Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

With an eye on group buying—whether it’s 20 people in an office buying a birthday gift or 9 farflung residents chipping in on an anniversary trip or even a Boy Scout Troop—Sears.com on Tuesday (May 5) introduced Givetogether. The program allows for gift givers to use credit cards or other means to pool resources for a combined purchase.

Despite being the great-great-grandpappy of the Big Box chains, Sears has consistently been ahead of the curve with creativity in E-Commerce, mobile commerce and cross-channel thinking. Unlike many of the E-Commerce ideas we’re hearing from the largest chains these days, this development isn’t the proverbial solution in search of a problem. This is an actual awkward issue that consumers have today that the Web can help with. …

Is Mobil afraid of Mobile? Is not offering an on-the-road version of a find-me-a-gas-station-quick application an example of E-Commerce fuelishness?Read more...

A Pennsylvania-based RFID tag-maker is introducing what it says is the thinnest active RFID tag in the world. CenTrak CEO Ari Naim said the size of his company’s new 3mm-thick IT-740 Staff Badge makes it an ideal tool for keeping physical track of not only employees but also of expensive equipment that can be moved, such as notebook computers. “It is pretty thin, at 3mm, for an RTLS tag,” said ABI Research RFID analyst Michael Liard. “The advantage is that the tag does not need to be the badge itself. You can overlay the active tag on current badges — retrofitting them if you will.”

Asked about the new tag’s battery power, Naim would only say that battery life is one of his company’s “specialties” and that power specifications aren’t very informative. “That, honestly, doesn’t give you much information,” said the CEO. “What defines the life of the tag has to do with how the system works. Our system updates every three seconds. If we change it to update every six seconds the battery life would nearly double.” Naim said the IT-740 unit can be programmed to operate at varying intervals and has a motion-sensor that can be used to prevent activation if the unit remains stationary for certain periods of time, such as when it is not tracking product.…

Typically, statements announcing such deals (which, in this case, included Subway's acquirer for its stores in Canada, Chase Paymentech) feature a canned quote from an executive with the chain, praising the vendor for its wisdom. In this case, the quote provided by Subway was anything but warm. Read more...

But deeper in the site, there were some answered questions and those answers were rather troubling, to the extent that a consumer is searching for credibility. The answers all seemed to be peppy and not especially neutral. One question asked: "Where can I find a great deal online for Sony VAIO VGN-CR507E Q 14 1 Laptop 1 86 GHz Intel Pentium Dual-Core T2390 Processor?" The answer: "What a great solid little system that you can really do a lot on. You can really get a great buy at Amazon or Best Buy." Do you get the sense that answer could have been written before the question was written?Read more...

But that may be precisely the point. With the economy still scraping bottom, many retailers and E-tailers are having to craft strategies that are designed to be very temporary and very emergent. There's a major E-Commerce vendor, for example, that is out there trying to convince retailers to halt efforts to bring in new sales, proposing that they instead force all efforts on the installed base. This forces us to consider three distinct issues.Read more...

But analysts were less than impressed, pointing out that the Motorola units were actually larger than many other major RFID readers today, despite being smaller than other Motorola RFID readers. "I definitely classify this as 'ho hum.' ThingMagic and Impinj as well as some others have much smaller form factors and more functions," said Pete Abell, a longtime RFID analyst (used to be with IDC) who today works as an independent consultant.Read more...

Starbucks is boasting of a 60 percent redemption rate on a mobile coupon trial being done in Mexico, where customers send SMS messages to access 2D barcode mobile coupons. That is an unusually—suspiciously?—high redemption rate, especially for a mobile program.

