Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

When looking at CRM programs, many retailers today focus on what they can do and not what their prospects want them to do.

Nothing radically new here, but i just stumbled upon this great Microsoft commercial about the consumer-retailer disconnect. When you see the guy with the “advertiser” shirt, think ‘retailer” and this really works. Sorry that it happens to be a vendor commercial, but even Microsoft can make a valid point from time to time.…

A key division of the Albertsons grocery chain officially abandoned its loyalty card program on Wednesday, officially saying that it wanted customers to be relieved of the burden of having to show a card to get discounts. Unofficially, the program got pulled because grocery managers weren't bothering to use the data.

To be fair, the decision for the Albertsons group that handles some 78 stores in Arizona, New Mexico and El Paso, Texas (Albertsons has any other groups for other geographies) was complicated. First, the chain's history has been marked by a strong and consistent resistance to any kind of CRM/loyalty program, with Albertsons being one of the last of the major retailers to launch a loyalty program when it tried it out in 2003. The chain is now going to try and push its new lack of a loyalty card as a reason for customers to shop there. But the truth is that the chain never saw a viable return-on-investment from the program. Why? As one Albertsons official—who asked to remain anonymous because of a fondness for a continuing paycheck--said on Wednesday, "The data was being collected but it wasn't being used."

Sometimes, it’s the simplest ideas that can solve the biggest problems. Consider the supply-chain global outsoutcing issues with clothing. A huge concern is the lack of accuracy of garment measurements.

Enter a a tiny device called an e-tape. I have to give credit to legendary retail analyst Paula Rosenblum, who has now launched her own firm called Retail Systems Research and who started raving about e-tape.

What it does is take the measurement from the garment and wirelessly send it to a PC. So what? Assuming the person doing the measuring places the device properly, this unit sidesteps most of the common errors, such as reading the measurement incorrectly or writing it incorrectly. It also avoids language issues frequently encountered overseas. Not bad for a handheld device.…

Electronic payment vendor CyberSource has agreed to purchase fellow e-payment player Authorize.net for $565 million in cash and stock, the companies announced Monday.

Steve Rowen, a research analyst at Retail System Research in Miami, Fla., said the merger of these two players is not in and of itself earth-shattering or surprising, but the size of the deal does reveal a lot about retail interests.

"CyberSource acquiring Authorize.Net is a highly logical move. Is it an industry-changing deal? Not at all," he said, but a deeper look at the metrics behind data-theft suggests an importance lying elsewhere surrounding this $565 million deal.

Lands’ End is hoping technology can deliver a better swimsuit-purchasing experience online than in-store. With few items of apparel are the subtle distinctions more important than with swimwear. The battle: to approximate the exact look-and-feel of the swimsuit online (advantage: brick-and-mortar) while minimizing the awkwardness and embarrassment of the process (advantage: online).

The Camden Courier-Post did a revealing (sorry. Couldn’t resist) look into how Lands’ End is trying to play this one, with options to “send messages to a personal shopper and match suits to their body types through a search mechanism that lists six elements.” Worth a read.…

In Sunday's New York Times, there's this intriguing piece talking about how E-Commerce sales are quickly running out of steam. Perhaps "intriguing" is the wrong word for it. A more apt term might be "dangerous" or "out-of-context" or ..... nah, I think I'll stick with "dangerous."

The piece is not dangerous because it reveals some deep, dark secret. It doesn't, not does it claim to. It's dangerous because it perpetuates the misguided—but commonly held—belief that online and offline retail efforts today are distinct. Even worse, it seems oblivious to the rapidly-increasing influence that each has on the other.

The story is built on stats showing a sharp decline in online sales. But those statistical issues are not the key problem with the Times story. The problem is that it still sees online and brick-and-mortar as rivals. The reality is that we are just starting the age of the merged channel.

Often transmitting unencrypted confidential customer data over weakly-protected connections, retailers risk privacy and create backdoors for cyber thieves. And yet, no one's giving the merchants much of a choice.

The best theoretical way to deal with these tests would be to use specially-created data that is not linked to any actual customers and is designed solely for the purpose of these kinds of tests. To date, no one has spent the time—nor the money—to create such data. That leaves retailers with few options and most use real customer data. Many in the retail industry see this as a recipe for security disasters.

"Some 90 percent of the retailers out there don't even realize how big a problem test data security is because they don't know the test environment," said David Taylor, president of the PCI Security Vendor Alliance. If auditors knew what to look for, "you could easily have 75 to 85 percent of retailers fail on this criterion alone."

