Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Say what you will about Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), but it’s an impressive operation when it comes to sweating the details. One such design innovation from Amazon—it’s ultra-smooth, almost instantaneous-responding pulldown menus—was driving one developer crazy, until he (possibly) figured out how Amazon’s people did it. The developer is Ben Kamens, who is lead developer at Khan Academy, and this is his theory on the pulldown magic, along with his suggested code for replicating it. The trick appears to be not that different from Amazon’s gravity-based link assist Patent, where the system anticipates where the cursor is headed and opens the pulldown a split-second before the cursor gets there, making it feel like an immediate response.

Pulldowns have always been an efficient programmer tool

(lots of content, minimal space), but never a shopper favorite. They are typically infuriating to use, with the submenus disappearing as the cursor tries to get there to click. Amazon’s approach fixes this issue, too, because the submenus politely stay there, assuming the shopper’s click will eventually arrive. Hats off to Mashable for first spotting this.…

That patent discusses using what Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) calls "gravity-based link assist" to guide a cursor to where the system thinks the shopper wants it to go. And to do so more quickly than some systems can. Although the patent specifies that this approach can be used in laptops, tablets and a wide range of other devices, its initial focus is on ebooks. That is because of a very specific technical issue: ebooks often have much slower refresh rates, so slow that shoppers can be confused about whether they have successfully clicked a link.Read more...

Abu Dhabi is going to an E-Commerce-friendly street address system. The capital of the United Arab Emirates announced on Sunday (Feb. 17) that, over the next 30 months, every building will get a number and every street will get a unique name (in many cases a much shorter name, in part to satisfy the needs of online forms), along with a short postal code. Currently, streets may be known by multiple names. For example, 7th Street is also Zayed the First, but it’s commonly known as Electra. And although the street Abu Dhabians call “Bank Street” is lined with banks, it’s formally named Khalid bin Waleed Street. Even some new glass-and-steel hotels have addresses like “Between the Bridges.”

Although local couriers are currently able to navigate the city to make deliveries, U.S.-style addresses should simplify things for E-tailers using addresses or postal codes for things like payment-card verification. It’s also a useful reminder for E-tailers that online forms designed for U.S. addresses aren’t necessarily going to work well in the rest of the world. With its population of 2.4 million people and a per capita income just below that of the U.S., Abu Dhabi is hardly a little desert oasis. But having three names for every street may not be so bad—just ask anyone who has tried to find an address on Peachtree in Atlanta.…

Never mind the physician-heal-thyself aspect of this incident (which is a little tough for us because, well, Bit9 did do exactly what it tells its customers not to). More to the point, it's another sign that retailers need to stop trusting security and start thinking securely.Read more...

That's right. Seven months after the standards were released and nearly two full years from its initial announcements on the matter, the PCI SSC has yet to validate a single P2PE vendor that can offer the promised scope reductions and a simplified SAQ to merchants. Why? Well, quite frankly, pens GuestView Columnist J. David Oder, because the council designed the wrong standard.Read more...

The chain denied any fakery, but the real shock is that JCPenney bothered. Customers don't care about the Manufacturer's Spurious Retail Price. They care whether JCPenney's price is lower than Macy's or Kohl's, and they can get that information online. Why isn't JCPenney doing the same thing? Read more...

Under what has been called "digital repossession," software vendors may even have the right to decide for themselves whether the terms of a contract have been breached and to simply terminate access to the software or the service. The key here, writes StorefrontBacktalk Legal Columnist Mark Rasch, is to make sure both software license agreements and service agreements have a "soft landing" provision that ensures the vendor is paid for its services while limiting the impact of a sudden withdrawal of the service or software.Read more...

The lawsuit has the tactical advantage of freezing the situation, giving Lands' End a little more time (very little time) to find a new home for its payroll system. But it's also an object lesson in software end-of-life issues—that lesson being, "when a vendor has you over a barrel, it doesn't have to play nice."Read more...

Yes, the Albertsons logo is the same on both sides. But seven years later, everything from self-checkout to loyalty to POS to prescription systems is now different across the soon-to-be-unsplit chain. And everything will have to be merged—and fast.Read more...

Amazon isn't saying, but chances are good that such safeguards were in place—and that's why the victory E-mails went out hours before the game even started.Read more...

Our voice and approach—for good or for bad—will not change, and we have been told to continue delivering the same mix of breaking retail IT stories, analysis and opinion columns. (Yes, and some truly awful jokes. It's in the contract that those stay.) The bylines here will stay, as Frank Hayes, PCI Columnist Walt Conway, Legal Columnist Mark Rasch and the rest of the team will continue to do that which we do. Me, too.Read more...

Didn’t we learn this lesson last year with Best Buy? On Black Friday morning, a Houston-area couple got up at 2:00 AM to order thousands of dollars’ worth of appliances from Sears. They got their order confirmation E-mail, went back to bed—and woke up to find another E-mail telling them their order had been canceled. Then the appliances were delivered, but charged at the regular prices thousands of dollars higher. It took a local TV station’s cage-rattling to get Sears to honor the Black Friday prices.

