Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

The chain, which has stores in 48 states in the U.S., lost its data connectivity on December 10 when the service provider made a modification that went awry. "It was an inadvertent switch to dynamic IP from fixed IP," said CIO Ray Hamilton. "That shouldn’t happen, and it took us a couple of days to resolve."Read more...

Buying items on Tesco.com, the E-Commerce site of the $84 billion, U.K.-based supermarket chain, is a bit like being a virtual marionette operator. When a Web shopper places an order, Tesco employees actually grab shopping carts and pluck items from shelves as they stroll up and down aisles in Tesco stores. Most of those online order fulfillment missions are currently conducted in busy, public Tesco markets also occupied by meandering shoppers. But Tesco is so pleased with its use of customer-free “dot-com store” installations–facilities nearly identical to its regular markets, except that are for use only by Tesco.com order-fillers–the chain plans to erect a large network of them, according to the Daily Telegraph of London.

It said Tesco now has two so-called “dark stores” up and running, one in Surrey and another in Kent, and plans to open a third, next year, in Middlesex. Laura Wade-Gery, Tesco.com CEO was reported as saying the company intends to open one new online order fulfillment store yearly “for the foreseeable future” and expects the employee-only structures will be handling 15 percent of online order fulfillment by 2014. Tesco currently processes 475,000 online orders weekly and operates a 2,000-van fleet for home deliveries, said the Telegraph.…

Wine deliveries often require signatures, and many fruits, vegetables and meats can be ruined by sitting out in extreme temperatures. Many two-income families are not home during much of the day, making such deliveries difficult. One vendor is trying to make some money off of this issue, by establishing alliances with businesses that will act as maildrops for such deliveries. The move by Kinek is not without precedent. Overseas—especially in parts of Asia—such services are common.Read more...

A Macy’s trial—limited to Florida—of a system where online databases can be accessed from in-store POS terminals has been “working very well” and will be rolled out to the $25 billion chain’s 800 stores by the end of next year, Macy’s CFO Karen Hoguet said at a recent analyst call. “I think we have only begun to realize the potential of the multi-channel integration. I think the potential that still is yet to be completely tapped is again integrating it more with the stores,” she said.

The technique is not new, and Macy’s is certainly not alone among major retailers testing it. But the Macy’s results are interestingly favorable. “Customers are increasingly using both vehicles to shop. Sometimes they are pre-shopping online and going to the store to try things on. Other times they walk through the store, they see something they want, don’t have time to stop, go home and order it online,” Hoguet said. “So I think we are going to see this tremendous growth continue. We’re beginning to roll [the system] out to some of the Midwestern stores as well as Herald Square now, and we will continue to roll it out in 2010.”…

But the A&P exec said his concerns are more generic, as in "the imaging of the mobile device itself and the readability of the barcode on the mobile." Another factor is that chains need to deal with a staggeringly large number of different phones, with very different screens, and they must interface with all of them with the same barcode scanning wand.Read more...

Amazon is in the midst of a very limited trial to send SMS text alerts to customers to update them on delivery status. The SMS package tracking feature—which Amazon said is being tested with “a small set of customers”—is available only for items sold by Amazon, not those offered by third-party sellers on Amazon.com. The text messages include the order tracking ID number as well as information about the shipment’s whereabouts, such as “Out for Delivery @ 10:15 A.M.,” according to Amazon. The company said it will only send text messages between 8:00 A.M. and 5:00 P.M. Pacific time.

After they click the Amazon.com “Track your package” button, customers being offered the SMS service are presented with a page on which they can enter their mobile number and click a “sign up” button. Although Amazon is known for its speedy, 1-Click ordering, this option would seem to be unavailable for SMS users—at least in the trial version. Users won’t be able to change preferences to add text alerts for all purchases, the retailer said. Instead, customers must request text alerts individually for every order.…

In what a senior company official conceded was an oversight, the 430-store, New Jersey-based chain failed to publish any ahead-of-time advisories before yanking its E-Commerce site's plug in the wee hours. Nor did it post much in the way of an explanatory statement during the long downtime period that followed. "The messaging on the site could clearly have been better," Burlington Coat Factory Supervisor of Web Development Jack Follansbee said. "It was an omission. We should have done something (a status page) a little more customized."Read more...

