Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

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...

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...

This is just not Walmart’s week for price management. On Tuesday (Sept. 25), a Walmart store in China was slapped with almost $16,000 in fines for a “discount hoax,” according to China Daily. In May, the Walmart in Wuhan changed its price for a bottle of liquid soap from 47.6 to 48.8 yuan (a 19-cent increase), but called it a discount price. Not so, according to the local government price watchdog: “When the promotion price is higher than the traceable lowest price of the period of seven days before the campaign, it is a price fraud,” said Zhang Jianmin, vice head of the Hubei Provincial Bureau of

Commodity Price.

It may be true that what the Chinese call a hoax, everyone else calls marketing. But with 370 stores in China, Walmart should know how this game is

played. And with its fanatical tracking of its own and …

"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...

It used to be only chains that kept detailed databases of competitors' prices. Now every coupon or rebate Web site has data that's even more current, which makes beating a chain's price-match promotion trivial.Read more...

This marriage could be a very low-cost proposition, with the app asking for the cart's number or, better yet, the cart presenting a QR or barcode that the app can scan. The app—with its capabilities and its CRM history—could use a cart equipped with a simple radio beacon for navigation purposes.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...

No major advances in mobile location technology have emerged. In the last couple of months, however, quite a few very different approaches to location tracking have emerged. These range from leveraging the earth's magnetic field to piggybacking the data already used by mobile ads, tracking a combination of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signals, and riding the audio signals from existing music speakers. One app even reacts to light patterns from specially enhanced LED bulbs.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...

The 1,100-store chain's CEO, Ron Johnson, admits that JCPenney is still figuring out the workflow for checkout. He'd better work fast—this is a lot more complicated than anyone assumed.Read more...

An Apple surprise might have forced the mobile-operator consortium to rush into its launch. That's not something ISIS wants to do, especially now that Google has already tried and abandoned ISIS's chosen technical approach and the number of ISIS-supporting retailers still isn't up to what ISIS wants it to be. And that's not the worst of it: There's still no leadership in mobile payments.Read more...

Yet another video-related shopping patent was issued last Friday (Sept. 14), and it’s not for retail chains—at least not at first glance. U.S. Patent 8,244,594 describes a personal shopping service in which a customer can use video to actually see the shopper-for-hire collecting the shopping list in real time, so it’s possible to reject or swap out items as they’re being grabbed from the shelf. That’s not a likely candidate for a service from a big chain, but it raises an interesting question: Why aren’t chains already using video this way in-store?

After all, customers have long called stores to ask if a particular item is in stock. Associates can check the shelves to confirm, though they

don’t always get it right. Now that camera- and Wi-Fi-equipped phones and tablets are so cheap, it’s practical to let customers watch online as associates check those shelves to see exactly what’s there. That’s at least as compelling a use of video as Amazon’s “watch while we pack your order” approach—and in this case, it could actually save customers time and avoid associate mistakes. Besides, half the retail battle is getting that customer into the store—even virtually.…

There have always been only two reasons for seeking opt-ins—supposed legal protection and to negate future customer backlash. As a practical matter, opt-ins help out in neither situation. Let's start, though, by admitting there are two types of opt-in: knowingly/deliberate, and what retail chains use.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...

Back when GuestView Columnist Ann Grackin started tracking such matters in 1995, the goal of the key players was that GS1 would be almost ubiquitous by about 2000. Today, some 12 years later, ubiquitous is hardly the move. And Ann conservatively projects that 2017 is much more likely. Now we have 2D and GS1 DataBar for the new world of mobile coupons. So what's been the slowdown? Quite a bit, it turns out.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...

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...

With a staggering $444 billion in annual revenue, Walmart has generally been sluggish and conservative, allowing tech innovations to be toyed with by rivals such as Amazon.com. But in the last few months, Walmart has quietly started acting like quite the aggressive startup. It has embraced mobile and various innovative tech approaches, including an infatuation with social media, in a way that no major chain—especially not the old Walmart—has ever done.

Consider just the last couple weeks’ activity at Walmart alone, and it becomes clear how change is being embraced by Bentonville. And as anyone who has ever worked with an aircraft carrier knows, turning such a huge boat around quickly is hardly easy. How that’s happening at Walmart is the topic of StorefrontBacktalk‘s September monthly column in Retail Week, the U.K.’s largest retail publication. The column lives here at Retail Week. For those who don’t have a Retail Week subscription—shame on you!—here’s a copy at StorefrontBacktalk.…

What should be the policy if the customer absentmindedly—or sloppily or in haste—forgets to click an icon? Even more frightening, what if the shopper does properly process the transaction on his/her mobile phone but the application or the transmission glitches, for whatever reason?Read more...

When Walmart quietly (was it really intended to be quiet? More on that in a moment) ran this test at one store near the Bentonville mothership, many compared it with the chain's self-checkout efforts. But this setup's advantages make that particular function of minimal interest. Still, it's the most palatable explanation to offer shoppers.Read more...

Walgreens has finally committed to putting planograms of every store on its own mobile app by the end of this month. Back in mid-July, we pointed out that although the drugstore chain would be the first major retailer to do that, hardly any customers would know about it because the store maps would only be available on an app from the vendor (Aisle411), not Walgreens.

Why did Walgreens flip? The chain had been considering such a move throughout, Aisle411 CEO Nathan Pettyjohn said on Wednesday (Sept. 5), but wanted to first let the vendor go live so that it could be tested publicly for glitches without risking associating any problems with Walgreens directly. Within a few weeks, Walgreens had tested sufficiently that it agreed to incorporate the planograms into its core app. Walgreens, which is expected to announce this feature imminently, did not comment for this story. And it’s still not clear how—or even if—Walgreens will tell its customers about the new functionality, whether through its homepage, in-store signage, E-mail blasts or other advertising. That’s been a key issue with mobile features, the lack of “selling” them to customers and the lack of any incentives to encourage shoppers to try them.…

Now imagine the same idea used in-store: A customer walks in, taps her phone against a pedestal-style kiosk and is automatically connected to the chain's CRM system via a secure Wi-Fi network. After that, everything she does in-store is CRM gravy.Read more...

DNA: It isn’t just for murders anymore. In its loss-prevention defenses against shoplifters, Walmart has started to use DNA testing. In this instance, the shoplifter was courteous enough to leave blood samples on a jewelry case he had smashed. According to the Charlotte County (Florida) sheriff’s office, 20-year-old Tyler Ray Kerry did a smash and grab for 33 rings from Walmart. He covered his hand with a sock, but that was apparently not sufficient to stop him from getting cut. (He actually used a hammer to break the case, but he then reached in with his socked hand.)

When authorities sent in the bloodwork, it matched Kerry, given that he had been jailed 15 times before. One of those times—the reason he was already in jail when they came to charge him with this shoplifting offense—he had broken into a home to steal TVs and tools. Biometrics got him that time, too, when he was IDed with his fingerprints. Instead of stealing Walmart jewelry, maybe he should invest in a really good pair of gloves? You’d have thought the fingerprint nab would done the trick.…