Back in May 1999, near the height of the dot-com insanity, one of a host of media darlings was an underwear sales dot-com called Underneath.com. Sending boxer shorts to various reporters, this dot-com was written up in BusinessWeek and the New York Daily News, and it made Time Magazine's picks for the best e-commerce sites. Read more...
When customers step into a cab from the Hello Taxi company in Brookline, Mass., they don't have to worry about fumbling in their pockets for cash, or about swiping their credit card in a moving vehicle, or even about finding their wireless fob to wave in front of a reader. To pay and tip the driver, passengers just say the last four digits of their cell phones, and then they can run. Read more...
Large retail chains have always had a healthy dose of a shell game in their heritage, exemplified by the highly marketed new larger bottle of shampoo and the much higher, entirely unmarketed price tag that goes with it. A price increase by any other name still delivers fewer hair washes per dollar. When it comes to retail technology, it seems those habits are hard to break. Read more...
Webmasters no longer know what their customers are seeing when they visit their sites, and they have anti-virus, ant-spyware, anti-popup and alternative browsers to thank. In the early Web days, all that an e-commerce site developer/programmer needed to worry about were operating system version and browser.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...
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...
Somewhere in Arizona—they insist that their exact location be kept secret so that e-commerce bandits won't recognize their address—sits a team of 18 Internet experts who hunt down people and companies that are either selling products illegally or are violating copyrights.
But the real work is done overnight, where a suite of homegrown applications crawls literally millions of Internet e-commerce locations, including Web sites, RSS feeds, Usenet newsgroups, private discussion groups (such as Yahoo's), IRC chat rooms, mailing lists and spam. Read more...
As an emergency medicine physician, Dr. John D. Halamka immediately saw the life-saving potential of embedding tiny wireless RFID (radio-frequency identification) devices in people. As the CIO of the Harvard Medical School, he was naturally skeptical of such devices and wanted to test them thoroughly before recommending their adoption. Read more...
Speaking to an overflow crowd at the National Retail Federation's Redefining Retail show, Metro Group CIO Zygmunt Mierdorf beamed in live footage of the company's prototype RFID-enabled stores from Germany, showing interactive changing rooms that make clothing recommendations and have clerks bring additional pieces, a cashier shelf that instantly scans items (so the cashier doesn't have to) and a privacy system that literally leaves the chip in the store. 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...
The fact that shoplifters nabbed $1.5 million across 19 states is not a technology, people or training problem. Rather, it shows that management needs to re-evaluate its obsession with keeping the line moving. The most well-planned and meticulously detailed crimes are often foiled by the commonplace. The thieves might map out their route precisely, coordinating it based on when various employees come and go. But security guard No. 9 gets a flat tire that morning, shows up 35 minutes late and ruins everything. Read more...
In a scheme that leveraged a little technology but relied on inattentive cashiers, Tennessee authorities arrested two couples on charges that they used bogus bar codes to steal at least $1.5 million from hundreds of stores—some belonging to Wal-Mart—in 19 states. Although the accused are said to have spent a lot of time and effort organizing colleagues in various parts of the country, the technology portion of their scheme was quite simple. 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...
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...
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...
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...
The time-honored tradition of retail rebates assumes that many customers won't bother. Staples Inc. hallenges that approach with an online campaign aimed at making rebates point-and-click easy. Read more...
In a move that is expected to slash one kind of retail installation project from nine months to three, a National Retail Federation division has unveiled the initial public release of its IXRetail Time Punch XML schema.
The division—The Association for Retail Technology Standards, or ARTS—also introduced Customer 2.0, which is intended to aid the exchange of customer data among applications in order to simplify integration of new applications such as loyalty programs into existing IT infrastructures. Read more...
By late 2004, many large retailers were "ill-prepared" to handle the likely flood of data expected from RFID implementations, and many hadn't even mastered their current bar-code systems, according to a report from analyst firm VDC (Venture Development Corp.). "OK, we've now got most of our suppliers finally on board with automatic identification and data capture technologies via bar codes. Sure, let's throw RFID at them, too," said Mike Liard, RFID research program director at VDC. "You've got to address Problem A before you start addressing Problems B, C and D." Read more...
With dramatically greater range and faster deployment—and with item-level tagging possible by next year—one former Boeing engineer thinks wireless may solve retail RFID headaches. Claiming the wireless ability to read tags that are literally hundreds of meters away, a retired Boeing engineer thinks he can deliver item-level tagging years faster than can conventional RFID and with technology that is much more readily available. Read more...
Store managers are starting to complain that their data-collection efforts are baring fruit, says Evan Schuman, but they're not being allowed to eat any of it. It's a common complaint within retail circles. Read more...
As RFID stories start appearing in the consumer media and on the television network news shows, we're starting to hear the same death and despair stories that were all the rage when the consumer media first discovered the Web. My personal favorites were the early stories of shock when a reporter found out that government computers had pornographic images on them. That sounded pretty bad, until you realized that it was simply an Internet server that has Usenet newsgroups on it. Read more...
Cards issued by European banks when used online cross border don't usually support AVS checks. So, when a European card is used with a billing address that's in the US, an ecom merchant wouldn't necessarily know that the shipping zip code doesn't match the billing code.
-Marc