“Every time you present your coupon, the offer would be modified, such as get a venti for the price of a tall, to make people come more often to the store,” said this story from Mobile Marketer. “The call-to-action urged consumers to text keyword STARBUCKS to short code 80080 to get a WAP link to download a buy-one-get-one-free 2D barcode mobile coupon. Starbucks is equipped with 2D bar code recognition software, so employees can read the mobile coupon directly from consumers’ mobile phones at the point of sale.”…

The ability to use GPS to deliver geolocation features for mobile commerce is one of the feature-rich capabilities that scares away even the most lion-hearted E-Commerce execs. The ability to tailor offerings to a consumer’s precise location is powerful, but so too are the paranoia fears of letting a consumer know just how much you know about them. Sears has opted to try to make it feel a little safer.

When the mobile app is launched (Sears is first pushing it for Apple’s iPhone, apparently on the premise that anyone who would shell out that kind of money for an AT&T phone is probably clueless as to where they are most of the time), consumers are given the choice of typing in their Zip Codes or letting the phone’s GPS system find them. If the consumer selects for the phone to find her, it’s presumably going to feel less freaky. “The app then customizes the shopping experience, showcasing geographically relevant products, such as local sports teams apparel, the closest stores to where the shopper is at that moment, and even current weather conditions,” said an Internet Retailer story. “Shoppers can search Sears products, browse by category, review current coupons and perform other tasks as they would on the Sears e-commerce site.” …

GuestView PCI Columnist David Taylor said the problems crop up in easy-to-miss ways and he rattles off three of his favorites.Read more...

Washington State’s governor has signed into law one of three bills relating to RFID and privacy, a measure that prohibits, with a dozen exceptions, the scanning of RFID chips by anybody other than the company that attached them.

The signed bill includes a number of significant changes to the initially-proposed measure which was denounced in January by Dan Mullen, President of the Association for Automatic Identification and Mobility (AIM), as potentially being “traumatic” to retailers and consumers. Mullen, according to an RFID Journal report, believes the enacted version is “pretty reasonable” because it focuses on banning the surreptitious scanning and reading of RFID chips, as opposed to the devices directly.…

Execs at Domino’s Pizza learned a painful lesson in the power of Web video and social networks this week. Although the chain already understood the power of those new channels to sell product and boost brand loyalty, it seemed to have been offguard how those channels could just as easily halt sales and hurt brand loyalty. It also seemed stunned that the powerful national chain could be undone by a 10-minute effort from two low-level employees.

The story—deliciously told here by The New York Times—involves two workers at one restaurant that posted a video of them doing some impressively unsanitary things to a pizza before he was sent. See the picture accompanying this story? All I can say is that that had better be cheese.…

After tracking that for an extended period and noting the ebbs and flows, he then ran a major campaign. But instead of looking at impressions, clickthrough, leads generated or any other typical Web metric, he simply repeated his study. The only test of a social site marketing campaign, he reasoned, is to see if it was changing the dialogue at all. Were his brands getting talked about more? And was it boosting his favorable and dropping his negatives?Read more...

Shoppers with RFID-enabled loyalty cards from a chain of Washington State grocery stores get their accounts automatically credited the price difference, plus 1 percent, if products they buy go on sale within a week of their shopping trips. Now there’s an incentive to use the cards. The program is being trialed at the Top Food & Drug chain, which owns 33 supermarkets in Washington and Oregon under the TOP Food & Drug, Haggen Food & Pharmacy and Larry’s Market names.

“If you buy milk for $4 on Tuesday and the provider sells it on Thursday for $3.50, you get an E-mail saying you’ve got fifty cents in your account based on the fact we put this on sale,” said Peter Gruman, president of Accelitec, a vendor involved in the program. “The next time the customer visits the store and taps his loyalty card at the POS, the cashier will see he has fifty cents credit and will ask if he wants to apply it to the sale or let it remain in the account.” The program also provides no-questions-asked automated refunds for products with quality problems. If a loyalty card holder finds the milk was sour, he can call the store and ask for a refund, which will also be credited directly to the CRM card.…

That's the deal being offered by Citibank Singapore, Visa payWave and mobile network M1 as part of a 3-month pilot program in Singapore. For the trial, which involves as many as 300 people, the companies are allowing participants to keep the Visa payWave-equipped Nokia 6212 Classic handsets if they make at least eight transactions with the phones each month.Read more...

