Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

There’s just something about being a $338 billion retail chain that casts huge significance over even trivial moves. When the world’s largest retailer moves into pharamacy sales, it quickly becomes the largest pharmacy. It starts to do some grocery and it quickly dominates a third of all grocery sales.

So it is with Wal-Mart’s in-house video system. It’s just a system to broadcast ads to store visitors, but as IHL Consulting Group President Greg Buzek has said, “it has a bigger audience than any TV show.” This week, that “tv show” moved into the next phase, with an order for 100,000 flat panel screens, designed to deliver product messaging for specific aisles via eye-level plasma screens. Wal-Mart’s IPTV network will run transmit over–logically enough–IP connections. Wal-Mart, which is working on the in-store media network with Premier Retail Networks, is considering future capabilities that might be linked into customers’ actions, said PRN VP Genet Garamendi.…

One of retail's most important IT executives--Circuit City CIO Mike Jones--has left the $11.6 billion chain, with the chief IT job going to his VP of business applications.

Jones had a very creative and visionary perspective for the chain and a company statement left unclear the circumstances of his departure, although the vaguely ominous phrase "to pursue other interests" was used. The statement said Jones will relinquish his CIO role "immediately" but added that "he will remain at the company until mid-November to transition his duties to his replacement."Read more...

"Can you hear me now, Mate? You can't? IBM must be testing RFID again." Alas, the Australian Tennis Open has little love for Big Blue and neither do Australian Vodafone users.

Seems that IBM was preparing a major demonstration, to show that RFID is now accurate, reliable and can function without causing interference. Unfortunately, IBM had to pull the plug on the demo because .... well .... it was causing too interference. To read the full story,

The changes for this holiday’s shopping season—both online and offline—were the highlights of this week’s StorefrontBacktalk Week In Review show, featuring panelists Patti Freeman Evans, from Jupiter Research, Cathy Hotka, from Cathy Hotka & Associates, Richard Mader from the National Retail Federation and former federal prosecutor Mark Rasch. StorefrontBacktalk Editor Evan Schuman moderated.

Jupiter’s Evans anticipates more sophisticated search capabilities as the most interesting development expected, along with earlier purchasing. The panel also explored whether more indirect issues—such as interest rates and gasoline prices—influence shopping behavior. The panel also explored whether new standards proposed by the National Retail Federation to make it easier for e-tailers to send data to price-comparison sites will also make it harder for retailers to hide selling identical products for higher prices. To listen to the pricing and standards discussion, please click here. To listen to the E-Commerce prediction discussion, please click here. To listen to the shopping influences discussion, please click here.…

We now have closure to a story we reported in April about a Texas man who smashed in a Wal-Mart self-checkout man when it froze. The punching consumer—46-year-old Joel Wallace Hansen of Euless, Texas—pleaded guilty this week to disorderly conduct and was fined $286 and ordered to pay $1,000 for restitution, according to a report in the Star-Telegram.

“Our office position was that we attempt to get some type of restitution and that the defendant be held accountable for his actions” Tarrant County Assistant District Attorney Al Lazarus told the daily newspaper. “We accomplished that.”…

PayPal expanded its global reach Thursday, adding ten new currencies: the Czech Koruna, Danish Krone, Hong Kong Dollar, Hungarian Forint, New Zealand Dollar, Norwegian Krone, Polish Zloty, Singapore Dollar, Swedish Krona, and Swiss Franc. PayPal had already supported U.S. Dollars, Australian Dollars, Euros, Pounds Sterling, Canadian Dollars, Japanese Yen and Chinese RMB.

PayPal also announced that residents in 48 new markets can now use PayPal in their local markets to send money online. These new markets include Indonesia, the Philippines, Croatia, Fiji, Vietnam and Jordan. PayPal currently has 114 million accounts globally. In the second quarter of 2006, PayPal’s total payment volume — or the total value of transactions — was $8.9 billion.…

As retailers and consumer goods manufacturers struggle with achieving the supply-chain nirvana of complete item-level tagging, $60 billion aerospace giant Boeing has gotten item-level RFID to soar, with two thousand high-memory passive tags in every plane of an upcoming line.

Boeing's item-level RFID efforts are intriguing because of their scope, but also because of the extreme environmental and frequency hardships they must endure. Beyond the expected vibrations, altitude, air pressure and humidity impact of routinely flying that far above the clouds, the tags must be able to handle temperatures that range from 40 degrees (Fahrenheit) below zero and they were tested to 1,200 degrees above zero, which is what the exhaust nozzle right outside a jet engine experiences. The wireless unit must be nonflammable and be accessible to frequency ranges between 860 MHz and 960 MHz, so it can communicate with devices from any country that using UHF RFID readers. They also must last about 20 years.Read more...

A major tradegroup on Tuesday unveiled new E-Commerce product format guidelines, which might help consumers more accurately compare products. But first, retailers have to reverse their proprietary ways. The new standard data exchange formats were introduced by the Association for Retail Technical Standards (ARTS), which is a part of the National Retail Federation (NRF).

