Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

The new proposed law—which passed both the House and Senate this week and is awaiting President Bush's signature—essentially removes the expiration date requirement of the law. So assuming the president signs it into law, the bill just got a lot easier to navigate. Read more...

But the change for The Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy and PiperLime is delicate, as the company still wants those brands to maintain their distinct personalities. Those conflicting goals give the new site a bit of a Jekyll-and-Hyde feel, as though a long-time favorite clothing store suddenly stopped remembering to take its medication. Read more...

Barnes & Noble on Wednesday (May 28) launched its mobile E-Commerce site, which is pretty much a super-slimmed down version of its regular site.

B&N Mobile includes search, store-finder, book availability and order tracking. It’s not an especially sophisticated site, but it puts the world’s largest physical world bookstore on a very short list of major e-tailers who have bothered to design a version of their site for the cellphone.…

Germany’s METRO Group is experimenting with RFID inserts to track meat and to immediately locate any product that is about to expire or that has expired.

METRO is placing the inlays into the foam meat packing trays used in their Future Store. “RFID has a key role to play in quality management for fresh food,” said Gerd Wolfram, managing director of MGI METRO Group Information Technology in a statement. “This automatic product identification technology will contribute to product quality and efficiency in our stores.”…

Like many ex-cons, when Martha Stewart got out of prison, she had a different outlook on life. So she’s going to relaunch her E-Commerce site. But this time, she’ll try and do it right by doing as little as possible.

In their new direct-to-consumer model, the homemaking queen will use her site to make the pitch, but all aspects of the site will be outsourced. “On the old site, we did the manufacturing, we held the inventory, the products were great and we lost an enormous amount of money. It’s not what we’re good at,” Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia CEO Susan Lyne said, according to this Internet Retailer story.…

New E-Commerce figures from e-Marketer show continued growth over the several years, but the rate of growth will quickly drop. The firm reported, for example, that last year’s E-Commerce sales hit $127.7 billion, a figure that they are projecting to steadily rise to hit $218.4 billion in four years.

But the percentage of growth shows an opposite story, with last year’s 19.8 percent growth dropping to 14.3 percent this year, 12.5 percent next year and down to 8.9 percent in four years. A senior analyst for eMarketer, Jeff Grau, said the declines were not necessarily horrible E-Commerce news. “A drop in the number of new online buyers is an inevitable sign of the maturation of the online retail channel,” he said.…

About 36 percent of all E-Commerce shoppers who abandon their shopping cart did so because the purchase total was a lot more than they had expected. That’s one takeaway from an April PayPal survey of U.S. e-tail consumers.

The survey offered few surprises, but the quantification of the stated reasons was intriguing. The top cause was the expected “shipping charges were too high” (43 percent). The remaining cart surrender reasons were the consumer wanted to do more comparison shopping (27 percent), the prospect “could not contact customer support to answer questions” (16 percent) and some 14 percent said they gave up because they had forgotten their username and/or password.…

The Blockbuster movie-download kiosks–slated to start their trial in June–will download movies directly into consumer-owned portable devices in about two minutes, according to a demo at the company’s shareholder meeting Wednesday (May 28).

Blockbuster officials want the NCR-developed kiosk to be able to download films in about 30 seconds “as Blockbuster is striving for an ATM-like experience,” said Blockbuster CEO James Keyes, according to this report in The Hollywood Reporter. “Keyes later told reporters he could envision a monthly subscription fee of $10 along with a free device give-away down the line. Games would be ‘a wonderful addition’ to the kiosk service in the future as well,” he said. The trial will start at a few stores in Dallas and will initially only work with devices made by Archos.…

MasterCard Canada this summer will start a 4-month NFC-phone trial, with the backing of some of Canada’s largest retailers, including Loblaw, Petro Canada, Tim Hortons’, Pioneer Petroleum, Rabba Foods, a major NHL arena and McDonalds.

One unusual aspect of the trial is that it will eventually support more than one payment card on each phone, said MasterCard Canada’s Nagesh Devata.…

Amazon is preparing to expand its entertainment offerings, with a planned streaming video launch “in the next few weeks,” according to a speech given Wednesday (May 28) by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

Amazon already offers video downloads and has a deal with Tivo to let consumers watch Amazon-purchased videos on their televisions. But a streaming feed would allow much more control over viewing limits and would also allow for near-instant viewing.…

PCI's plan to address these vulnerabilities had been delayed for two years, which has crippled compliance efforts. As the requirement is about to kick in in June, merchants are not thinking so much about PCI, unless their annual PCI compliance review date happens to coincide with the PCI 6.6 effective date. Read more...

At $388 billion in annual revenue, handling Wal-Mart’s ERP financial application is nothing if not challenging. But when Wal-Mart last year turned to SAP to take over many of the financial functions that the chain had been handling with in-house software, it was a concession that it can’t push its homegrown apps as far as it used to. This is especially true as the company continues its aggressive global expansion.

Wal-Mart CFO Tom Schoewe said this month that the first phase of the global roll-out is expected to be completed in the next two years, with two remaining phases kicking in over the next five years, according to Wal-Mart spokesperson John Simley. “It is a departure for us to standardize on something (from a third-party) rather than homegrown,” Simley said. …

The employee has been dubbed a whistleblower and it's been suggested that TJX was wrong to have terminated the guy. In this case, I have to stand up for TJX: They were completely within their rights to terminate this employee. As for the charges themselves, those are dramatically more troubling. Read more...

A handful of grocery chains—including PriceChopper and Wegmans—have started using CRM data to alert customers to product recalls. It’s an encouraging move to convince consumers that loyalty cards can be used to help them beyond taking 10 cents off a gallon of milk.

