Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Chains are just starting to see the business ROI potential of POS—especially when working with CRM—to fuel upsells and to legitimately increase loyalty. But few look at POS as a potential protector and a protector against some potentially very large expenses. Consider four items from the last few days.Read more...

Google hasn't been faring especially well, with some seeing Google's move in April to boost prices as desperate. Then on Thursday (April 30), Amazon counterpounched, offering to waive fees for five months for retailers who would be new customers for its Amazon Payments program. The Amazon offer was quite limited, excluding any existing consumers, having the fee waiver only lasts five months (from April 29 through Sept. 30). Technically, it would be five months for those who signed up immediately. The deal isn't for five free months, it's free transactions until Sept. 30, apparently regardless of when a merchant signs up. The deal also has an especially low ceiling, with Amazon saying that the fees will start sooner than Sept. 30 if $2 million or more is sold.Read more...

This leaves open the question of whether Macy's is refusing to turn the files over for legal—or other—reasons or if it simply cannot access and thereby produce such records, for technological and logistical reasons. But Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Daniel Wright said he is leaning more toward the "won't" as opposed to the "can't" theory, at least for some of the requested records. "It's aggravating," Wright said. "It's inexplicable to me."Read more...

Given how far e-tailers are pushing everything to try to get a little more margin room, it’s always perplexing how ineffective the shipping tracking functions are for almost all but a small handful of major E-Commerce sites. This point is detailed quite nicely in a recent E-Commerce Times column. Amazon, which seems to be the exception for almost every E-Commerce rule, is the gold standard for tracking shipping today. Not all chains can afford to replicate the kind of operation Amazon has, but some of this is simply not that complex.

With mobile and social networking sites opening consumers’ minds to the possible, and Amazon continually illustrating the practical, e-tailers need to rethink their shipping strategies.…

The RFID industry is being slowed, but not stalled, by the recession, according to ABI Research. The company’s latest market data shows that total revenue earned from RFID transponders, readers, software and services will exceed $5.6 billion by the end of 2009. “The recession has had an undeniable effect on deployment plans,” said ABI Research practice director Michael Liard. “Despite some project deferrals and terminations, there will be market growth, albeit fragmented.”

The RFID market is “worthy of cautious optimism in the near to mid-term, particularly in the closely-watched passive UHF segment,” said ABI Research. And while the RFID industry, like most others, is struggling, the researchers said they “would not characterize it as being in a state of despair or turmoil.”…

Could these be coincidences? Might they indeed be isolated debit card incidents? Absolutely. But this also might be an initial heads up that the debit card system relied on by major retailers today has inherent flaws. What happened, with both Macys and Best Buy, with software specifically designed to look for and prevent these kinds of multiple identical charges? What about the systems at the card processors and the banks?Read more...

She hit Walmart.com and found tons of different printer paper, all of which looked quite acceptable. But she tried one or two and searched if it was in-stock at her store. Nope. She simply wanted to ask the site, "Limiting your answer to this one store, what printer paper does it have in stock?" If she was only interested in one very specific brand and paper type, she could have searched that store. The generic searches made so easy on the site, though, wouldn't work when focused on one store.Read more...

New stats coming from research at RISNews.com are suggesting that, as suspected, homegrown packages are losing their home. IT execs saying that their "preferred IT deployment philosophy" is "deploying packaged applications with few modifications" came in at 53.8 percent, almost twice as popular an answer as "best of breed" at 28.8 percent. Even though RISNews has seen that trend for years, the difference had never been so stark. While the packaged response has been right around today's 53.8 percent figure for years (ranging no farther than from the low- to mid-50s), best-of-breed has suddenly plummeted. It was at 46 percent in 2006, 45 percent in 2007 and 47 percent in 2008, before plunging to 28.8 percent this year.Read more...

Having gotten that off our product lifecycle management chest, the Tradestone effort does have quite a few things going for it. First, it's A Team list of retailers—including Macy's, Kohl's, Lowe's, Urban Outfitters and Pacific Sunwear--forces it to be taken seriously. Secondly, there has been so little truly accomplished with PLM standardization that practically any effort should be applauded.Read more...

Even more cynically, is it possible that those execs know that surveys like this tend to impact CEO/CFO expectations and, therefore, they'll give the answers they want their CFOs to believe? Even if the execs are being straight with the survey takers—and that the survey takers are being straight in reporting all of the collected data without sanitation—we have to wonder what was behind those answers.Read more...

OK, maybe it's a reach, but not so much as one might think. A study published by Carnegie Mellon University Tuesday (March 3) found that "shopping online reduces environmental impact with 35 percent less energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions compared to the traditional retail shopping model."Read more...

Wal-Mart has historically had a strong fondness for its own homegrown apps, given the $401 billion chain’s rather absurdly large size. The company has liberalized that policy recently, allowing a few shrink-wrapped enterprise apps to slip in. Now there’s a report in Economic Times that Bentonville is seriously considering an Indian business process outsourcing contract that could include “non-core processes of procurement, merchandising, finance, accounting and payroll” and be valued at as much as $500 million.

