Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

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. …

"It undermines the strategy," said Finish Line CIO Terry Ledbetter. "But quite frankly, it was hard to imagine how resistant customers would be to telling you who they are. 'You don't need to know who I am,'" he said, adding that the chain is exploring using an opt-in feature on its mobile app that would broadcast to all associates when a customer walks in the store.Read more...

It's time to stop trying to plan out IT needs for an entire year at budget time and let IT scale and shrink to meet changing business demands. Smart retail organizations will give the CIO the tools necessary to solve the problems at hand, rather than trying to make sure no one runs with scissors. Todd speaks for almost every CIO out there when he says that they want to be given the responsibility and accountability to fix things, without having the "we don't trust you" strings attached.Read more...

The penalty, from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), was issued because the government said Burlington had deliberately and knowingly sold recalled children's clothing.Read more...

That theory is crucial to the century-old chain's makeover, which Johnson said will also include all-RFID sales ticketing within six months, elimination of cashwraps by the end of 2013, and a plan to combat showrooming by making 75 percent of its inventory JCPenney-only products to make direct price comparisons impossible.Read more...

There are a lot of interesting twists involved in this same-day delivery strategy—including some unusual ways one Amazon insider said the master site could deploy it—but there's a bizarre trend here.Read more...

A lot of Amazon sellers will have a lot of cleanup to do, but there's a bigger issue here. Customers who go to Amazon had their orders canceled and, third party or not, that's going to undermine their faith in Amazon. Buying from a third party on Amazon's site is supposed to be the best of both worlds: a chance to give business to small players while enjoying the security and reliability of the Amazon environment.Read more...

The home-delivery problem for E-Commerce is hardly only a British issue; it is an apartment and city issue. But the fact is that a huge percentage of the E-Commerce decision-makers in this country do not live in apartments or urban areas.Read more...

Most fared well, with a few exceptions. Coast's "service was a failure, and defied the objective of convenient click-and-collect." For Marks & Spencer, "a faster turnaround would be welcome." Homebase shoppers find that "the tight deadline for pick-up and limited availability is a drawback." These lessons learned, among others, certainly apply to the U.S., and this report offers an opportunity to avoid the hiccups suffered by our European counterparts.Read more...

Flashy customer-facing technology is fine, but it’s nice to see a retailer giving employees something shiny to look at, too. U.K. online grocer Ocado is now using what looks like a 3D animated video game to give managers a better view of highly automated warehouse operations. Managers can “fly through the warehouse and see what’s happening in bright video-game-like colors,” a Bloomberg report said.

A “first-person grocer” may sound silly, but consider a typical software dashboard—nothing but numbers and acronyms. Even if a problem flashes red, it still takes time for a manager to identify what the numbers mean. Ocado’s system uses analytics to flag any efficiency problems in the 295,000 square foot distribution center; the game graphics are then used to render views of the problem. Like Kroger with its self-checkout tunnel, Ocado built this system itself, because no vendor offered the type of software it needed for DC management. No word on whether Ocado, like Kroger, plans to market its homegrown system to other E-grocers. (Or maybe just polish it up and sell it to video gamers. If they’ll buy baseball and auto theft, there’s gotta be a market for warehouse operations.)…

Just a reminder that StorefrontBacktalk now has five free monthly newsletters, each one focusing on a different key area for us: 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.

The Monthlies publish the first half of each month, and they are a great way to catch up on all of the news in a given area. So before you miss the June Monthlies, sign up for your free copy. …

One of the biggest reasons CIOs fail—and, as a result, have such a high turnover rate—is the ghosts of decisions past.Read more...

As chains become more merged-channel and outright encourage customers to fly back and forth between mobile, in-store, online, call centers and Twitter interactions, the lack of visibility into real-time inventory is going to create headaches much worse than mere out-of-stocks.Read more...

Under the old system, the site would tell customers that an item was in-store when it was at that store, not differentiating between a product at a lower level and one at a higher level. The problem: Because IKEA safety procedures prohibit forklifts from being used when customers are in the store, customers would come in to purchase their reserved sofa or table, only to be told that it can't be accessed and that they must return some other day.Read more...

With more than 3,000 stories, columns and GuestViews in the content database here at StorefrontBacktalk, we thought it was time to do a little upgrading. Starting this week, readers (both free and Premium) can search for stories by limiting the search to just the story’s headline—as opposed to the headline and the full text. (Note: Right below the search bar, readers can choose HED Only or Story And Hed.)

