Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Consumers are now saying they insist on customer service above all else. That, coupled with a growing lack of perceived online/offline distinction, is behind a National Retail Federation survey result released this morning showing Amazon.com as number one.

Compared with earlier surveys, the NRF stats showed consumers placing their customer service demands much higher. After Amazon, the other top ten retailers–for customer service–were Nordstrom, L.L.Bean, Overstock.com, Lane Bryant, Boscov’s, Kohl’s, REI, Lands’ End and Macy’s.…

The latest batch of test results from Keynote Systems released Tuesday is giving more evidence to those who argue that E-Commerce sites must be simplified, reliable and fast even if it means that they are not as gorgeous.

Consider the clothing retailer that came out as number one in both of Keynote's rankings (for speed and reliability): Zappos, a $600 million shoe merchant, which easily beat out much better funded rivals including JC Penney, Kohl's, Banana Republic and Nordstrom. On the other end of the spectrum, the Gap had a lock on last place in both categories. A quick look at the sites of Zappos and the Gap shows why. Zappos' homepage uses tiny images and lots of text. It's design is a bit crowded, but it's functional and efficient. The Gap's site's homepage autoplays music over a brightly-colored Flash presentation that autoplays. To read the full story,

A major Wall Street analyst firm delivered a good news/bad news joke to Yahoo on Tuesday: The good news is that your online advertising space is doing much better than we feared. The bad news is that you're not.

The Cowen and Company report downgraded Yahoo to Neutral from Outperform after it included that Yahoo's recent drop in marketshare--attributed by Yahoo to an industry-wide drop in banner ads and paid search--was a Yahoo-only situation. Don't mean to pile on, but another report today—from eMarketer, which tracks Web ads—also pours HTML unhappiness unto Yahoo's yodel. The eMarketer report gives Yahoo nemesis Google control of 25 percent of all U.S. online ad spending in a calendar year, which is the first time any company has controlled that big a slice of the Web ad market. To read the full story,

The changes for this holiday’s shopping season—both online and offline—were the highlights of this week’s StorefrontBacktalk Week In Review show, featuring panelists Patti Freeman Evans, from Jupiter Research, Cathy Hotka, from Cathy Hotka & Associates, Richard Mader from the National Retail Federation and former federal prosecutor Mark Rasch. StorefrontBacktalk Editor Evan Schuman moderated.

Jupiter’s Evans anticipates more sophisticated search capabilities as the most interesting development expected, along with earlier purchasing. The panel also explored whether more indirect issues—such as interest rates and gasoline prices—influence shopping behavior. The panel also explored whether new standards proposed by the National Retail Federation to make it easier for e-tailers to send data to price-comparison sites will also make it harder for retailers to hide selling identical products for higher prices. To listen to the pricing and standards discussion, please click here. To listen to the E-Commerce prediction discussion, please click here. To listen to the shopping influences discussion, please click here.…

A major tradegroup on Tuesday unveiled new E-Commerce product format guidelines, which might help consumers more accurately compare products. But first, retailers have to reverse their proprietary ways. The new standard data exchange formats were introduced by the Association for Retail Technical Standards (ARTS), which is a part of the National Retail Federation (NRF).

The intent of the new rules was clearly to help lighten the processing burdens of retailers as they submit product details to various product-comparison Web sites. But a possible unintended consequence of the move is that it might help those product-comparison sites more easily identify which products are identical. For years, product-comparison sites have complained that retailers deliberately make such comparisons difficult. Read more...

An upcoming retailer/supplier trainwreck collission over store localization, Amazon's abandonment of key features of its A9 search engine, whether a new giftcard service will change retail approaches and the privacy controversy surrounding Hitachi's new RFID tag. Those were the topics for this week's StorefrontBacktalk Week In Review audiocast.

This week's panel featured Forrester Research's Nikki Baird, the Retail Systems Alert Group's Steve Rowen and Ken Morris of The Lakewest Group, along with StorefrontBacktalk Editor Evan Schuman moderating.Read more...

The A9 search engine’s highly-touted street-level images and the ability to remember almost everything a user has ever searched for have been abandoned by Amazon, according to an Associated Press story. Amazon removed those capabilities—”along with several others”—late Friday, the AP report said. It quoted Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener as saying that Amazon is “shifting its priorities to areas where it can provide the greatest benefit for customers.”

This is not good news. Amazon was pushing the HTML envelope on creative search techniques. When Amazon starts pushing and starts retreating, what does that say to the industry? On greater concern to many, what does it say to Google?…

Hitachi on Monday announced what it is billing as the industry’s first WiFi active RFID tag for wireless LAN position detection and management of people entering and leaving buildings.

