Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

"How many smart people are out there who are simply not reserving inventory" for all channels, asked Forrester Principal Analyst George Lawrie. "You never know where demand is going to crystallize." He cited morale—not to mention inventory—problems caused by "reserving inventory for stores that could have been sold by the catalog or online channel." Read more...

Consumers older than 50 are rapidly growing fond of the Web, with such users checking news, for example, more frequently than those younger than 20 as well as participating in online communities more. But the new university study found that instant messaging and video downloads were “still tools for young users. Only 9 percent of users 50+ said IM was important or very important compared with 48 percent of users younger than 20.”

“The perception is that Americans over 50 only dabble on the Internet, but we are finding that they are increasingly spending time online becoming involved in robust Internet activities, such as online communities,” said Jeffrey I. Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School for Communication. “In specific areas, there is often little difference in use of online technology between older users and some of the youngest users.”…

For those e-tailers wondering if video is an effective way to reach American consumers, here’s the latest video stat, courtesy of Comscore: In May alone, U.S. Internet users viewed more than 12 billion online videos, representing an increase of 45 percent versus one year ago.

Nearly 142 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 85 videos per viewer in May. Google Sites also attracted the most viewers (83.8 million), who watched an average of 50 videos per person. Fox Interactive attracted the second most viewers (60.8 million), followed by Yahoo! Sites (40.2 million) and Microsoft Sites (29.5 million).…

A new E-commerce payment system at UrbanOutfitters.com allows users to complete purchases in one screen, boosting cart conversion rates by 19 percent, according to an Internet Retailer story that quoted Dmitri Siegel, managing director of Urban Outfitters Direct.

The original approach forced customers to use several pages to handle payment, address and other purchase details. “We were losing a lot of customers with that,” Siegel said.…

J.C. Penney customers are twice as likely to say they are highly satisfied with their in-store shopping experience if they are working with store employees who are accessing the company’s Web site while standing next to them. That according to an Internet Retailer story quoting Kevin Gebhardt, the chain’s director of multi-channel coordination and implementation.

It’s been almost two years since the chain connected all 35,000 of its point-of-sale systems to the Web, giving associates in its nearly 1,100 stores access to the retailer’s e-commerce site, JCP.com, the story said. “J.C. Penney also has tested placing Web-enabled kiosks in stores so that customers can access JCP.com on their own, but decided against deploying them,” Gebhardt said. He added that “the retailer is focusing on helping employees provide better service rather than on self-service technologies, with the exception of kiosks that customers use for accessing online gift registries.” …

"Response times for some short codes degraded severely during the busiest hours of the day. One CSC (common short code) showed a 60 percent peak-period slowdown every day, indicating a major capacity issue was present," Keynote said. "Many of the CSCs monitored showed significant reliability issues. Several (experienced) more than 10 hours of outage while one (experienced) more than 50 hours." Read more...

E-tailers in continental Europe are just now starting to get hit by slower growth, but they are still shining much more brightly than their U.S. counterparts, according to new figures from eMarketer.

In the first five days of sales earlier this year, French trade group FEVAD noted a 25 percent rise in revenues from nine leading online retailers in 2008, compared with the same period in 2007. “The group predicts that B2C e-commerce will grow 30 percent this year,” eMarketer said. “That is down from 35 percent in 2007, but still quite healthy.” …

"One thing that is true about Amazon's site is that it is very complex, utilizing numerous backend database, proxy servers, distributed application and Web servers, lots of dynamic images, etc.," said Shawn White, director of external operations at Web site performance tracking firm Keynote. "Even accessing the homepage involves complex multi-step interactions between the Web browser and a number of backend systems within Amazon." Read more...

Major retailers won't invest in a truly robust mobile deployment until they see most of their rivals doing so. Yes, this is why American business is in the global position it's in today—that grand American Can-Do-But-Only-If-You-Do-It-First attitude. Read more...

New York State has started pushing to collect sales tax from e-tailers that have no physical presence in the state, prompting Amazon and Overstock to fight back. But as this BusinessWeek story describes, e-tailers are fighting back with different legal strategies.

All are hoping against the odds that other states don’t pull the same revenue-generating attempt. If New York gets legal greenlights, several more states will quickly mimic its efforts, leading to a flood of almost every state within two years. If it’s going to happen, better it happen quickly. With one or two states, consumers will feel the tax pain and will look elsewhere. When it’s universal, though, it will blend into that amorphous cost of doing business and will cease changing behavior.…

The dotcom side is trying something similar, but the virtually infinite nature of online means that the Borders site can display as many books as it wants. The ability to drag the shelf to the left or right keeps the cover images flowing. Called the "magic shelf," that feature "is way more robust than it was before" in beta testing, said Kevin Ertell, the Borders E-Commerce exec who is in charge of the site. Read more...

But the change for The Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy and PiperLime is delicate, as the company still wants those brands to maintain their distinct personalities. Those conflicting goals give the new site a bit of a Jekyll-and-Hyde feel, as though a long-time favorite clothing store suddenly stopped remembering to take its medication. Read more...