Many of the Supreme Court justices expressed significant skepticism about whether the current system should be maintained. Questioning one attorney about a financial approach patent, Justice Anthony Kennedy raised a Congressional intent argument. "In your view, clearly those would be patentable: the explanation of how to compile an actuarial table and apply it to risk. It's difficult for me to think that Congress would have wanted to give only one person the capacity to issue insurance." The newest member of the court, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, asked how far process patents could go. "How do we limit it to something that is reasonable? Why not patent the method of speed dating?" Read more...

Using RFID to coordinate sales floor promotional displays with ad campaigns has yielded a 54 percent increase in sales at Germany’s $68 billion Metro Group. The sales increase figure was one of several pro-RFID numbers mentioned in an October 27 speech by Metro’s IT office chief, Gerd Wolfram, according to RFID Journal.

Wolfram reportedly said Metro, the world’s fifth largest retailer, found that using RFID-tagged pallets for inventory tracking brought a “significant reduction of shipping mistakes and resulting compensation claims,” in addition to a 15 percent cut in truck unload time and halving the time it takes to verify proper item delivery. Metro, using products from Checkpoint, is about to experiment with using item-level RFID tags as the sole method of theft deterrence in stores. …

This week, Mattel--the $6 billion toy maker with brands including Hot Wheels, Matchbox, Barbie, American Girl, Fisher-Price and Tyco--joined those ranks and accepted channel conflict as it started selling directly through its Web site and social networking sites. The latest move will unveil a major Facebook presence for Mattel on Friday (Oct. 30). Read more...

The new ruling comes from a federal judge in San Francisco, who rejected the class-action settlement proposal for TD Ameritrade on the grounds that it didn't help the consumer victims sufficiently.

In both cases, the judges reversed positions they'd previously taken.Read more...

Amazon planned to have a California company with which it partnered, New Vine Logistics (NVL), handle the complex order-fulfillment hassles and legalities. That didn't quite work out as NVL, citing a "financial crisis," went out of business in July. Although Inertia Beverage Group subsequently purchased NVL, some have argued that NVL's problems played a part in Amazon's retreat from wine. This is not the first time Amazon has tried selling wine and been sidetracked by bad economic conditions. Back in 2000, Amazon bought almost half of WineShopper for $30 million. But the dot-com implosion that summer wound its way to the wine seller and brought stock prices into the cellar, too. WineShopper merged with another crushed grape E-tailer, Wine.com, and the combined company went bankrupt and was sold in 2001Read more...

Then there are negotiations. “You need to sharpen your pencil, I’m not paying this much.” Good IT leaders will work hard to deliver services at the lowest possible cost. But they need to be careful not to negotiate such a low price that the vendor will never be able to meet their expectations for service. Believe it or not, getting the lowest price is not always the right goal. By the way, if anyone is looking for someone to help negotiate a cheap, crappy IT service, Michaud knows plenty of people who would rock your world.Read more...

What often happens is a sort of gridlock, where a project stalls under its own weight. Typically, the debate divides over party lines. Conservatives (those who believe that IT is simply a cost-suck) and Progressives (those who believe that IT drives business value) generally are split over the “smallest/cheapest/simplest technology” and the “ring every possible ounce of value out of it” divide.Read more...

Tom Emmons, the mobile team leader at Sears Holdings, said that while the Sears and K-Mart mobile sites offer third-party payment options, including PayPal, he couldn’t envision adding Amazon as another way for Sears2Go or Kmart2Go customers to pay for purchases.Read more...

IT security is truly a funny business, writes Franchisee Columnist Todd Michaud. If you ask any business leader about the importance of having a top-notch IT security program, they will almost always tell you that it is paramount. Unless it is a large company that has regulatory requirements, when there is a conflict between a business need and a security concern, the security concerns more often than not are pushed aside or diminished. Such is often the case when determining if the chain should be leveraging a secure network (example: private frame or VPN connections) or going with a standard offering such as DSL, cable, satellite or a FIOS-like product.Read more...

It’s a compelling argument. There is a lot to be said for smaller companies that are hungry and constantly go the extra mile. But there's a reason why national chain CIOs do—and must—often resist.Read more...

When $1.2 billion Columbia Sportswear launched a new E-Commerce site in August, it gave shoppers the option of having their goods shipped in a used box instead of a new one. It was an initiative the company hoped would resonate with its customers, folks who (being outdoorsy types) tend to have a fondness for trees. According to Columbia, the assumption was on target: About two-thirds of the products purchased since the site went live have been shipped in used boxes.