The ability to isolate a search to the headline can be useful in two ways. If you happen to remember that the headline mentioned Target, for example, you need not see every story that mentioned Target (or even used the word “target”). The second way is practical. If you want a story that is primarily about tokens—and not a story that merely mentions the word somewhere—the headline-only search can be helpful.…

The sales guy says, "Yes. Yes. Yes." You say, "No. No. No." In this surreal world, pens Retail Columnist Todd Michaud, you are watching your hard-fought IT career be dismantled by an onslaught of companies that shake your hand and look you in the eye as they pitch your demise one product and service at a time. And you had better buckle-up, Buttercup; it's only going to get worse.Read more...

Take the example of a bottle of L'anza brand shampoo, suggests Legal Columnist Mark Rasch. The manufacturer in California sells the shampoo for, say, $5 a bottle in the U.S., but sells the same shampoo overseas for only $3 a bottle. It is perfectly legal for a retailer to buy the genuine shampoo overseas, import it back to the U.S., and then resell it for a profit. But add a label to the bottle of shampoo, and the situation may change. Read more...

In fact, what lawmakers probably thought was a simple idea runs into a buzzsaw of complexities—and the IT project is the easiest part of the problem.Read more...

Almost as unsettling was a rather reckless statement from the department's director, where she offered unwarranted confidence in the impregnable nature of disk formatting.Read more...

Organizationally, these functional experts will challenge the traditional organizational structure. Data scientists will likely enter an organization through the IT group, because that department is most likely to engage their services to help drive value from information mining projects, pens Retail Columnist Todd Michaud.Read more...

When Amazon on Monday (March 19) announced its $775 million cash deal to buy Kiva, a popular robot automation fulfillment center player, it put many of its existing retail clients in a bind. This includes current Kiva clients—Walgreens and Saks, among others—plus other recent (and possibly current) customers, such as Gap, Crate & Barrel, Staples, Dillard’s, Toys’R’Us and Office Depot. How will all of them feel about systems in their warehouses—which know everything about product flow and, even worse, can control speed, accuracy and efficiency of product flow—being owned and controlled by Amazon, a direct rival? Granted, Amazon would have to be crazy to risk being caught using that information or deliberately slowing down operations. But will the latest technology get shared quickly? Or will Amazon hold onto it for extensive testing in its own warehouses?

And what about the psychological impact of having execs at Walgreens or Toys’R’Us having to write checks to Amazon (or to a Kiva account, fully owned by Amazon)? The devices themselves are impressive little robots, capable of carrying a half-ton of products and knowing where to fetch and where to return. For any sci-fi fans out there, we’re talking about intelligent powerful robots controlled by a corporate empire and working in the inner operations of its rivals. What could possibly go wrong?…

Due to the (strange? pyschotic? drug-induced?) unusual policies at Amazon, publishers have no idea who their Kindle subscribers are. That puts us here at StorefrontBacktalk in the awkward position of having to make a plea to our Kindle subscribers: Please reveal yourselves, and tell us how you find the Kindle subscriptions. We’re considering some changes to the service and any customer feedback goes to Amazon—and it’s not sharing. Therefore, we’re begging for whatever feedback you want to share to please share it with us directly.

For you Kindle people who have not yet subscribed to our Kindle feed, it’s not bad for convenience when traveling, when you’d like the latest on retail tech and E-Commerce beamed into your Kindle when you’re not looking. …

In our attempts to battle the never-ending assaults by Spammers, StorefrontBacktalk had to do something this week for which we need to apologize. Our direct discussion forum—Go Beyond The Story—was recently overrun by Spammers. To make the forum useful, we had to wipe out existing users. We then put in place much better security. Now, we are asking our readers who had signed up for accounts in the forum to please sign up again.

We have also cleaned up our discussion forum on LinkedIn. If you want to jump into a discussion on our LinkedIn page, you simply need to first join the StorefrontBacktalk group forum. For you Facebook fans, we have also reactivated the StorefrontBacktalk‘s Facebook page. We love when people comment on the stories, but we need to insist that only comments relating to a story be posted to that story. For comments that do not directly relate to a story or column, the Go Beyond The Story forum is home. And we want it to be a noisy home, with lots of loud arguments and shouting. That’s how retail discussions are supposed to be.…

That improves Macy’s revenue, but also sets it up to take on its most threatening rival—Amazon—where the online giant should be at its strongest.Read more...

It turns out there was at least one more copy of the problem picture—this time on Sears' ShopYourWay.com Web site.Read more...