Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Publicly held companies have to wrestle with a delightfully subjective concept known as material information. Its essence is, "would this information be something that would likely impact how an investor makes decisions?" On Monday (Jan. 3), Borders filed an 8-K form to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, notifying the investing public that the chain's CIO—D. Scott Laverty—had left Borders after about 20 months. And it said that he had resigned that same day. But in early November 2010, when Sears parted ways with its CIO—Timothy Kasbe—it felt the need to say nothing. No SEC filing, no news release or statement whatsoever. What does that say about how much the two chains value IT? Is Sears saying that the loss of its IT chief wouldn't make a difference to any investor? Does Borders see its technology as more strategic?Read more...

Although initially this sounds like a perfectly reasonable question, it is based on the dangerous assumption that a $26 billion, 4,800-store retail chain can crash repeatedly during two weekdays and people won't notice. How did we learn about it? Two site tracking services, readers visiting the site, our visiting the site and multiple Twitter messages (including one from Rite-Aid itself). But how you learn about an outage is irrelevant. Retailers have to assume that customers (and, for what it's worth, competitors and investors) know about their crashes, and they need to be able to explain them. Rite-Aid didn't. And that was Problem Two.Read more...

Also, retailers are creating not-so-small teams to deal with social interactions, teams they plan on paying for by cutting back on call center group staffing. That is a sound plan, but few are giving it enough time. By late 2012 or so, such staff re-allocations may start making sense. But certainly for 2011, double-staffing (adding to social teams without significantly taking away from still-popular call centers) will be necessary. Have you budgeted for that?Read more...

Borker figured out that any kind of comments from customers&38212;including really negative ones—would send his pageviews from Google soaring. Note: This didn't help him if a customer typed in his retail brand (Decormyeyes), but few prospects had a reason to do that. They'd be much more likely to type in major optical brands such as Ciba Visions, which Borker resold. Because of the Borker case, Google has changed its search mechanism. But that might be bad news for many legitimate retailers. Google is being cagey about the changes it made, but Google Fellow Amit Singhal did post a few comments on the Google blog.Read more...

Many of the privacy arguments in Washington surround what advertisers can do online, but few focus on the data that retailers collect from site/mobile visitors. Does that mean that retailers are in the clear or merely that politicians have yet to figure out that loophole? In much the same way, Facebook's privacy restrictions focus on allowing others to access a member's information. But it says nothing about restricting what a user can do with his friends' info. In other words, consider the info that a Facebook user legitimately has about people on his/her friends list. Can they then share that with anyone else, without getting their friends' permission? And where do retailers fit in?Read more...

In the last few days, some have posted that this Patent is inherently rude and disrespectful and warned of the dangers of a computer glitch revealing that a gift was swapped. In this instance, those concerns are misplaced. Consumers have faced that risk for a millennium, when friends or relatives visit and ask where that sculpture of their dog—a birthday gift from last year—is hiding.Read more...

Starbucks' up-and-down history on CRM, mobile and the Web makes these latest stats historically interesting. Whether it is up or down, this chain is hard to count out. That's especially true when a $10.7 billion coffee house is reporting a loyalty program growing at 20 percent.Read more...

As part of the ordered manual review, Target shut down its POS Cashier Speed-O-Meter devices to accommodate the additional time for the manual reviews. That review will cost the chain between $2 million and $5 million in additional labor costs, said IHL President Greg Buzek, who calculated that fee based on an additional minute for every transaction and the number of stores and checkout aisles that Target is using, plus Target's efforts to add more people to keep the lines moving.Read more...

The story behind the numbers also gets into some definitional questions. Consider a 19-year-old who poses a question to a Facebook forum about which car to buy. Does that consumer think of such an inquiry as mobile research or merely talking with friends? Retailers are likely to see it as quintessential M-Commerce research, but the consumer—who is answering these survey questions—is more likely to see it as hanging with friends and say "no," said Pam Goodfellow, a senior analyst with Big Research, which managed the NRF survey.Read more...

But is that necessarily true? Given the various target audiences for different categories of retailers, is it not realistic to assume that site management has already matched functionality and visuals to target customers? Read more...

On Wednesday (Oct. 20), Starbucks launched another campaign to get customers into its stores and, again, it has nothing to do with coffee. Called the Starbucks Digital Network, the program provides free access to a wide range of entertainment and news content that requires a fee elsewhere. The catch: Content can only be seen when customers are within the wireless LAN range of a Starbucks store. It gets better. The plan is to soon integrate the Starbucks Digital Network with loyalty cards, which opens a whole new world of customer data. With Yahoo as its partner, that information could find its way almost anywhere. They'll know not only customers' latte preference, but their preferences in news and entertainment, too.Read more...

At first glance, the Best Buy Commerce API program doesn't look that different from its earlier API efforts or from API moves by other chains. And even Best Buy's official line about the program—"we'll connect with customers wherever they are"—has a deeply innocuous element. But there's much more to it.Read more...