Barnes & Noble on Wednesday (May 28) launched its mobile E-Commerce site, which is pretty much a super-slimmed down version of its regular site.

B&N Mobile includes search, store-finder, book availability and order tracking. It’s not an especially sophisticated site, but it puts the world’s largest physical world bookstore on a very short list of major e-tailers who have bothered to design a version of their site for the cellphone.…

About 36 percent of all E-Commerce shoppers who abandon their shopping cart did so because the purchase total was a lot more than they had expected. That’s one takeaway from an April PayPal survey of U.S. e-tail consumers.

The survey offered few surprises, but the quantification of the stated reasons was intriguing. The top cause was the expected “shipping charges were too high” (43 percent). The remaining cart surrender reasons were the consumer wanted to do more comparison shopping (27 percent), the prospect “could not contact customer support to answer questions” (16 percent) and some 14 percent said they gave up because they had forgotten their username and/or password.…

The idea of offering consumers financial bribes if they use a particular search engine has been tried before, without success. But Microsoft's entry into this field—the latest in a series of Redmond gambits to try and breathe life into its search engine—is different from earlier efforts. Read more...

The 59-year-old Mervyns department store chain, with 177 stores in seven states and about $2.5 billion in annual revenue, certainly can’t be accused of rushing into technological fads. On Tuesday (May 20), some 15 years after the World Wide Web launched, Mervyns announced that it would launch an E-Commerce site sometime “in the fourth quarter of 2008.”

The site—which a Mervyns statement said “could quickly grow into a $50 million business”—will be outsourced to an unspecified “nationally recognized provider of turnkey order entry and fulfillment services.” What’s next? Maybe next year they’ll explore these new-fangled push-button telephones.…

As more consumers use search engines to find products filtered by a single attribute–such as price–shopping cart abandonment rates are increasing, according to E-Commerce vendor MarketLive, which tracks such matters.

The shopping cart abandonment rate went up 2.7 percent, from 57.88 percent in Q1 2007 to 59.43 percent in the first quarter of this year, while “one-and-out” visits to E-Commerce sites jumped 18.9 percent, from 32.94 percent to 39.15 percent, based on MarketLive Performance Index figures that rely on activity from nearly 100 E-Commerce sites, according to this Internet Retailer story. The piece quoted Jaye Sullivan, senior Internet strategist at MarketLive, as saying that about two-thirds of consumers now start their research at search engines, “which means many visitors are new to E-Commerce sites and more likely to click off quickly if they don’t find what they want. More people are doing research and they’re price-sensitive, so they’re opening up more carts to check out the price.”…

Sears is in a fascinating online position. On the one hand, the $50 billion 3,800-store-chain says its online numbers are soaring, with the number of unique visitors in February 2008 reportedly rising 20 percent in that month. But Sears.com has also run into quite a few speedbumps. Read more...

Thanks in no small part to soaring traffic on YouTube, Google for the first time took the top slot in American consumer reach in April 2008, besting Yahoo.

But it took that top slot just barely, reaching 141 million Americans in April. Yahoo ranked second with 140.6 million visitors, followed by Microsoft Sites with 121.2 million visitors. …

Not only was Twitter's 37 hours and 16 minutes of downtime the worst in the group, it was almost double the amount of downtime from the second worst-performing site (Reunion.com, with 18 hours and 55 minutes of downtime). But even Twitter's numbers amounted to an uptime that sounded good: 98.72 percent. Pingdom's Peter Alguacil said those percentages can be misleading. Read more...

Like it or not (place this father defiantly in the “not” category), children are using the Internet’s social network sites at a younger age, with retail marketers hovering close by. How young?

New stats show 17 percent of boys aged 10-12 used such sites last year, which is more than double the 8 percent who used social sites in 2006, according to the Harris Poll. For 10-12-year-old girls, the figure is 27 percent, more than 2-and-a-half times the prior year’s 11 percent. In the 13-15-year category, boys jump to 46 percent and girls jump to 54 percent. Oddly enough, that 54 percent for 13-to-15-year-old girls actually dropped three percent from 2006.…

Microsoft is “leaning toward going hostile in its pursuit of Yahoo,” with an announcement “likely” on May 2, according to a report in that day’s edition of The Wall Street Journal.

Although such a move would not likely have a direct impact on the IT side of E-Commerce with major retailers, it could sharply impact tens of thousands of smaller merchants that rely on Yahoo to sell their wares.…

Google says it has concocted a better way of searching for Web images, one that involves image-recognition to “see” what the image depicts as opposed to just reading the accompanying text.

This technique, called Visual Rank, has tremendous potential to shake up E-Commerce, which heavily relies on product images. The details were discussed by Google last week at the International World Wide Web Conference in Beijing, where two Google scientists described Visual Rank as “an algorithm for blending image-recognition software methods with techniques for weighting and ranking images that look most similar,” according to this New York Times story.…