The intent of the new rules was clearly to help lighten the processing burdens of retailers as they submit product details to various product-comparison Web sites. But a possible unintended consequence of the move is that it might help those product-comparison sites more easily identify which products are identical. For years, product-comparison sites have complained that retailers deliberately make such comparisons difficult. Read more...

An upcoming retailer/supplier trainwreck collission over store localization, Amazon's abandonment of key features of its A9 search engine, whether a new giftcard service will change retail approaches and the privacy controversy surrounding Hitachi's new RFID tag. Those were the topics for this week's StorefrontBacktalk Week In Review audiocast.

This week's panel featured Forrester Research's Nikki Baird, the Retail Systems Alert Group's Steve Rowen and Ken Morris of The Lakewest Group, along with StorefrontBacktalk Editor Evan Schuman moderating.Read more...

To the sadness of absolutely no Web surfers, pop-ads—and other forms of disruptive media—dropped this year by 9 percent, to the point where it’s worth barely 0.7 percent of all online advertising dollars, according to an Interactive Advertising Bureau report released in London. “The random scattergun approach is dying out,” said IAB chief executive in the U.K., Guy Phillipson, according to a story in The Guardian newspaper.

Here in the U.S., “pop-ups are irritating advertisers” and it’s not even something that the U.S. chapter even looks at, said IAB’s U.S.-based Senior VP Sheryl Draizen. “We don’t even think about it anymore. It’s not what online is all about anymore. Popups were an issue for us four years ago.” Draizen was pushing stats that show online ad purchases—for the first six months of 2006 compared with the first six months of 2005—increasing by 37 percent. That compares to the same period ending 2005 of 26 percent, 39.7 percent for 2004 and 10.5 percent for 2003.…

The A9 search engine’s highly-touted street-level images and the ability to remember almost everything a user has ever searched for have been abandoned by Amazon, according to an Associated Press story. Amazon removed those capabilities—”along with several others”—late Friday, the AP report said. It quoted Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener as saying that Amazon is “shifting its priorities to areas where it can provide the greatest benefit for customers.”

This is not good news. Amazon was pushing the HTML envelope on creative search techniques. When Amazon starts pushing and starts retreating, what does that say to the industry? On greater concern to many, what does it say to Google?…

Saw a note this morning listing winners for the Organic Semiconductor Industry Awards and, for some pyschotic reason, I felt the need to suggest that the Whole Foods chain would be an ideal sponsor for this event.

Maybe they could serve Alf alpha sprouts and organic tofu and maybe Ben & Jerry’s ice cream for dessert? We could get this whole no preservatives, no pesticides, no barcodes theme going. (Plextronics apparently won the start-up of the year award, for which I thank them because it gave me an excuse to run this silly item.)…

Hitachi on Monday announced what it is billing as the industry’s first WiFi active RFID tag for wireless LAN position detection and management of people entering and leaving buildings.

According to a report in the Japan Corporate News wire service, Hitachi’s new offering will also include an emergency message capability that reportedly “allows users to send a message to the control center, automatically informing disaster relief officials of their whereabouts.” The Air Location II Tag-w, which will be released on October 3 at 21,000 yen, will be displayed at CEATEC Japan 2006 from October 3-7.…

As the established large E-Commerce sites pour millions of dollars into security and enterprise-league hardened POS systems, cyber crooks have been giving more attention to much smaller and less well-protected merchants.

Those smaller merchants can't even necessarily protect themselves by opting to not have a Web site, as the thieves are grabbing credit card information as its transmitted over the Internet to POS servers. "In general, the smaller retailers, whether they're operating E-Commerce sites or physical stores, don't have the resources to think about security," said Gartner Group retail security analyst Avivah Litan.Read more...

BestBuy was the retail maverick about two years ago, when it rolled out its customer loyalty program that charged customers $10. It worked to the tune of some 7 million takers, many of whom spent 130 percent more than typical BestBuy customers. Beyond the $70 million in additional direct revenue, those cardholders on average spent 130 percent more than typical BestBuy customers.

This week, though, BestBuy gave up the fight, opting to give up the $70 million in hopes of getting a far larger percentage of its customers to start using the card and being tracked.…

The marquee names of the participants in lockstep agreement couldn't have been more impressive: Wal-Mart, P&G, Kellogg's, Coca Cola, Miller Brewing, Disney, Walgreens and more. They were all coming together to support a method for tracking aisle traffic for the purpose of properly pricing promotion fees. But according to a panel of retail technology experts this week, they couldn't be more wrong.

The dramatic infrared sensor announcement will offer no true advantages over the old-fashioned mechanical counters and is a puzzling move, said Paula Rosenblum of the Retail Systems Alert Group.Read more...

The folks at Visa and PayByTouch just want everyone to know that they’re doing fine. Visa on Thursday issued a statement identifying a handful of retailers–7-Eleven., Clearview Cinemas, Dairy Queen, Domino’s Pizza, and Sonic Drive-In, to be precise–who have agreed to use the card’s No Signature Required Program, for transactions costing less than $25. That campaign is aimed at cash-intensive retailers.