Franchisee Columnist Todd Michaud argues that a chain's commitment to making customer comments public—before knowing what that feedback will be—says so much about its confidence in quality. Isn't showing this transparency through unedited real-time feedback what social networks are all about?Read more...

We are witnessing a race that will determine the success or failure of many Quick Service Restaurants' rewards programs, pens Franchisee Columnist Todd Michaud. On one side, we have the socially enabled "check-in" applications like Foursquare and GoWalla, where friends share their location and compete to earn badges. On the other side, we have brands trying to offer perks through these applications. Today, these perks are inconsistent, in terms of both which locations offer them and the value they provide to customers. If the industry as a whole doesn't start to provide consistent value to the consumer through these new tools, I think the social aspect (the game) may pass by as nothing more than a fad, leaving brands right where they started.Read more...

That's a key problem with tying your loyalty or rewards programs to an outside company, especially a quickly rising startup with inevitable growing pains. From the point of view of your customers, when they check in with Foursquare at your store or restaurant, they're checking in with you. And if Foursquare is unresponsive, you're the one who will get blamed.Read more...

A good social strategy is simply a different lens on a good business strategy. A few "tweets" and a few more "fans" or "friends" are not going to produce bottom-line results. Michaud believes IT needs to take a leadership role in a company's social strategy, helping the business partners avoid shooting themselves in the foot. The new world of everything "social" will absolutely be a game-changer for business as we know it. But it will absolutely not happen overnight. And it certainly won't be cheap.Read more...

The next time you’re stuck on an airplane with just your Kindle and you want to know what other retailers are working on to make your life miserable when you land, fear not. StorefrontBacktalk is now available as native content on Kindle.

It goes beyond the headlines, and the Kindle supposedly updates this content when you’re near a connection so you can read it when you’re not. (I have to trust my Kindle-carrying colleagues to tell me how our content looks. Personally, if something can’t give me a paper cut while reading it, why bother?)…

This incident, which police are still investigating, raises the issue of associate training. Preliminary information given to police by Wal-Mart did not indicate that the caller gave the associate any reason to believe he really was from Wal-Mart IT. Nor was any reason offered as to why an IT person would make such a request. Was the thief assuming the 1 AM crew might be more accommodating and less suspicious?Read more...

It seems that those ducts—officially dubbed heating, ventilating and air-conditioning (HVAC) ducts—snaking through these old multi-level escalator-using buildings are natural signal boosters. "The HVAC ductwork is an excellent conduit for the radio transmissions because the ducts typically consist of hollow metal pipes," the university's report said. "Those pipes can be used to guide the radio waves, keeping the waves from dispersing, and helping to maintain a strong signal over a greater distance."Read more...

Think about it: millions of customers and prospects post their innermost product thoughts on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and the blogs of themselves and their friends. this info is free and often visible to all. But how do you take that data and match it to specific customers/prospects so that the data can be acted on? That's the untouchable part.Read more...

The world is moving to an open, sharing, social platform at a lightening pace. As a result, people behave differently today than they did yesterday. How have your sales and marketing strategies adapted to this change? What if you could provide incentives to customers to entice their social graph to visit the location (receive 10 cents on your loyalty/gift card for each of your friends who checks in)? Laugh if you will, but I believe the restaurant industry will see multi-level marketing become a large part of its business in the next three to five years.Read more...

The moves--and different strategies--are especially interesting given how pharmacies today find themselves in arguably the most data-sensitive retail segment. This space has all of the usual retail privacy concerns and regulations, in addition to medical requirements such as the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA).Read more...

PCI guidelines and a whole slew of privacy laws are based on the assumption that a retailer might do something bad to expose payment-card data to a thief. A retailer's logical response in a case like this: "I didn't do it. The phone's operating system did." But that defense might not hold up if the retailer was aware of the problem and did nothing to avoid it. Further complicating the situation is the fact that there are ways to keep sensitive information out of the keyboard cache. Apple, however, is likely to bounce any app from its iTunes Store that uses such a workaround.Read more...

The initial problem was pretty much along the lines of what StorefrontBacktalk reported on Thursday (July 29), which was a series of server failures. But the problems with two of the biggest names in retail tech--IBM and Oracle--are what made this situation balloon into a nightmare.Read more...

Last week, we pointed to the bizarre story of Brian Maupin, the Best Buy associate who made funny videos on the side and who was almost fired for it. This week, Maupin tried to remind Best Buy that it should never torment a guy who buys pixels by the virtual barrel.

He posted a video about a guy who was called on the carpet by his boss, accused of having used Twitter to make vague innocuous comments that his superiors saw as vicious assaults on the corporate brand. How does Maupin dream this stuff up? Even though this video is not in any way related to Best Buy (cough), it’s actually quite funny.…