According to a report in the Japan Corporate News wire service, Hitachi’s new offering will also include an emergency message capability that reportedly “allows users to send a message to the control center, automatically informing disaster relief officials of their whereabouts.” The Air Location II Tag-w, which will be released on October 3 at 21,000 yen, will be displayed at CEATEC Japan 2006 from October 3-7.…

As the established large E-Commerce sites pour millions of dollars into security and enterprise-league hardened POS systems, cyber crooks have been giving more attention to much smaller and less well-protected merchants.

Those smaller merchants can't even necessarily protect themselves by opting to not have a Web site, as the thieves are grabbing credit card information as its transmitted over the Internet to POS servers. "In general, the smaller retailers, whether they're operating E-Commerce sites or physical stores, don't have the resources to think about security," said Gartner Group retail security analyst Avivah Litan.Read more...

The marquee names of the participants in lockstep agreement couldn't have been more impressive: Wal-Mart, P&G, Kellogg's, Coca Cola, Miller Brewing, Disney, Walgreens and more. They were all coming together to support a method for tracking aisle traffic for the purpose of properly pricing promotion fees. But according to a panel of retail technology experts this week, they couldn't be more wrong.

The dramatic infrared sensor announcement will offer no true advantages over the old-fashioned mechanical counters and is a puzzling move, said Paula Rosenblum of the Retail Systems Alert Group.Read more...

A new price-comparison site went beta this week. On its own, that’s certainly not worthy of note as new such sites crop up fairly often. But this site—called www.pronto.com–is making two interesting claims. First, it’s billing itself as world’s most comprehensive comparison-shopping site, backing that up with a further claim of 45 million products from 50,000 retailers. But the second claim is that it will display results with no influence from ads or purchased placement.

Traditional comparison sites today only show products that retailers want to be shown, while Pronto claims to show all, just as the very initial meta-sites did, in the early days of the Web. “Many top retailers advertise less than one-third of their inventory on leading comparison shopping sites and consumers pay the price for this lack of comprehensiveness,” said Pronto CEO Dan Marriott. “Most people don’t want to shop in a store where two thirds of the retail space is empty so why would they do so on the Web?”…

There must be something slightly surreal in creating a company whose products only function well when another company does its job poorly. Then again, if it makes a buck and helps its customers, what’s wrong with that? I mention this in light of a statement issued Monday by a Colorado company that helps EBay customers do better in the sea of EBay bureaucracy.

If EBay kept its systems clean and simple, then Colorado Springs-based Internet Business Skills wouldn’t have a chance. Therefore, they have a very bright future. The company bills itself as “the only company providing analytical intelligence to eBay sellers in order to reduce fees” and I think it’s a safe bet that their description is accurate. The product–Pyrolytics 2.0–analyzes inventory, keywords and price to help customers reduce listing and marketing fees.…

After Yahoo announced today that it would scale back its third-quarter financial expectations because of weak recent Web ad sales, Google and Ebay joined Yahoo in a shared stock-fall ride. Let’s set aside for the moment that Wall Street’s “what have you done for me lately?” financial analysis is not the way to run an E-Commerce company. But there does tend to a lack of there there with much in E-Commerce today.

Yes, online ads are much easier to measure. But consumers are clicking less and less and advertisers are starting to question how strong a sales lead a clicker is anyway. Advertisers are absolutely pulling dollars away from print and putting it online. But will the online ROI keep them for the long term? I have serious doubts. (But, please, while you’re debating that point, click on a bunch of our Google ads. I love being proven wrong.)…

This week’s show included a special guest, David King, CIO of the Regal Entertainment Group, which is the nation’s largest movie theater chain, bringing in about $2.7 billion a year from theaters in 40 states. King lead a spirited discussion about the new PCI changes and how his chain is viewing them, including a new wireless requirement. On the RFID front, the panel looked at the new Gen2 support promised from both Wal-Mart and the Metro Group as well as what may be truly behind it. Metro’s experiment with physically separating payment from checkout also prompted a debate of whether two lanes would be seen as being slower even though it’s faster.

Other than CIO King, our panel this week featured the Retail Systems Alert Group’s Paula Rosenblum, IDC’s Pete Abell, Chris Noell from TruComply and former federal prosecutor and security consultant Mark Rasch. StorefrontBacktalk Editor Evan Schuman moderated.…

McDonald’s in Japan is letting cellphone-touting consumers instantly see the nutrition information–such as it is–for all of their fastfood, courtesy of a barcode printed in the food’s wrapper. According to a Cellsuite news story, the wrappers have QR codes printed on the labels, taking users to a site that will detail the calories and fat of the product.