The day before, it was PayByTouch’s turn to reassure people that it was still around by announcing its three-millionth consumer customer. That is a good indication that biometrics is gaining a little acceptance out there, but signing up to get whatever incentives are being offered is one thing. The frequency of use is another. …

A new price-comparison site went beta this week. On its own, that’s certainly not worthy of note as new such sites crop up fairly often. But this site—called www.pronto.com–is making two interesting claims. First, it’s billing itself as world’s most comprehensive comparison-shopping site, backing that up with a further claim of 45 million products from 50,000 retailers. But the second claim is that it will display results with no influence from ads or purchased placement.

Traditional comparison sites today only show products that retailers want to be shown, while Pronto claims to show all, just as the very initial meta-sites did, in the early days of the Web. “Many top retailers advertise less than one-third of their inventory on leading comparison shopping sites and consumers pay the price for this lack of comprehensiveness,” said Pronto CEO Dan Marriott. “Most people don’t want to shop in a store where two thirds of the retail space is empty so why would they do so on the Web?”…

There’s not that much that is retail-specific about this, but it’s difficult to not at least note the introduction of a 16-GByte, which claims the title of the world’s highest-capacity card. The card, with a suggested price of $1,050, truly has the potential to shake up the IT world. When that much memory can sit atop a fingertop, it is going to enable some fascinating things.

The SanDisk Extreme III CompactFlash cards claim minimum write and read speeds of 20 MBytes/sec. and are slated to ship by late December, SanDisk said.…

A fascinating story in ComputerWeekly reports on British retail powerhouse Marks & Spencer and their efforts to increase the number of products being tracked at the item-level from 25 million to 49 million.

Staff in 42 stores use Bluetooth retail handheld devices to scan garments in a weekly stock check. Every tagged garment in a store can be read in 90 minutes.…

When we see news releases that try to spin something out of nothing, we typically *sigh* and write nothing. Every now and then, though, a PR stunt is so brazen and misleading that it begs to be shared. Cisco this week gave the retail world just such an offering.

It trumpeted on Monday the introduction of the “Cisco Unified Communications for Retail solution.” The fact that it uses the word “solution” is the first hint that it’s worthless, unless they’re referring to liquids sitting in a beaker atop a Bunsen burner. But other than that word, it sounds impressive. Major vendor introducing a retail-only package. What followed? They took four old case studies (one was so old we reported on it more than a month ago) and called it a new offering. What those retailers had purchased many months ago were existing products. They weren’t even beta sites. Oh well. If you hear about Cisco’s Unified Communications For Retail package, you can feel safe in ignoring it. It reminds me of one of my favorite Johnny Carson jokes. He described the White House Press Secretary’s job as “When the President has nothing to say, he puts it into words.”…

A survey released Monday morning tells us all what we already knew, that consumers still run into a lot of problems when trying to make online purchases. Although the high percentage of consumers reporting problems (88 percent) is eye-opening, the upshot isn’t.

The lead with the announcement of the Harris Interactive survey–paid for by TeaLeaf– pretty sums up the “and this surprised you in what way?’ response: “Online transaction failures can wreak havoc on Ebusiness.” I read that a few times and tried to figure out what point Harris was trying to make. Were they expecting online transaction failures to help E-business? Perhaps they had anticipated consumers saying that they would ignore online transaction failures and continue to work with that site regardless. The word itself–“failure”–pretty much telegraphs the answer.

That all said, if the survey makes IT execs say, “OK. We knew about these relentless glitches, but we sort of hoped no consumers would notice” take notice, that’s fine. But I’d just as well hope that IT execs who think that way get punished. There’s something just about that.…

A New Zealand company is pushing a digital signage/RFID system that fills an aisle with smells to reinforce marketing messages. In the Regency duty free shop at Auckland International Airport, for example, digital images of vodka company Absolut’s raspberry vodka were reinforced by—yep—a strong raspberry smell. The system isolates the smells for specific customers and can spray as many as 2,000 different fragrances into different parts of the store at different times, according to a report in the Sunday Star-Times in New Zealand.

“What we’re getting into now is really something more than digital signage,” said OpenEye chief executive Gareth Croy. “It’s more the digital experience” with one-on-one electronic messaging. “You pick up a bottle of Johnnie Walker Green Label and put in your shopping basket. Suddenly, the digital sign near you tells you you can buy two bottles of Johnnie Walker on special for $100. Visual images then reinforce the message.” If a customer uses an infant-carrying pram, OpenEye has the security camera track the customer’s movements and co-ordinates digital signs and audible messages pushing the hottest items for babies. As for smells, options include vanilla for women, leather for men, chocolate for all and cut grass for gardening issues.…

Kimberly-Clark is reportedly taking its RFID testing into the United Kingdom with a series of trials with Tesco, according to a BrandRepublic story. The typical loading dock and conveyor setup builds on trials the Huggies-maker has already been doing with Wal-Mart, Target and Albertsons in the U.S..…