One of the more pervasive challenges today is that remote site access has been around for decades, but the security needs have sharply changed. No longer, for example, does a firewall have to be pierced to permit remote site access. StorefrontBacktalk held a podcast this week on PCI and remote access, with LogMeIn's George Hamilton as guest. To listen to the podcast, please click here.Read more...

But from a strategic marketing perspective, Calvin Klein's approach-avoidance relationship with E-Commerce and New Media is fascinating. They waited more than a decade to get into E-Commerce, even though they wanted that audience. Even when they did launch, they're hesitant to go mobile and social. And yet, this is the same fearless company that pushed the envelope—many would say blew past that envelope—of good taste in X-rated advertisements, trying to stir up attention among younger consumers. That's fine, of course, but it hardly fits the profile of a brand that is scared to move into mobile and social in 2009.Read more...

Typically, statements announcing such deals (which, in this case, included Subway's acquirer for its stores in Canada, Chase Paymentech) feature a canned quote from an executive with the chain, praising the vendor for their wisdom. In this case, the quote provided by Subway was anything but warm. Read more...

It is true that discovery can be frightening for typical companies involved in class-action civil lawsuits, but for TJX, it can be positively terrifying. Throughout two trials, TJX showed itself to be far more worried about revealing thus-far-unreleased security details than monetary payments or almost anything else.Read more...

But the key issue has consistently been much simpler. Unlike other forms of consumer-issued RFID devices—such as EZPass and even the keyless entry systems of some newer cars—typical contactless payment methods have not given consumers any real reason to use them. With no significant convenience or cost-savings issue, one need not look too far to figure out why contactless is struggling in many sectors.Read more...

But far too many retailers make those decisions based on two very narrow questions: "How much per click?" and "Are you PCI compliant?" That's a very bad idea.Read more...

The statement references the anticipation of more burglaries because of the recession. Well, this is certainly a sharp improvement over the crowbar, which generally can only disable the doors and not the security system and has a high noise-to-shutup ratio. Everyone knows that wireless access—especially for a consumer product—is quite secure and no respectable intruder would dare attempt to wirelessly access such devices without authorization. That's against the law.Read more...

Given how far e-tailers are pushing everything to try to get a little more margin room, it’s always perplexing how ineffective the shipping tracking functions are for almost all but a small handful of major E-Commerce sites. This point is detailed quite nicely in a recent E-Commerce Times column. Amazon, which seems to be the exception for almost every E-Commerce rule, is the gold standard for tracking shipping today. Not all chains can afford to replicate the kind of operation Amazon has, but some of this is simply not that complex.

With mobile and social networking sites opening consumers’ minds to the possible, and Amazon continually illustrating the practical, e-tailers need to rethink their shipping strategies.…

The RFID industry is being slowed, but not stalled, by the recession, according to ABI Research. The company’s latest market data shows that total revenue earned from RFID transponders, readers, software and services will exceed $5.6 billion by the end of 2009. “The recession has had an undeniable effect on deployment plans,” said ABI Research practice director Michael Liard. “Despite some project deferrals and terminations, there will be market growth, albeit fragmented.”

The RFID market is “worthy of cautious optimism in the near to mid-term, particularly in the closely-watched passive UHF segment,” said ABI Research. And while the RFID industry, like most others, is struggling, the researchers said they “would not characterize it as being in a state of despair or turmoil.”…

When Heartland announced in November that it was acquiring Chockstone, it issued a statement that “Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.” Why do publicly-held companies try such things? They know they’ll likely have to disclose it at SEC filing time.

This week, that filing time came and the Breach Boys had to report that they had dropped some $4.1 million in cash for Chockstone, including $1.6 million in goodwill and $2.4 million in intangible assets. They also took on some $200K in short-term capital lease obligations and about $300K in long-term capital lease obligations.…