Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

The immediate impact on shoppers is they may find that the expensive flat-screen TV, surround-sound speakers or refrigerator that looked like such a bargain on Amazon voids the warranty. The arguably-unrealistic expectation from consumer goods manufacturers—which sharply strengthens the hands of traditional e-tailers trying to fight against these third-party marketplaces—is that shoppers would not only notice the actual name of the merchant shipping the item, but would take the time to run that name on the manufacturer's site to see if they are truly an authorized reseller. Or they could just make the purchase from Target.com or Bestbuy.com and know for certain.Read more...

Store management should care as much about whether a transaction started in mobile or in-store as for whether an in-store entered the store through the South entrance or the West entrance. True merged channel thinking would say, "What do I care how they came into my store as long as they came in?"Read more...

Books-A-Million doesn't appear to be trying to reduce its need to stock inventory with the machine. Instead, it's going after sales of books it wouldn't normally stock anyway. The idea is that instead of sending customers away to order an out-of-print book from Amazon (or theoretically have the store order it and wait a week, but how likely is that?), the kiosk will be able to download and print the book in a matter of minutes. The reality is likely to be a little more complicated.Read more...

Personally, I've never met someone who was as personable, intelligent and just plain nice as Walt. He will be missed far more than any words can convey.Read more...

There are many factors behind those numbers, but it really comes down to the fact that Walmart's massive global supply chain needs to support more than 4,000 physical stores—a feat that Amazon need not worry about. Given that huge physical burden, Walmart's costs are quite impressive. But no one ever said that fighting against a pure play was particularly fair. Like all major chains, Walmart initially had two choices. Run the chain as one big happy merged channel family or separate and run online and offline as separate companies. Neither approach is perfect.Read more...

The interesting background to these trials is that Target—as its name implies—has always been precisely focused. These trials, as the CFO pointed out, are the chain admitting that many fundamental shopper assumptions may no longer be valid. "We spent 50 years honing, moving products one direction to our supply chain and ultimately to the back door of the store. Then through the front door and trying to do that as quickly as possible. Now we're moving product different directions depending on what our guest wants and for us, we need to learn how to operationalize that," Mulligan said.Read more...

Your friends here at StorefrontBacktalk editorial also now publish a daily retail site, called FierceRetail, and wanted to give you a sense of what you’re missing by not visiting or grabbing its free newsletter. Urban Outfitters discovers that it can get away with charging more online than in-store. See? Sometimes conventional wisdom is conventionally wrong.

A look into how federal judges are likely to force changes in how price anchors are set in-store plus some questions about whether Sears is thinking about becoming members-only. Was Best Buy’s Facebook promo a victim of its own great deal—and some we-should-have-seen-this-coming rip-off artists? We also threw in our take on Walmart’s $82 million hazardous waste settlement, where Walmart spoke of mouthwash and hairspray and the feds said they were pesticides. (You say tomato, I say Molotov cocktail…) All of that—and dozens more stories—and that was just this week. And Monday was a holiday! Drop by and check it out. It’s free and the snacks all have zero calories. (That may be because they don’t exist.)…

That dramatically cuts Amazon's delivery costs, and it's the most obvious explanation of why Amazon flipped its position on online sales taxes in 2011, from the leading opponent to a major supporter: All those warehouses give Amazon a big advantage over its e-commerce rivals, and it doesn't want those rivals to have a sales-tax advantage in return.Read more...

The most concrete difference between the two approaches is that Gap will force shoppers to pay for their goods in-store. After it's reserved online, the customer has until the end of the next business day to show up, pay and pick it up. That's good for getting shoppers deeper into the store, but not so good for guaranteeing the sale.Read more...

Beyond personalization, there is a very practical reason to insist that companies get on the phone for these deliveries: to force shoppers to listen. On the Web, it's very easy to post all kinds of restrictions ("Must call by 1 p.m." or "We're not responsible for traffic jams or road closures") that shoppers won't read and they certainly won't internalize.Read more...

One of the results of StorefrontBacktalk‘s being acquired back in December is that we are going to be expanding into coverage that goes beyond Retail IT into other areas of retail. The first example of this launched last week and is a daily newsletter and site called FierceRetail.

The site applies the same kind of perspective, analysis and bad jokes that StorefrontBacktalk has always delivered, but we can now explore issues way beyond IT. Consider our coverage of an unorthodox Apple patent, the reasoning behind the Sears Portrait shutdown, why Target’s Manatee mishap is a lot worse than it looked, Samsung’s real retail strategy, why Best Buy and Target’s Geek Squad alliance was doomed and stats showing Visa having all-but-cornered the debit market. It’s all free, of course. If you’d like to sign up, our latest thoughts will be in your Inbox early each morning.…

Given that its program would deliver expensive value in the form of free food and drink at its stores, the first priority of the rollout was to try and discourage fraud. And that involved some creative packaging and identification mechanisms. And a choice to exclude mobile from the launch.Read more...

Part of the reason Neiman Marcus got into trouble here is that it started selling the fake faux fur products less than six months after settling a previous FTC fake faux fur investigation. But the bigger problem may be the fact that physical stores have human beings who can catch some of these labeling problems before they become a federal case. Online stores don't.Read more...

Keep in mind that it's barely a year and a half since Target could barely keep its own newly built E-Commerce site running, after a decade of having its E-Commerce operations run by Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN). That's fresh in the minds of Target E-Commerce execs, so if there's any chain that can see an advantage to becoming a mini-Amazon for cooking websites, it's Target.Read more...

