Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

At the heart of Web analytics is the belief that by pouring into the almost unlimited number of stats that Web sites today can churn out, we can figure out what our visitors are thinking, what they want and how to get them to do what we want them to do.

This gets into one of the great conundrums in E-Commerce today: You have to know your audience quite well before you choose the criteria by which you'll get them to know them much better. I bring this up because of an interesting Web traffic analysis change announced this week by the Nielsen/NetRatings folk, which itself follows similar changes implemented by ComScore.

Is the dark cloud of multiple investigations still looming over TJX and its imfamous data breach? Yes, but it’s going to have some time to breath over the summer. While the various lawsuits and state probes continue, the threat of U.S. congressional hearings–threatened months ago–appears to be delayed until at least September, according to a congressional source who has asked that her name not be used.

Those hearings have been on the subcommittee plans for months, but have repeatedly been delayed. Although high hopes had existed for July hearings, the source said that other legislative priorities has forced “all other committement business to come to a halt.” With the August recess, that leaves September/October as the next possible timeframe. …

With so much of E-Commerce analytics dependent on industry-accepted definitions of pageviews, visitors and visit length, changes in the way that is tracked can have a huge impact. So when Nielsen/NetRatings on Tuesday announced that radical changes it how it tracks Web site popularity, it’s something to be seriously examined.

The first impact of the change—which will now measure popularity by how long users linger on sites, not by how many pages they view—was that it sent AOL, Yahoo and MSN way up, leapfrogging Google, according to this well-done Washington Post story. The story reported that IM and E-mail usage was a key factor.

The change in audience measurement comes as the frequent use of online video and streaming sports scores and stock quotes make the number of page views increasingly irrelevant to a Web site’s popularity, the story said. “New technology has also altered the way consumers engage sites. For example, a system called Ajax automatically refreshes Web page content without the user clicking to reload the page, which reduced the number of page views in the old rankings. Now new e-mails also appear without pressing the “check mail” button. Nielsen rival ComScore addressed these changes in March by measuring the frequency with which users return to sites.” A piece very much worth reading.…

Hewlett-Packard on Wednesday announced that it has created a mobile application that uses imaging algorithms, wireless broadband and the phone's digital camera to allow on-the-fly color matching.

HP is pushing the technology as a way for retailers to help boost sales by, for example, helping sell makeup that matches specific skin shades.

For those companies who may be plannng for Google to become less powerful over the next several years will get a rude awakening from a report published Wednesday from Cowen & Co., a major financial analysis firm.

The report sees Google today controlling 50-55 percent of search in the U.S. and about 70-75 percent in Europe. But when analyzing the competitive moves by rivals Microsoft and Yahoo, the report predicts Google's marketshare will continue to soar, hitting "at least 90 percent of the search market over the next decade."

A hospital snack room in Michigan is an unlikely place for a fullblown item-level RFID trial coupled with biometrics, but the 24-hour needs of the facility created the need.

In this eye-opening Detroit News story, the Fast Track Convenience room at Garden City Hospital used RFID tags on all products to charge purchases by–among other methods–deducting cash value on employee ID cards. Employees who can’t grab their ID cards can instead use a biometric thumb scan. With vendor assistance, the project’s initial setup cost the hospital $25K. A story worth reading and thinking about. (Note: Look closely at the photo the paper shot on-site. Love the product-level warning label placed directly on the tag: “Remove Before Microwave Use.” More “fun with microwave oven” potential than I had anticipated with item-level tagging.)…

The bandwidth, input and software limits of smartphones makes even the most basic mobile purchases difficult. PayPal's market entry is a quintessential "more is less" strategy.

EBay's PayPal unit formally entered the mobile payment space Tuesday, arguing that their checkpoint gets more valuable as they reduce the number of features. (Now if only Microsoft could think that way.)

Tuesday actually marked the day PayPal issued a news release about MobileCheckout, which has been fully functional and available since June 11, a full month before the announcement, according to PayPal spokesperson Jamie Patricio.

Wal-Mart's version of the virtually ubiquitous buy-online-pickup-in-store strategy has reduced customer shipping costs by $5 million while sharply increasing new customer acquisitions and in-store upsells, according to figures released Tuesday from the world's largest retailer.

In announcing that it is extending its Site-to-Store program to more than 3,300 stores in the U.S., Wal-Mart released a handful of carefully selected stats to show that its approach to the strategy is working. Wal-Mart's approach is slightly different than the traditional approach, which uses the Web to help move in-store merchandise. The twist to Site-to-Store—which was launched in March--is that Walmart.com promotes "tens of thousands of products" that are not available in stores and then offers to ship them free to a local Wal-Mart.