The program at PriceChopper—a 116-store grocery chain in New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Vermont–is especially interesting as it uses an automatic phone-calling system to instantly and simultaneously reach out to impacted customers. Last month, the system was used to reach out to some 12,000 customers about a recall of Samuel Adams beer due to glass fragments, according to this intriguing report in the Daily Gazette, a daily newspaper from Schenectady, N.Y..…

The new machines are called e-Spot automated retail shops and are designed to deliver consumer electronics—initially offering iPods, digital cameras, camcorders, mobile accessories and headphones priced anywhere from $15 to $350—as though they were candy, literally. The machines function just as a candy or sandwich vending machine does, in that they accept the payment (typically a credit card or a gift card) and then drop the product to where the customer can retrieve it. Read more...

So when she places the barcode-less fruit on the scale, the first fruit it displays in its list is kiwi, followed by the four fruits and vegetables that Jane typically buys. Other fruits and vegetables follow alphabetically after Jane's favorites have been displayed. Given how many fruits Jane buys each time, this shaves a precious 108 seconds off of her checkout. Read more...

The idea of offering consumers financial bribes if they use a particular search engine has been tried before, without success. But Microsoft's entry into this field—the latest in a series of Redmond gambits to try and breathe life into its search engine—is different from earlier efforts. Read more...

The 59-year-old Mervyns department store chain, with 177 stores in seven states and about $2.5 billion in annual revenue, certainly can’t be accused of rushing into technological fads. On Tuesday (May 20), some 15 years after the World Wide Web launched, Mervyns announced that it would launch an E-Commerce site sometime “in the fourth quarter of 2008.”

The site—which a Mervyns statement said “could quickly grow into a $50 million business”—will be outsourced to an unspecified “nationally recognized provider of turnkey order entry and fulfillment services.” What’s next? Maybe next year they’ll explore these new-fangled push-button telephones.…

But there really is no reason to wait. Why? The proof is in the tracking tools. Whether the 1.2 release of PCI DSS in October 2008 specifically addresses server, network and desktop virtualization is less important than being able to provide proof to your PCI assessor that you can control, manage and track access to card data continuously.Read more...

The grocery challenge with the theft of moist, fresh products–such as cheese–has frustrated retail loss prevention managers because such products tend to react poorly with EAS tags. Checkpoint and Sealed Air Cryovac announced Wednesday (May 21) one possible way around this issue.

Cryovac has started to integrate anti-theft labels inside the vacuum shrink bags. “The first market request to Sealed Air Cryovac was for two million packs for the protection of Parmigiano Reggiano. In Italy, for instance, Parmigiano Reggiano has a shrink rate of about 9 percent,” said a joint statement. “Initial studies have shown that this RF-EAS source tagging program may cut down inventory shrinkage of dairy products from 9 percent to 1 percent.”…

As more consumers use search engines to find products filtered by a single attribute–such as price–shopping cart abandonment rates are increasing, according to E-Commerce vendor MarketLive, which tracks such matters.

The shopping cart abandonment rate went up 2.7 percent, from 57.88 percent in Q1 2007 to 59.43 percent in the first quarter of this year, while “one-and-out” visits to E-Commerce sites jumped 18.9 percent, from 32.94 percent to 39.15 percent, based on MarketLive Performance Index figures that rely on activity from nearly 100 E-Commerce sites, according to this Internet Retailer story. The piece quoted Jaye Sullivan, senior Internet strategist at MarketLive, as saying that about two-thirds of consumers now start their research at search engines, “which means many visitors are new to E-Commerce sites and more likely to click off quickly if they don’t find what they want. More people are doing research and they’re price-sensitive, so they’re opening up more carts to check out the price.”…

Using virtual reality, $18 billion consumer goods giant Kimberly-Clark is creating virtual depictions of stores, shelves, products and displays—even sounds and smells people encounter while shopping—to enhance traditional means of research, according to this story in CPG Matters.

“With virtual reality, K-C and its strategic retail partners have a stealth, risk-averse way to test new products, packages, display positions, assortments and point-of-purchase materials without taxing muscles or bearing the cost of physical goods movement,” the story said. “Depictions of retail interiors on the full wall-size screen at its Innovation Design Studio in Greenville, Wis. (opened in May 2007), are realistic and reflective of real-world shopping.” An interesting discussion about this effort–along with skeptical thoughts about some of the sales increase claims–is in the comments area of this RetailWire piece.…

A pair of British shopping centers is experimenting with a creative way to leverage consumer cellphones. The consumers are being surreptitiously tracked by the signals emitted by all mobile devices and a database notes when consumers “enter a shopping centre, what stores they visit, how long they remain there and what route they take as they walked around,” according to a report in The London Times.

A spokesperson for the vendor behind the trials–Path Intelligence, of Portsmouth–said its equipment was just a tool for market research. “There’s absolutely no way we can link the information we gather back to the individual,” a spokesperson said. “There’s nothing personal in the data.” But their system does apparently grab a consumer’s phone’s unique IMEI number, which is found on all GSM and UMTS mobile phones. The carrier would theoretically have the data to match it to personally identifiable data.…

Although this doesn’t shed any light on this year’s recession, American consumers were certainly spending-friendly last year, having spent with retailers $201 billion more last year than the year before, according to new figures published Tuesday (May 20) by The Nilson Report.

But in a trend that might prove to be bad news for retailers, Nilson reported a sharp move away from credit card and toward debit cards. “Purchase volume on Visa and MasterCard debit cards increased by $97.11 billion in 2007. Visa’s increase was $58.16 billion, while MasterCard’s increase was $38.95 billion,” the report said. The bad part? These figures confirm that consumers often spend a lot less with debit cards: “The average annual purchase volume per Visa debit card was $2,046 in 2007, down from $2,350 in 2006. The average annual purchase volume per MasterCard debit card was $1,715, up from $1,583.” …