eBay served up exactly the same screen for a tablet as for a phone with a screen a small fraction of the size. On the phone, those compact, minimalist sites help usability. On even a small tablet, the result is vast expanses of blank space that all but drives away customers.Read more...

For the Amazon sales tax haven to be an issue, you first have to believe that the only—or even a main—reason why people shop at Amazon is to save the sales tax. There are quite a few reasons why that is absurd. But the fact that shipping charges are typically many times the sales tax is a pretty good place to start.Read more...

What's impressive is that this approach is three levels deeper than what RedLaser has been used to. It goes beyond limiting its results to Best Buy, focusing instead on what that specific Best Buy store sells and then limiting the results to what that specific Best Buy store has in stock. This means Best Buy's APIs are sharing real-time inventory data.Read more...

But the social program of its stores, during the same timeframe, has gone nowhere, according to a report slated to be released Thursday (Sept. 20). The reason? Just about nothing that corporate is doing right—dedicated social resources, rules about the number and frequency of posts, people dedicated to responding to shopper comments—has been replicated at the store level. The stores have been left to do whatever they can fit in, which the report said seems to be pretty much nothing.Read more...

Currently, retailers have a choice. They can use their smartphones and tablets, sticking on a dongle that reads a payment card's magnetic stripe, and be cruising down the mobile commerce highway. Or they can be PCI DSS compliant. Unfortunately, the PCI Council has stated that smartphones and tablets are not secure, pens PCI Columnist Walter Conway.Read more...

Clearly, that's not always the case. Sometimes spending much more is highly beneficial but may not deliver immediately better mobile stats; for example, an infrastructure investment that will provide better uptime and faster performance for many years. That caveat caveated, the fact that Forrester found few, if any, performance gains from spending more money on mobile is deliciously counter-intuitive.Read more...

Unfortunately, the two software suppliers aren't just throwing the usual hissy fits at each other. They're configuring their software as part of the feud, which means retailers and their online privacy policies and, potentially, the Federal Trade Commission are caught in the middle.Read more...

When it comes to merged-channel thinking, customers are already there. E-Commerce execs are getting there. But chain CEOs don't get it yet.Read more...