Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

The sales guy says, "Yes. Yes. Yes." You say, "No. No. No." In this surreal world, pens Retail Columnist Todd Michaud, you are watching your hard-fought IT career be dismantled by an onslaught of companies that shake your hand and look you in the eye as they pitch your demise one product and service at a time. And you had better buckle-up, Buttercup; it's only going to get worse.Read more...

Seems that it missed the fun social elements of physically shopping together. This week, it was British department store chain John Lewis' turn.Read more...

The geolocation opt-in alerts are an interesting twist, especially when a consumer is walking in a city (locally or when traveling) and has no idea that a particular retailer has a store three blocks to the right.Read more...

After many years in retail operations, Retail Columnist Todd Michaud is still surprised how little traction well-developed back-office applications receive. You would think that saving money on inventory, labor or marketing expenses would be all the motivation that a retail owner or general manager would need, but that rarely seems to be the case. That got Michaud thinking about some of the new social applications, like Foursquare, and what makes them successful: Gamification.Read more...

It's striking, though, how much of a contrast the 36-year-old Mayer makes compared with the existing members—with an average age of 60, the board is heavily weighted with CEOs of non-tech companies, venture capitalists and Wal-Mart veterans. The board seems to be acknowledging that it may not be the ideal group to oversee Wal-Mart's moves into the worlds of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, geofencing and Foursquare.Read more...

Empowering retail employees is certainly a wonderful thing, and nowhere is the potential for empowerment more explicit than with social media. But that cuts both ways, as it also enables one or two careless employees to do more damage to the brand than would have ever been realistically possible before. Consider this month’s stunner from KFC.

As has been widely reported, someone in the chain’s Thailand operation saw the 8.6 magnitude earthquake hitting northern Indonesia as a marketing opportunity and posted on the company’s Facebook page: “Let’s hurry home and follow the earthquake news. And don’t forget to order your favorite KFC menu.” Beyond the marketing disconnect (other than a tie-in of “disaster for your health” compared with “disaster for your planet”), the odd phrasing (does KFC Thailand have multiple menus and consumers have their favorites? Wouldn’t it be “order your favorite item from KFC’s menu?”) and the big bucket of a lack of sensitivity, this post raises a fundamental social media issue. Does the ease-of-use mean that chains have to remove all approval efforts for marketing messages? Five years ago, could a few employees have done this much damage so easily? …

That means the government will ask for—and Congress might insist on—extensive additional limits on using and even collecting such data. If a chain is going to collect specific geolocation data, the retailer needs to do more than inform those shoppers, said Peder Magee, an attorney in the FTC's division of Privacy and Identity Protection. "You need to ask for permission," he said.Read more...

Organizationally, these functional experts will challenge the traditional organizational structure. Data scientists will likely enter an organization through the IT group, because that department is most likely to engage their services to help drive value from information mining projects, pens Retail Columnist Todd Michaud.Read more...

In fact, Microsoft's effort produced a bad-results hat trick: It didn't drive more store (or mobile or online) traffic, it wasted time for both store associates Read more...

And the thing that made the systems interact was something that Nordstrom's software developers had no control over: the homegrown system that the affiliate site used to handle Nordstrom orders. That's what couldn't be tested until a problem actually showed up.Read more...

It's a powerful idea, but it has some serious limits. First off, Facebook, Twitter and tons of gaming blogs will see to it that the need for Birds fans to go into a Wal-Mart and hunt around will likely only last a day or two. After that, the full sets of clues will be published by early fans (the store campaign begins March 25) and the incentive will quickly diminish. Suddenly, the advantage of Wal-Mart versus rivals disappears.Read more...

The initial test used the shopper's physical location, but no other personal data (such as purchase history, other apps on the phone, Web search logs, personal demographics). However, personalization will likely be the subject of upcoming trials, said Dave Etherington, the SVP for marketing and mobile at Titan, the advertising firm that executed the Gap trial.Read more...