Adding to the eco-friendly fun, Columbia created another site that allows people to track boxes as they continue to be re-used by others. To make this box tracking possible, Columbia places on each used box a sticker that includes a unique, scannable QR code and a number that can be entered at the A Box Life site. Participants can also “post pictures and stories about their box and periodically return to the site to follow their box’s journey, helping to illustrate the value that one box can deliver in its lifespan,” said the company.…

Today, writes Franchisee Columnist Todd Michaud, his average restaurant has eight to 10 pieces of technology that are complex enough to house their own operating systems. These same restaurants now have five or more vendors providing technical support. With the high level of integration, when a problem occurs the store manager is often hit with the “It’s not us, it’s them” excuse. The store manager, who is typically not an IT administrator, is left trying to decipher cryptic error messages, leaning on a peer group and spending hours if not days on the phone with various support organizations trying to get to the root cause of the issue. Symptoms of this situation usually manifest themselves in screams from the back office: “I have already rebooted it 14 times. I am not doing it again!”Read more...

The perceived inaccuracy of online depictions of in-store inventory may be at the heart of a new excuse that one Best Buy employee is apparently using to avoid having to hunt up products, according to this wonderful report from Consumerist, a Consumer Reports-owned site with a nice dose of attitude. Seems that a consumer went to Best Buy to purchase a deeply-discounted hard drive after the site said the item was in stock. The shelf was empty, so he asked an employee to help him find it.

“He informed me that they were all out of stock and that the Web site takes about 6 hours to update the inventory, and that that was the reason for the discrepancy,” the customer said, according to the story. “I didn’t trust him, however, so when I got home I logged back onto the Best Buy site and ordered the HDD for in-store pick-up at the same location and about a half an hour later, there was a message in my inbox letting me know that my order was ready to be picked up” and he indeed drove to the store and was given the hard-disk. Added the story’s author: “You have to admit, however, that his ‘the Web site is wrong’ line did effectively get you to go away, albeit temporarily, which we can only assume was its intended function.”…

Franchisee Columnist Todd Michaud can’t tell you how many times he had heard some version of this over the years. On the surface, this seems like a pretty straightforward argument . But with most things in life, it’s not quite that simple. I also have franchisees who pepper me with questions like: “Why is the system so expensive? Why can’t I have a single phone number to call for all of my problems? Why are these upgrades so expensive and why on earth do they take so long to complete? Why can’t I get access to better data faster? Who is holding this vendor accountable?” Not always, but sometimes, the answers to these questions are found by limiting the franchisees choices.Read more...

When negotiating—or surrendering to—a service-level agreement guaranteeing uptime levels with a Web hosting service, retailers need to be cautious of how “downtime” is defined. Pingdom is now blogging about more SLA games, including some hosts that exclude any downtime that they consider maintenance. Here at StorefrontBacktalk, if our site is down, it’s of little comfort that it was a planned outage that we never asked about.

Pingdom’s post on Monday (Sept. 7) also spoke of hosts that exclude server downtime and only count network downtime. Again, if the site is unavailable, that’s downtime. Pingdom is a bit more forgiving, though: “To be fair, for dedicated hosting providers, it would be difficult to guarantee anything else when the customer has control over the server.” It also repeated an observation that Pingdom has made before that hosts often ignore smaller outages, even if they have many of them. Of course, for chains, it’s not merely situations of Web hosting. These tricks also apply to services handling mobile sites, customer comments, video reviews, shipping and almost anything else your site needs to outsource, especially for the holidays. Sometimes—and may I be forgiven for saying this—it’s actually good to have the lawyers involved in SLA negotiations.…

In the trial—conducted over 13 weeks and published Monday (Aug. 24)—looked at a non-item-level store (the control store) and one item-level store and the same limited product area (denim jeans) were examined for both.Read more...

A 500-store franchise chain, for example, could easily have to indulge more than 50 different POS configurations, given various owner demands. Each location is likely to have it’s own nuances and, in a franchise environment, each store will likely have different needs than the rest. So what do you do when you have 500 locations that each have their own needs? You need to think of the rollout as more like 500 little project plans. Asks Franchisee Columnist Todd Michaud: Now doesn’t that sound like fun?Read more...