Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

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...

As Chinese consumers suddenly start to embrace the retail store, orders for point of sale systems are soaring, according to a study from IHL Consulting Group. IHL projected China's accelerating 20 percent annual growth in 2004 would catapult it in 2005 beyond the POS sales of Germany, which is Europe's largest POS market. 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...

As retailers prepare to migrate from bar codes to RFID, upgrade POS systems and accept wireless input from a wide range of new payment devices, it's critical that they know that data points mean the exact same thing at all points on the supply chain. With that goal in mind, a key retail technology standards group unveiled a series of new schemas for retail pricing data consistency. Read more...

One of the most disheartening things for a technology journalist to learn is that a lot of readers look at magazines to see the ads. Well, maybe not solely to look at the ads, but the fact that readers even glance at those dastardly marketing con jobs is enough to make us weep in our espressos. 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...

A hungry consumer pulls up to the drive-through window in a California McDonald's restaurant and places a dinner order. The person taking the order points out that the caller placed only three drink orders for four dinners and reminds the diner of a special that day on apple pie.

This might be a fairly typical fast-food—or, in industry parlance, QSR for quick-service restaurant—exchange were it not for the fact that the customer and the order-taker are dozens of miles apart, connected through a VPN-secured voice-over-IP hookup. Read more...

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...

Self-checkout may go down in retail history as the most secure insecure piece of technology ever. Wonder why the Wal-Mart bar-code thieves avoided self-checkout? They knew better.

The world of crime prevention is riddled with what—at first glance—seem to be contradictions, but are actually exercises in logic. Read more...

You're cleaning away papers that accumulated during the holidays and find a portable CD player that is identical to the one you use every day. It was given to you as a gift and you have no receipt, nor any clue where it was purchased. On a whim, you take the CD player to your favorite local retailer. Customer service scans the item, reports to you the date it was purchased and the name of the retailer it was purchased from, tells you that the other retailer's rules give you four more days to return it, and hands you a freshly printed receipt for you to use for that return. Read more...

Some of the nation's largest retailers pay Paul Walsh to think about existential-sounding questions like "How cold is cold?" and "How wet is wet?" No, Walsh isn't a philosopher. Indeed, as a trained scientist (a meteorologist, to be precise), his answers are anything but theoretical. But it certainly is about perception. Read more...

Spreading holiday joy among its suppliers, the nation's largest retailer has softened its RFID compliance deadline.

In a briefing with analysts, Wal-Mart CIO Linda Dillman said that its top 100 suppliers—plus 37 "volunteer" suppliers—will start shipping cases and pallets by February to three Wal-Mart distribution centers. The original deadline was Jan. 1.Read more...

It has been written that the wiser the people, the more they are aware of how little they truly know. That unsettling thought nicely summarizes the state of RFID today. With each trial, companies discover how incredibly much they still do not understand. With each investment, they discover how it's likely to be much more expensive than they had projected. Read more...

When I thought about retail IT operations in 2005, I envisioned an eccentric, wealthy hermit who lives in a comfortable mansion in the middle of the woods.

The hermit certainly knows about the big city and all of the glorious things he could buy there, but he is content. He has what he needs and a sufficient number of things that he wants. His home is sound and he doesn't have a heck of a lot of motivation to go out and make it fancy and state-of-the-art. Maybe someday, he thinks. Read more...

With the holiday season comes fruitcake, traffic jams and an anticipated onslaught of must-be-returned gifts from well-meaning (and possibly colorblind) friends and relatives. But sprinkled amongst those gift-receipt-clutching consumers are what the industry considers thieves: people who deliberately use return policies to steal. 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...

For years, line-of-business managers have told IT executives that their goal is to improve efficiency. Their mission is to leverage hardware and software to do in a nanosecond what it takes human employees minutes, lunch breaks and vacations to do. 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...

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...

Wawa CIO Neil McCarthy's voice reveals his anger as he recounts a recent meeting he had with bank executives to complain about high credit card fees that are out of proportion with services. Wawa's 550 stores sell a huge amount of gasoline: about 110,000 gallons per week per store, which places it among the highest volume in the country. Typical volume for U.S. gas stations is about 40,000 gallons, McCarthy said. 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...