But Sears clearly wants it—like Neiman Marcus and every other big retailer. The challenge now isn't doing it, but figuring out how it can fit in with what customers expect.Read more...

That ability, plus new detailed maps to customers within Facebook, and Wal-Mart has bought itself quite a gift. The magic comes when those millions of gift-giving events—birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, graduations, baby showers, etc.—are merged with Wal-Mart's new social media files and its not-so-new customer purchase histories.Read more...

Retailers have been trying to get that right for years, using a variety of technologies. But if Neiman Marcus' approach works, it may mean that associates and store managers will have to exercise much more discretion and discipline—and that chains will have to change they way they hire associates.Read more...

Due to the (strange? pyschotic? drug-induced?) unusual policies at Amazon, publishers have no idea who their Kindle subscribers are. That puts us here at StorefrontBacktalk in the awkward position of having to make a plea to our Kindle subscribers: Please reveal yourselves, and tell us how you find the Kindle subscriptions. We’re considering some changes to the service and any customer feedback goes to Amazon—and it’s not sharing. Therefore, we’re begging for whatever feedback you want to share to please share it with us directly.

For you Kindle people who have not yet subscribed to our Kindle feed, it’s not bad for convenience when traveling, when you’d like the latest on retail tech and E-Commerce beamed into your Kindle when you’re not looking. …

What if your system could look for hints about specific purchases that could be flagged for likely returns? Perhaps a customer who purchases three of the identical shoe, but each one in a slightly different size?Read more...

The problem, then, for retailers attempting to enter the social networking space is whether they plan their strategy and miss new opportunities or allow that strategy to be random and chaotic and to create a host of potential legal problems from copyright infringement to defamation and potential privacy law violations, pens Legal Columnist Mark Rasch. How so? Let's start with copyright infringement.Read more...

In our attempts to battle the never-ending assaults by Spammers, StorefrontBacktalk had to do something this week for which we need to apologize. Our direct discussion forum—Go Beyond The Story—was recently overrun by Spammers. To make the forum useful, we had to wipe out existing users. We then put in place much better security. Now, we are asking our readers who had signed up for accounts in the forum to please sign up again.

We have also cleaned up our discussion forum on LinkedIn. If you want to jump into a discussion on our LinkedIn page, you simply need to first join the StorefrontBacktalk group forum. For you Facebook fans, we have also reactivated the StorefrontBacktalk‘s Facebook page. We love when people comment on the stories, but we need to insist that only comments relating to a story be posted to that story. For comments that do not directly relate to a story or column, the Go Beyond The Story forum is home. And we want it to be a noisy home, with lots of loud arguments and shouting. That’s how retail discussions are supposed to be.…

Those Facebook sites died because they were based on a flawed understanding of what social media is all about. It's not about creating a storefront or a virtual watering hole where customers gather to sing your praises. Those retailers already have that: It's called a Web site.Read more...

The items that are on the shelf elsewhere or in the backroom? An employee goes to fetch them. Those that are not in-stock at that store? They'll be shipped to her home. This is where Venky Harinarayan, Wal-Mart's Senior VP for Global E-Commerce, head of @WalmartLabs and venture capitalist extraordinaire, sees the world's largest chain headed.Read more...

Nowhere is this more true than with retail IT talent, talent that is marketed by touting the various applications people have worked on and the specifics of problems they have solved, pens Legal Columnist Mark Rasch. In LinkedIn, all of those apps and problems/solutions are located right next to their employer's name.Read more...

All of this, pens Retail Columnist Todd Michaud, in an area—such as CRM—where the application of technology could directly impact a retailer's top and bottom lines.Read more...

In a typical chain store, what happens when a customer discovers a problem, be it an incorrect price label or an out-of-stock or expired product? It's up to the customer to track down an associate. What happens then? Usually nothing, because it's quite unlikely it's the primary responsibility of that employee to deal with that problem.Read more...

It's time to evict Web and mobile app development, and pretty much any marketing initiative that isn't core to your business. Heresy? Certainly, pens Retail Columnist Todd Michaud. But it's necessary.Read more...