Tired of various challenges with RFID? A pair of Pennsylvania inventors have been awarded a patent for an RFID-like tracking system that uses light instead of radiowaves. The argument is that it would be more amenable to a crowded warehouse and that it would be less susceptable to unauthorized intercepts.

Patent 7,232,067 (Registering Multiple Similar Items with Flickers) calls for LED tags that will emit visible light, infrared, or ultraviolet. .Read more...

New figures from IDTechEx, the British RFID analysis firm, predicts RFID spending to move sharply toward active tags.

Today, IDTechEx reports, active tags represent some 12.7 percent of the RFID market, a figure that it predicts will hit 26.3 percent by 2017. If cell phone RFID modules are added in, the figures get even more dramatic.…

After more than $75 million in bogus credit card charges, several Cuban nationals in Florida have been arrested with more than 200,000 credit card account numbers, many of which came from the TJX and Polo Ralph Lauren data breaches, according to U.S. Secret Service officials, commenting on Monday's announced arrests.

The numbers were sent to the Florida defendants—who specialized in manufacturing bogus credit cards complete with embossing, logos, holograms and properly encoded magnetic strips—from a group of Eastern European residents who specialized in collecting the stolen credit card numbers, the Secret Service said.

That Eastern European group of fiduciary Fagans obtained those numbers from many different sources, but many of the numbers were traced back to two specific major retail data breaches: last year's TJX breach and a 2005 Polo Ralph Lauren breach, said a Secret Service case agent involved in the investigation and who asked that his name not be used.

Noticed this interesting Bloomberg story about how well EBay's PayPal is faring against Google Checkout and *sighed* at how weak a foundation it was built on.

First, the story seems to be based on the statement that "In recent surveys, the world's largest auctioneer found that less than one out of five users of Google's Checkout online payment service was happy with it." But it doesn't say what those surveys were, who was being surveyed nor exactly what they were being asked nor when. Read more...

It’s that time of year to start thinking kindly about charities, especially if you steal credit card numbers for a living.

Symantec reports that it is seeing an awful lot of cyber thieves using charities as efficient ways to verify that their stolen numbers are valid. Traditionally, those thieves have used small retail online purchases to perform that verification function, but retailers have been cracking down on such practices while many charities are still more lax. Some charities, however, are starting get tough. The story reports that, last month, the Red Cross was forced to return nearly $7,000 that was donated in the course of 700 fraudulent transactions, said Carrie Martin, a spokeswoman for the American Red Cross.…

Fidelity National suffered the ultimate insider theft when an IT staffer sold about 2.3 million customer records to a marketing firm. But it's the low-tech way this techie did it that makes it interesting.

The company said that this was all orchestrated by one employee, who has thus far only been identified as "a senior-level database administrator who was entrusted with defining and enforcing data access rights." If someone wants to steal a database, that's the perfect job to have.

Despite—or is it because of?—this employee's technical expertise, intimate knowledge of the network and extreme access, he/she didn't break in, didn't do a transfer and didn't concoct such elaborate script to make data copies. "The incident does not involve any outside intrusion into, or compromise of, Certegy's technology systems," said a company statement. Here's the most fascinating part: "To avoid detection, the technician removed the information from Certegy's facility via physical processes; not electronic transmission."

Are recent Google incidents with an EBay party and Sicko blog comments a pattern or anomalies?

When red-hot startups grow very quickly, lead by intelligent founders with a clear vision, they tend to grow quickly until they get into the danger zone. This is that awkward stage where strange decisions start getting made, a stage that quite a few companies haven't lived through. Burn rate is the ability for these companies to go through tons of money very quickly. This isn't Burn Rate. Let's call this Burn Up And Implode Rate.

The average time it takes a consumer to make an E-Commerce purchase decision has jumped from about 19 hours in 2005 to 34 hours and 19 minutes this year, according to a report that is slated to be published next week.

The report, created by a security service called ScanAlert and based on about 128 million visitors to 470 web sites, makes the reasonable conclusion that the increase is based overwhelmingly on the increase in the number of E-Commerce sites today. In theory, this allows for much more extensive—and time-consuming—comparison shopping. Comparison shopping is certainly a very good possibility, but as the novelty of E-Commerce purchases becomes more of a distant memory for most, other more innocuous options are also possible.

Look for Yahoo next week to try and push Web ads to the next customized level, with “a new system dubbed SmartAds that allows advertisers to compile ads on the spot based on a Web user’s Internet profile, including such data as their location, recent product searches and, in some cases, age or household income,” according to this Reuters story.

From one perspective, this is nothing new, as Google and others have been trying to get close to this for more than a year. But Yahoo is making the right noises, with announced plans to merge its display and Web search advertising businesses. The next rev of Web advertising was going to happen sooner or later, almost certainly by early year. Yahoo’s dollars will simply guarantee that it will be sooner. …

In court papers, SAP has now conceded that one of its units did perform “some inappropriate downloads of fixes and support documents” from Oracle.