Sears’ explanation—the system sent confirmations before checking inventory but sent the cancellation E-mail almost immediately—misses the point. It’s 2012, not the dawn of E-Commerce. Inventory is online. Customers don’t need to be reminded that they just placed an order, only notified that their order will be honored. There’s no reason for two E-mails, nor is there any excuse for confirming an order by E-mail before checking inventory. That will take an extra 30 seconds? Five minutes? It’s E-mail. Nobody expects sub-second response times, not even customers. They do expect a “confirmation E-mail” to confirm they’ve made a purchase—and it’s long past time for retailers to get that message.…

This would be a little less embarrassing for Microsoft if not for the fact that the repeatedly crashing operating system was either Windows or Microsoft's own customized version that it sells as a POS system. This is not the way you demonstrate your retail expertise—or compete with Apple.Read more...

The result, as our media partner Retail Week reported, isn't just that vendors were pulled into thinking in terms of actual retail needs. It also pulled non-IT managers into thinking about IT. As John Lewis Retail Operations Manager Mark Lewis said, "It sparks ideas in our minds."Read more...

Part of the reason for Macy's silence on in-store navigation could be that it's only in the flagship store. A more likely reason: There's only one safe way to roll out untried technology on Black Friday, and that's very, very quietly.Read more...

Which raises an interesting question: What exactly is Amazon testing here?Read more...

For those few critical days before Christmas, any same-day delivery for last-minute orders could be a high-margin bonanza for retailers. But for the rest of the year, the customers already know what they expect when they order something for quick delivery. And the benchmark to beat isn't Amazon. It's Domino's.Read more...

At the Web site for $85 billion grocer Kroger, the site makes its best guess for the customer’s location. But this week it identified a New Jersey customer as being in Missouri and located an Oregon visitor in Texas—off by more than 1,000 miles each time.

Was that a storm-related glitch? We’re still waiting for an answer from Kroger, and we know that location feature has worked fine for at least some shoppers in the past. But considering how critical geolocation is in merged-channel retail (where’s the closest store? What’s on sale right now?) and the fact that IP addresses can often be tied to other CRM data, this may be a good reminder of how tricky outsourcing location services can get. Even if your datacenter is safely out of harm’s way, an outside location provider can still be inside a disaster zone and may need its own third-party help—and end up scattering your E-Commerce credibility all over the map. So many other things can impact location accuracy: A VPN can throw it off, and an ISP’s own disaster plans can alter where others think your customers are. Then again, it’s not especially onerous for customers to fix their location, as long as the site makes that at an easy fix.…

A little late October housecleaning here at StorefrontBacktalk. First, a quick reminder: StorefrontBacktalk now has five free Monthly newsletters, each one focusing on a different key area for you: E-Commerce, Mobile, PCI/Security, In-Store and CRM. The Monthlies—see the descriptions here—are available to anyone via a quick E-mail sign up and the November monthlies will publish next week.

The Monthlies are a great way to catch up on all the news in a given area. So before you miss the November Monthlies, sign up for your free copy—and remember, you can sign up for multiple topics. Finally, a quick thought for Kindle users. For those of you who have not yet subscribed to our Kindle feed, it’s not bad for convenience while traveling. You’ll get the latest on retail tech, E-Commerce, mobile and security beamed into your Kindle when you’re not looking. …

How about the fact that those mobile stores will also be pushing customers to buy a new phone as long as they're already in the store? And yes, we're sure that will make retail chains feel warm and fuzzy about Isis, too.Read more...

Unfortunately, with those so-called "low and slow" attacks—which require a lot less firepower from attackers but can still crash your site—brute-force DDoS defenses won't work. Your E-Commerce and network security teams may need to take a lesson from associates and loss prevention in thinking about online defense.Read more...

And it can't be created the same way Visa and MasterCard were, because that's now illegal. If the MCX retailers' alliance wants to beat the card brands, that's going to require some seriously new thinking—and it should probably start with loyalty.Read more...

The shift is part of an IT revamp that includes a merged inventory system, ship-from-any-store capability and improved turnaround on returns—in addition to a new West Coast datacenter that effectively works as a disaster recovery hot site for the company's existing East Coast IT operations.Read more...

This is just not Walmart’s week for price management. On Tuesday (Sept. 25), a Walmart store in China was slapped with almost $16,000 in fines for a “discount hoax,” according to China Daily. In May, the Walmart in Wuhan changed its price for a bottle of liquid soap from 47.6 to 48.8 yuan (a 19-cent increase), but called it a discount price. Not so, according to the local government price watchdog: “When the promotion price is higher than the traceable lowest price of the period of seven days before the campaign, it is a price fraud,” said Zhang Jianmin, vice head of the Hubei Provincial Bureau of

Commodity Price.

It may be true that what the Chinese call a hoax, everyone else calls marketing. But with 370 stores in China, Walmart should know how this game is

played. And with its fanatical tracking of its own and …

Among the largest retailers, only the Amazon, Home Depot, McDonald's, Kohl's, Apple, JCPenney, Gap and Overstock Web sites showed up in a tablet or full-screen version. Staples.com showed up on a seven-inch tablet with slightly more content added to what was still clearly a site designed for a phone screen. But Walmart, Target, Walgreen, CVS, Lowe's, Best Buy, Sears, Macy's, Rite Aid, TJ Maxx, Nordstrom and even eBay served up exactly the same screen for a tablet as for a phone with a screen a small fraction of the size. On the phone, those compact, minimalist sites help usability. On even a small tablet, the result is vast expanses of blank space that all but drives away customers.Read more...