The piece says this should save McDonald’s costly printing runs to keep the data current, but I’m not so sure that information would change that often, unless the product itself is tweaked. But it also says this could reinforce McDonald’s image for selling healthier food. Although the openness is to be applauded, I’m wondering if it might have the opposite result. When I’m eating a quarter-pounder, the nutrition specs are the last thing I want to see.…

Our panel this week whipped up some sweet insights into Starbucks’ headaches with an electronic coupon that they had intended to be strictly localized but the Web had other plans. It also jumped into the renewed interest from some major retailers into using closed-circuit video feeds for a lot more than catching thieves, including CRM and preventing child abductions.

Our panel this week featured IHL President Greg Buzek, the Retail Systems Alert Group‘s Steve Rowen, Forrester Research‘s Sucharita Mulpuru and The Lakewest Group‘s Sunita Gupta. StorefrontBacktalk Editor Evan Schuman moderated.…

Think of it as a marriage between Amazon's consumer review comments and Youtube's homemade videos. But will anyone turn little movies into big money?
Buy.com is trying to merge two of the Web's most powerful sales tools—consumer-written reviews and homemade video—into a salestool that will both tap a younger demographic and theoretically add more credibility to heretofore anonymous content. Among the initial roadblocks are that a relatively small number of people will likely take the time to record and transmit a video review (which is a lot more troublesome than typing out a few sentences of comments) and the essential review-and-approval today must be done manually (which, if the technique becomes popular, could quickly translate into a huge labor and cost challenge). Read more...

For your listening pleasure this week, you can hear us discuss video. (That’s probably more fun than watching us discuss audio.) Buy.com’s video reviews effort, to be precise. Will consumer-generated video content shake up E-Commerce? Also, the panel looks into why fewer than half of all retailers today even have a formal plan for dealing with consumer data security breaches as well as whether technology deployments today are often hurting retail sales.

Our late summer panel this week featured IHL President Greg Buzek, the Retail Systems Alert Group’s Steve Rowen and ABI Research’s Michael J. Liard. Special industry guest was Dave Samuel, co-president of Grouper Networks, which is now part of Sony Pictures Entertainment. StorefrontBacktalk Editor Evan Schuman moderated.…

Please click to listen in on this week’s audio discussion, as the panel rips into Google’s substantial new challenges, with both Google Checkout and marketshare, the question of whether the major E-Commerce sites are ready for the holiday rush or the holiday crash, and a European look at RFID pricing and ROI struggles.

Our inquisitive panel this week included returning panelists Paula Rosenblum from the Retail Systems Alert Group and former federal prosecutor and security expert Mark Rasch plus Safa Raschtchy, senior research analyst with Wall Street’s Piper Jaffray (who authored the initial report that questioned Google Checkout’s retailer acceptance) and Ben Rushlo, from Keynote Systems Evan Schuman, Editor at StorefrontBacktalk, moderated.…

When Amazon.com crashed for almost two hours on Monday, it might have meant little were it not for the fact that a major industry report had foreshadowed it just three days earlier. Do related problems with Wal-Mart and Google show a trend? Late last week, Internet traffic monitoring firm Keynote Systems issued a report that said many of the largest E-Commerce players will face major load-handling challenges for the holidays if they don't make major changes quickly.

To help out, Amazon generously knocked out its own servers for almost two hours on Monday. OK, OK. Amazon probably didn't crash just to help Keynote make a point. But it's timing was impeccable nonetheless. Read more...

Google's stock got slapped around again on Wall Street on Wednesday, after what initially appeared to be an isolated report of a search marketshare drop turned out to be not so isolated. Google shares lost about 1.3 percent of their value.

Google started off the week with a report from Piper Jaffray that that Google Checkout is not winning over a lot of retailers, mostly because those retailers don't want to surrender that much customer information to Google. This follows a report that Levi.com had officially abandoned Google Checkout. Read more...

As if to stress the fragility of large E-Commerce in handling large loads with the upcoming holiday season, Amazon.com “experienced an outage of its main U.S. Web site for at least an hour and a half” on Monday, according to the Bloomberg News Service.

“We’re sorry!” the Amazon.com home page said Monday from at least 2:08 p.m. until 3:45 p.m, according to Bloomberg. “An error occurred when we tried to process your request. Rest assured, we’re already working on the problem and expect to resolve it shortly.” Amazon.com spokeswoman Patty Smith declined to say how long the service was down except to say it was for “a short period.”

Keynote Systems confirmed the Amazon outage, although it clocked it at closer to two hours. “The outage was detected in more 50 cities worldwide. The problem seemed to be a Web server/application issue,” said Keynote spokesman Dan Berkowitz. “The physical server was on online, but the application was not or had a significant backend problem. Keynote considers this to be a fairly significant outage.”…