Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Will E-Commerce Work? You no longer have a choice. You're thinking like this is an optional matter, such as whether you open a new store in Detroit or add a line of gloves. To be blunt, it's not. E-Commerce is now mandatory, as dictated by the Three F Reality: Faith, Force, and Fiasco. Read more...

It looks like Amazon is no longer backing up its pricing, putting an end to its Post-Order Price Guarantee—a policy that allowed customers to recover the difference from an Amazon price drop within 30 days of a purchase. As of Monday (Sept. 1), customers who place orders on Amazon.com are not offered the 30-day guarantee, a customer service representative confirmed.

The representative said Amazon decided to do away with the policy because sometimes price drops on the Web site were actually special offers by the manufacturer of the product. Amazon would then have to compensate the difference to a customer who purchased that item within 30 days of the drop. Amazon corporate did not return repeated phone calls asking about the change. The sharks are already in the water, with at least one company smelling fresh blood. A new Web site called priceprotectr.com is hoping to benefit from Amazon’s change, expediting the launch of a new price protection plan designed for Amazon users. …

How so? PCI's jurisdiction is limited to payment data and, therefore, it phrases most of its guidelines and requirements in those terms. So a retailer that uses appropriate encryption, firewall and intrusion detection systems only on systems that directly handle payments would be compliant and praiseworthy. But with today's networked systems, cyberthieves seek out soft spots in the network just so they can somehow get inside. Read more...

Quite a few retailers have been involved in site changes to make the Web more accessible to those with vision difficulties, but Target has been the most aggressive in fighting such efforts. As such, Target's settlement has an especially strong chance of pressuring retailers to aggressively embrace such changes. Read more...

Wal-Mart on Wednesday (Sept. 3) launched what it dubbed the Walmart Smart Network—a series of next-generation digital-ad systems—to 2,700 stores. The funky aspect of this rollout is that all 27,000 screens will be centrally controlled via an Internet Protocol Television connection.

In theory, this will allow content to be adjusted based on a virtually endless list of criteria and could be tweaked on a per-store, per-screen and time-of-day basis, said officials with Wal-Mart, who seem to be unsure when they’re Wal-Mart and when they’re Walmart. (Both were used.) “Every screen and every message has a purpose and we will be analyzing point of sale data on an ongoing basis,” said Stephen Quinn, chief marketing officer, Walmart Stores, U.S..…

Site navigation problems and unpleasant booking engines are driving customers away from online travel sites and pushing them through the doors of traditional, more personable travel agencies. Even though sales for online travel sites are growing, fewer travelers are actually booking their trips online, this eMarketer report said.

This shift in trip booking bucks the trend for online travel sites, which have been more popular than offline agencies throughout the last decade. The reason for this about-face is that many customers are fed up with “unfriendly booking engines and navigation tools” and are seeking the personal touch of an offline agent. “Not so long ago, industry observers cast traditional travel agents as has-beens,” said Jeff Grau, senior analyst at eMarketer and author of the report. “Perhaps this has helped them to focus on what they do best: provide travel expertise and personalized service.”…

Campbell also backed encrypting data as it is sent to banks, even over private networks. There's little question that both moves would improve security, but the cost and change required will also make them almost impossible to deploy. As TJX execs know better than anyone, market forces to push such change are essentially non-existent. Read more...

A retail IT lesson from the world of politics? Maybe. Web tracking firm Keynote studied the text message blast sent by the U.S. presidential campaign of Barack Obama, the one in which his campaign promised to tell supporters his VP selection before it was broadly announced.

That message didn’t quite work out politically, as CNN broadcast the choice hours before the text blast was supposed to start. As a result, the campaign immediately triggered the blast, which didn’t work well, either. About 50 percent of people who subscribed to receive the text message from the Obama campaign regarding the VP pick may not have received it “in a timely fashion and perhaps not at all,” Keynote said. Does this mean Common Short Code SMS messaging won’t work for large national blasts? Not necessarily. But if you’re relying on getting your data out to prospects, it’s probably a good idea to vote for a different transmission method. …

Has Amazon decided what it wants to be when it grows up? More to the point, are there indications that it has now decided that one thing it does not want to be is yet another thin-margined retailer?

One tech blogger is arguing that Amazon wants to get as far away from retailing as possible by examining its hiring choices surrounding Kindle and Amazon’s Web Services. Interesting reading.…

Mike Osier, head of IT Operations at Netflix, wrote in a blog posting on Aug. 22 that it was "a key faulty hardware component" that caused the hiccup. "On Monday, 8/11, our monitors flagged a database corruption event in our shipping system," Osier said. But why does the site hide its blog? Read more...

TrustCo, which operates more than 100 banks nationwide, filed the lawsuit in the New York Supreme Court against TJX in July, saying that it had never been invited to participate in the initial group of banks suing TJX. This bank's accusations mirror the other banks' charges, namely that TJX "breached its duties" by allowing the intrusion. TJX replied that it was the bank's own fault.Read more...

With four months still remaining until the end of the year, the 449 breaches reported in the Identity Theft Resource Center's list for 2008 exceeds 2007's total of 446. The Macy's incident was sparked by "a massive security breach at a Visa processing center in England," said the Identity Theft Resource Center report.Read more...

Like any list, it's hard to be precise about what the content means. Are these truly the best paid CIOs in the country or just the best paid of those working at publicly held retailers? And even some publicly held chains aren't required to report their CIO's compensation, making the analysis even more inconclusive. For the full list of the top-paid retail CIOs, Read more...