"Candidly, it's getting so hard to know what's a store sale and what's a mobile sale and what's Internet. It's getting harder to figure out the lines between them," Macy's CFO Karen Hoguet told analysts on Tuesday. When asked for some E-Commerce projections, she said: "I really can't give you that number. I mean, I don't know it. But clearly, the growth is continuing very aggressively. But sometimes, it's being bought on a mobile device sitting in a store. So I'm not sure how to define that."Read more...

"Amazon's price parity clause, under which sellers are deprived of their freedom to sell a product offered through Amazon cheaper on another Internet sales channel, could violate the general ban on cartels," said Andreas Mundt, the head of Germany's federal antitrust office (the Bundeskartellamt), on February 20.Read more...

John Lewis, the huge British department store

chain, is taking an interesting twist on E-Commerce returns. The idea of having free unlimited returns for online-purchased clothing and shoes (especially shoes) is well known, but the chain is trying to make it more hassle-free by allowing those free E-Commerce returns at more than 5,000 convenience stores, gas stations (OK, petrol stations) and newsstands. Returning too tight sneakers when you fill up for gas on the way to work?

The initial deal is limited to online purchases (no trying to return stuff purchased from a physical John Lewis store) and is further restricted to clothing, shoes and “fashion accessories.” (Wonder if the argument that an iPad Mini or a coffee machine is a fashion accessory would fly?) The John Lewis free shipping deal comes through a partnership with CollectPlus, a large U.K. parcel service. Completely non-coincidentally, the incoming E-Commerce chief for John Lewis—Mark Lewis—is the former head of CollectPlus. Regardless of where the idea came from, having a relatively quick and painless way to return those “looked good on screen but are in reality stunningly ugly patent leather pumps” is a good one. Anything that makes shoppers more comfortable with buying a lot of clothes on the chance that they’ll keep some …

But of much greater significance is the digital domino effect. In this case, JCPenney was building its in-aisle checkout on the premise that it had item-level RFID fully in place. And if remodeled stores have dramatically scaled back the number of cashwraps (because customers would be doing in-aisle checkout), does that mean all those customers will have to line up for the limited number of cashwraps? That's not going to be pretty—presuming JCPenney can actually get enough returning customers to make it a problem.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...

Retailers have discovered that, although the benefits of a truly merged-channel supply chain are vast, the pain-points are potentially even more vast—at least in the beginning. Michelle Tinsley, the director of transactional retail at Intel, said chains can find it difficult to strike the right balance. “The customer views that brick-and-mortar location as today’s face of that retailer, so they need to uphold that brand image and take the (online) returns,” Tinsley said. “But in this merged world, (the chain needs to) allow any location in that nationwide retailer to see those shoes now back into inventory and to then sell them very quickly and ship it from that location. So even though it was

returned to a brick-and-mortar store, let it be seen in those warehousing systems so that the next order that comes in over the Internet or from a store in Cincinnati gets placed from that store in, say, California.”

In Part Two of this week’s StorefrontBacktalk Radio segment, Tinsley argues that this problem is one manifestation of the old way retailers look at problems. “I think you need to flip it. Instead of saying, ‘I’ve got the inventory in the wrong place,’ say, ‘Well, I’ve just got to open up the inventory to where the next demand signal is coming from.”…

Problem #1: Shoes have an extremely short shelf life. At the end of that shelf life ("that shoe is sooo last month"), the shoe is typically priced at a steep discount. Problem #2: Stores can't sell one or two products. The display unit would represent half of all inventory. So, again, that orphaned product goes on steep discount. Problem #3: The store could ship that shoe to a store that does have that SKU in its inventory. But you then have the cost (hard out-of-pocket shipping costs as well as labor to prep the product on both ends) and time (the multiple days involved in shipping) delays, and you're still fighting against that extremely short shelf life.Read more...

These chains apparently think shoppers would never pay full freight, so they're willing to pay the delivery service £10 and then only charge the shopper £6, according to the CEO of a prominent same-day retail delivery service in London, whose company is trying to move into the U.S. That calculation also assumes not that many shoppers will use the service. After all, there are only so many £4 haircuts a chain selling lower priced goods is willing to take.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...

But even better, of those Amazon shoppers who saw that icon and then made the purchase, most of them ended up not using same-day delivery, opting instead for next-day. Given the way Amazon Prime is priced, same-day didn't typically cost any more than the $3.99 next-day pricing. So what is it about same-day that is so enticing that it drives 25 percent conversion boosts but is so unattractive that shoppers opt to not use it? Is this like those people who post burglar alarm system signs but don't use the actual service, because the sign delivers 90 percent of the benefit?Read more...

In an October sampling of some 7,000 products shown on the 10 largest E-Commerce sites in North America and the U.K., 29 percent of the SKUs did not include the manufacturer’s name and some 8 percent offered up details that were simply wrong, according to a report released Wednesday (Nov. 7) at a Paris tradeshow. The fact that SKU GS1 data is imperfect is hardly a stunner, but the large number of defects was interesting. That missing manufacturer data, for example, could exclude products from a Kraft-specific search result. For the chain itself, it could interfere with analytics of which supplier’s products are moving well.

The study, performed by vendor Clavis Technology and GS1, looked at 500 brands and 7,000 packaged food/beverage products across 23,000 Web pages. One of the biggest numbers the report stressed was that 67 percent of products examined were missing information. But that could go either way. Were products dinged for not including marketing copy or other non-sales-essential datapoints? Another good figure: 14 percent did not include any ingredients. That could be a costly omission, if a product containing an allergen—a nut product would be the most obvious issue—was purchased and eaten after the shopper did a search excluding anything that had peanut in its ingredient list.…