The Tuesday acknowledgement came from SAP CEO Henning Kagermann. “Even a single inappropriate download is unacceptable from my perspective,” Kagermann said. “We regret very much that this occurred,” according to this CIO Today story. Technically, this was a violation but it’s far from clear whether Oracle suffered any true harm or whether SAP achieveved any material advantage.…

Wal-Mart this week continued its campaign to push RFID throughout the industry, with this powerful Money Magazine story adding new some details.

The piece has Myron Burke, strategy manager of Wal-Mart’s store innovations and operations group, discussing a recent visit to a Wal-Mart equipped with on-floor RFID tagging. He reported that out-of-stock signs were discovered in 66 of about 200 total product categories within its electronics section. “With RFID, Wal-Mart management can now alert those store associates to fix the problem spots,” the story said.…

Visa has in the wings its own version of number portability, in a program that will allow “consumers to carry their account numbers with them if they move up to pricier and more exclusive cards, and merchants to offer new services and benefits, such as loyalty programs, to customers,” according to this InformationWeek story. (Note that my former employer needs to look at a calendar from time to time. This July 2 story references a TJX statement from “earlier this month.” It meant “last month.” They probably just lifted it from last week’s print edition and no one on the copydesk caught it.)

The piece quoted Visa Snr. VP Jim McCarthy as saying, “This allows us to take a specific action in real time based on consumer behavior at a specific merchant and a specific location.” Calendar issues notwithstanding, it’s worth a read.…

I have to confess a certain fondness for Google, an admiration that has grown out frequent innovation and creativity. Then again, my livelihood doesn't overwhelmingly depend on the whims of Google so the idiosyncrasies of their search and other services is professionally interesting and not much more.

But to a growing legion of small and mid-sized E-Commerce players today, Google's evolving rules and exact methodologies can devastate—or make wildly successful—and these are matters where they have virtually no say.

Despite efforts by Yahoo and others in recent months, no one has come close to touching Google's overwhelming marketshare for Web search. In the olden days, this was called "cornering the market" and it was a good thing, to be congratulated in the nearest wood-paneled corporate watering hole.

With the $81 Billion Euro retail giant Metro Group having formally gone into full-fledged RFID deployment, a senior executive there says the efficiencies the chain saw in trials was too compelling to not deploy.

The chain has informed all of its suppliers that they need to ship all RFID pallets to Metro fully RFID tagged by October 1, 2007, said Gerd Wolfram, an IT managing director for the chain.

One of the key hurdles to full-scale RFID deployments with U.S. retailers has been low read accuracy rates, but Wolfram said that wasn't what his people found in European testing. "It's not a problem at all on the pallet level," he said, adding that pallet-level read rates were "about 100 percent."

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In an against-the-trend move, Pier 1 will shut down all of its online operations, focusing solely on select physical locations.

“We are exiting all non-Pier 1 stores activities,” Pier 1 president and CEO Alex W. Smith told Wall Street analysts on the company’s first-quarter conference call, according to an Internet Retailer story. “We are exiting the e-commerce and catalog business.”

The move may not be permanent, however, according to a report from Marketwatch, which quoted Smith as saying that pier1.com will continue, but purely for marketing. “We’re not saying this is forever,” Smith said. “We’re just saying this is where we need to be today.”

Although the trend is a push toward a unified merged channel–combining online and offline–when having to choose one over the other, online is typically seen as being less costly to operate. The other major retail chain to have similarly pulled back has been TJX, which pulled back from its E-Commerce efforts for T.J. Maxx and HomeGoods in late 2005. But there’s a connection: Alex Smith had been a Senior VP at TJX when TJX pulled back from E-Commerce and this is the same Smith who today runs Pier 1.…

In what is being billed as the largest production rollout of RFID in Europe, the $81 billion retail giant Metro Group has gone live with its wireless strategy.

The Germany-based chain has long been in the lead of RFID thinking and strategy globally, although it's efforts to date have been limited trials. "We are moving RFID out of the innovation labs and into working retail stores," said Gerd Wolfram, an IT managing director for the chain.

Metro, which will reportedly be using RFID products from Reva Systems in the rollout, will start with about 200 locations of its Metro Cash & Carry, Real stores, and the Metro Group distribution centers.

As the summer vacation season has arrived, travel web sites are getting a serious workout. Perhaps a bit too serious a workout, according to one uptime monitoring service, which reports that one site had 2-and-a-half hours of downtime.

Although the survey looked at 16 major travel sites—including Orbitz, Travelocity, Yahoo and Priceline—Expedia was not among them. Why not? Expedia's system apparently didn't take kindly to being watched and blocked the nosey system inquiries from report conductor Pingdom.