With the frequent product changes executed by any large e-tailer’s site, the tech hurdles of launching a mirror site in another language can be daunting. But this challenge has created a small industry of companies that are trying to facilitate rapid globalization for e-tailers.

One such company is an 8-year-old outfit called MotionPoint, which has an interesting method for mirroring retail sites, described in this Wednesday (Sept. 2) story in The Financial Times of London: “When a customer wants to access a foreign language version of a particular site, page or item, a MotionPoint server passes on the request to the original site. The response, in English, prompts MotionPoint to retrieve a previously translated version of the page or item held in its own stored data and send it on to the customer. The foreign language versions of each page or product are kept updated by human translators, who use software that ensures the translation fits the space available on the page. They are also automatically alerted to changes made on the original site, enabling material to be updated within a few hours rather than the days required by a traditional operation with translators not working directly on a Web-based system.”…

In an overall down market where the 150-store Nordstrom chain is seeing a 4.3 percent sales drop, online operations are jumping 15 percent–accounting for almost 8 percent of all sales. Company execs now project online to soon top 10 percent. Even more intriguing: Nordstrom is reporting a sharp increase in the number of multi-channel shoppers, who now represent almost a third of all sales.

But Nordstrom is doing online differently, according to this wonderful profile in The Puget Sound Business Journal (Seattle). First, Nordstrom is delivering the identical merchandise online and offline, a tactic quite different than many other cross-channel retailers. Secondly, its call center staffing has not been outsourced, a move that the customer service-intensive chain said gives it a competitive advantage.…

When the PCI Security Council this week detailed a bunch of changes it will include in PCI 1.2, what might be more worthy of note is what they didn’t address.

There were technical issues—such as segmentation and tokenization—that didn’t get referenced, but also policy issues. Why isn’t there a more clear-cut appeal process, for retailers who believe their assessor is improperly interpreting the rules? Today, the council will try and address technical questions, but that rarely involves overruling an assessor. Visa has been known to get involved with a retailer who has an assessor complaint, but that’s a very rare occurrence. Read more.…

This concept is being trialed right now by Germany's $81 billion Metro Group, in a project with Procter & Gamble.Read more...

Here's the IHL theory: Not all IT spending is created equal, and some retail segments spend a heck of a lot more on IT than others.Read more...

"Numerous apparel companies have reported increased sales of as much as 20 percent using RFID to monitor shelf stock levels," the report said. "In 2008, IDTechEx research finds that 38 percent of the money spent on RFID in retail is specifically for apparel tagging." Read more...

In North America, "the mean estimate for share of IT budget devoted to innovation in 2007 was 35 percent," the Forrester report said. "But a lower median at 30 percent and mode at 20 percent suggest that a few retailers planned heavy funding of innovation, while most planned much less investment." Read more...

"The criminals have been going into shops claiming to be engineers working on the terminals," said Una Dillon, head of card services at the Irish Payment Services Organization Staff. "Staff are used to their bank officials coming to update terminals so unfortunately they have been able to do that." Read more...

These days, when U.S. government officials want to ask questions about privacy and data security, it’s never clear if they want to protect consumers’ privacy or learn the best way to violate it themselves. But retail execs who want hints can drop by a Sept. 22 hearing at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s Washington, D.C., headquarters. Those who can’t personally attend can do so virtually.

“Workshop participants will discuss the increasing prevalence of contactless payment devices in everyday consumer transactions, including credit card purchases and public transit, as well as the growing use of item-level tagging in the retail sector,” said an FTC statement. “The workshop will examine consumer awareness and education initiatives regarding these developments; security and privacy threats and proposed solutions; and emerging technologies and practices that may shape the marketplace in the coming years.” True enough, but there’s a reason these D.C. sessions are called “hearings” and not “listenings.” …

Retailers who are worried about RFID security problems will have more details available to them now that a federal judge has killed a gag order on MIT students who had identified flaws in Boston’s contactless RFID subway cards.

Ten days ago, a judge ordered three MIT students to not discuss research they had done about RFID security problems with the Boston subway system. On Tuesday (Aug. 19), U.S. District Judge George O’Toole Jr. killed that order, ruling that discussing the papers would not violate computer fraud laws. “The MBTA ultimately is trying to silence some uncomfortable truths that these students uncovered,” Cindy Cohn–one of the attorneys for the students–told The Boston Herald. “They brought an action against three college kids rather than address the problems in their own house.” Countered an attorney for the Boston subway: His organization merely ” wanted the students to refrain from revealing details about the security problems publicly until the MBTA has time to correct the flaws.” How long did he think that would take? Five months.…

A “persistent and mysterious technical glitch” has severely disrupted business operations at the massive online film rental site Netflix, “potentially affecting millions of its customers,” according to this story in The San Jose Mercury News.(UPDATE: ValleyWag is reporting that the outage happened “because of massive database corruption in their Oracle cluster caused by a botched upgrade”)

The company was unable to ship any DVDs to its customers on Tuesday (Aug. 12), managed only some deliveries Wednesday and said it again was forced to halt shipments for much of the day Thursday, said Netflix spokesman Steve Swasey. A company-issued blog post warned that “the issues we’ve faced over the last several days have been significant and there’s no guarantee at this point that our shipping operations will be fully restored by tomorrow.” The story said that the note did not identify the cause of the problem and Swasey previously said Netflix executives were having trouble isolating it.…