The story quoted from a Wal-Mart document that said “Wal-Mart will expand staffing of certain elements of IT application maintenance and development with some of India’s leading information technology firms. India is one of several countries that the company is targeting as part of its remote sourcing model for IT activities.” Vendors in the running, the story said, include IBM, TCS, WNS and Wipro.…

Given P&G's reputation for ROI worship, many assumed the company pulled the plug because RFID was failing the test. What is closer to the truth is that the test failed, not the technology. And to the extent that Wal-Mart was as much a player in this trial as P&G, it could also be said that the test didn't fail, the tester did.Read more...

The researchers found that 57 percent of the retailers they categorize as "laggards" in terms of adopting price localization cited their technology infrastructures as being a "gating factor" preventing them from delivering differentiated pricing. Forty-seven percent of the companies RSR labels "winners," those with average sales growth of three percent, told RSR that technology was impeding their localized pricing desires. "It's the entire technology infrastructure, particularly the integration bus," said RSR Managing Partner Paula Rosenblum.Read more...

Some 13.3 percent of respondents say 18 to 24 months, and only 6.7 percent assume it will take "more than 24 months." The respondents who "do not know" account for the remaining 18.3 percent. Those are some very sobering numbers. Do IT managers truly believe these goals, or have they convinced themselves to believe? Or were they forced to say what they really need to get their CFOs' spending authorization and now need to be consistent?Read more...

Earlier this month, CSPI published an "Open Letter to Food Retailers" in which it praises retailers such as Costco and Wegman's that mined their loyalty card data to find out, and make phone calls to, customers who bought recalled peanut-based products. Read more...

The change in heart, driven by new CEO Ron Marshall, will almost immediately force Border's E-Commerce team to halt additional investments. Although the move certainly reflects a new top management strategy that does not see E-Commerce making much money for the company anytime soon—a regrettably realistic assessment—it also is part of a pragmatic strategy of pouring every possible resource into the brick-and-mortars while simultaneously implementing chain-wide—and very deep--budget cuts.Read more...

Amazon.com is quite familiar with federal investigations, but the world’s largest E-tailer is not used to being the target. In a January 30 SEC 10-K filing, Amazon’s government filing casually mentioned: “In January 2009, we learned that the United States Postal Service, including the Postal Service Office of Inspector General, is investigating our compliance with Postal Service rules, and we are cooperating.”

Not quite sure who Amazon is cooperating with, but it’s certainly not us, as both Amazon and Postal Service officials refused to comment on the probe. Although there are quite a few specific mail no-nos that might spark such a probe—such as distribution of child pornography or narcotics or other illegal items—postal inspectors are a great catch-all federal law enforcement tool. Can’t prove that a thief stole something? Charge him with mail fraud for shipping it to someone else. Or, the investigation could even be enforcement of a very old still-on-the-books law that—believe it or not—makes it a federal violation to use someone other than the U.S. Post Office when there is no business need for something to move through an alternative carrier, such as FedEx or DHL. …

But, GuestView PCI Columnist David Taylor argues, how long is a "point in time"? And is there any way to make that point in time last longer, so that a "state of compliance" can persist for months--or at least until the next "point-in-time" review?Read more...

Prior to the ACMA decision, formally published Jan. 15, 2009, RFID devices were limited to one measly watt in Australia. Boosting the power of RFID readers will allow retailers to use fewer of the devices and enable the units to process more simultaneous data.Read more...

This tactic is hardly new, as many chains—including Price Chopper and Wegmans—have been doing this for at least a year and several very large retailers are exploring it. But Costco is the largest retailer to have launched it on such a large scale.Read more...

"Why would you want to invest in technology, training, software and people when Wal-Mart can do it for you for 12 cents?" asked Louis Bianchin, senior RFID analyst and program manager at VDC Research. "The risk there is that they (Sam's Club) could have sent the wrong message to the supplier community. That is not the message the supplier community needs to get."Read more...

Wangfujing, a huge Chinese department store chain that claims to serve 10 million shoppers every day and is Beijing’s largest retailer, has launched a SaaS trial, a move that the chain said will be the first time for any retailer in China.

The Web-based supply chain package will be available to all of Wangfujing’s 20,000 suppliers–to handle all business transactions from order processing to settlement—by December 2008, but only about one-tenth that many have access now, according to a Wangfujing statement. Wangfujing brought IBM in for this trial, where Big Blue said it would be using its WebSphere Application Server and DB2 database.…

But within days of the Canadian Tire (CT) statement, Circuit City shut down its Web site entirely (months before closing its physical stores) and Sears added a drive-through for its buy-online-pick-up-in-store program. Is this the next growth phase for E-Commerce, or is it more of a "We can't afford anymore to subsidize this bits-and-byte annoying albatross"?Read more...

Among the changes are a centralized search box, new categories and comments that are much more easily accessible.Read more...