For those of you who may be near Philadelphia next week, I'll be delivering the Keynote Address at a PCI Summit in the city of brotherly contempt on Thursday. For the moment, let's set aside the very legitimate question of why they asked me to keynote, given that it's hard to imagine scraping the bottom of the speaker barrel any more pathetically than to ask an ink-stained journalist to talk.

That's actually literal. A few weeks ago, I didn't check my pockets carefully and did the clothes washing with a blue pen still embedded. Voila! The perfect shirts to wear in full ink-stained wretch mode. Wretch Wear! I was delighted by the discovery. My wife much less so. Then again, I've been relieved of clothes washing for awhile so this might be seen as a win-win.

Making it unanimous thus far, two federal judges have denied key motions in the lawsuits against retailers accused of violating federal law by printing prohibited information on credit card receipts. This is on top of a third federal judge making a similar ruling earlier this month.

Unless the U.S, Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit intervenes early next year, retailers who have been sued for printing federally-prohibited information on consumer credit card receipts will almost certainly get off the hook. This is because of decisions from two federal judges this week rejecting a critical class-action certification request from the consumers suing the retailers.

Here's a story that makes you wonder if the adults at eBay hadn't taken a few days off this week. The New York Times had this wonderful story about eBay's annual big convention for its largest sellers and how Google scheduled its own party at the event. Google thought this would be a good way to sell GoogleCheckout to people who might otherwise have gone for eBay's PayPal.

What Google forget is that eBay is a huge Google customer, not to mention deliciously vindictive.

In Europe, Visa officials are backing off of strict retail PCI demands, bowing to practicality. Visa described the original PCI deadlines as “unrealistic,” according to this ComputerWeekly story.

“Visa and MasterCard agree that risk mitigation is of prime importance and we expect this to be done immediately,” said Stanley Skogland, head of policy compliance at Visa Europe. “It does not mean that we do not expect all parts of the standard to be achieved, but we cannot expect miracles overnight.”

Added Simon Langley, head of PCI DSS at KPMG: “Visa and MasterCard agreed on the standard, but compliance has not been standardized.”…

As a possible consequence of its less-aggressive enforcement policy against shoplifters and cutbacks in security personnel, Wal-Mart is suffering an increase in theft, according to this Associated Press story. It cited a June 1 SEC filing that said the gross profit margin for its Wal-Mart Stores segment fell by 0.1 percentage points in the first quarter due in part to “higher inventory shrinkage,” according to the story. The piece discusses quite a few possible causes.…

A price-comparison site is supposed to find a product and show lots of Web sites offering it for sale, ranked by price. Such sites have encountered two problems: a consumer doesn’t really want to see the top 50 options, when the first four or five is all they’ll consider; and low-price is easy to scam, with bait-and-switch ripoff artists common, where they offer an item at a low price, claim to be out-of-stock when you try and buy it and offer a higher-priced alternative.

On Wednesday, DiscountMore.com introduced a mega-price-comparison search engine, which claims to simultaneously show the results of some 26 price-comparison sites, including Shopping.com, PriceGrabber.com, ShopZilla.com, PriceRunner.com plus general sales sites including eBay.com, ubid.com, Amazon.com, Walmart.com, Overstock.com and Buy.com.

But will such a mega-site address either of the two shortcomings of today’s price-comparison sites? Thus far, it doesn’t look like it. Quite the contrary, in fact.…

The technology needed for printing RFID tags is slowly maturing. Make that very slowly maturing, to the point where they are still years away.

At IntertechPira’s Printed RFID conference, held earlier this month in Frankfurt, Germany, execs said the reality of printed RFID tags directly onto packaging is still far off, according to this RFIDJournal story. IDTechEx President Raghu Das predicted that most of the 1.91 billion passive and active tags purchased in 2007 will not be printed at all, though antennas and other UHF tag parts might be. However, he claimed, nearly 50 percent of the 670 billion tags purchased in 2017 will be fully printed.…

Traditional arguments against item-level RFID use is that it only makes economic sense for products costing more than $100. But that assumes one-time use. With a trial with re-usable tags, Staples is throwing out all the old rules.

Staples in Canada started its trial this month at one of its Montreal stores, selectively tagging about 2,000 items representing some 300 SKUs out of the 7,500 SKUs in a typical location, said Joe Soares, director of process engineering for Staples and Business Depot. The tags themselves are higher-end active tags, which would typically cost Staples between $5 and $8 each. For the six-week trial, though, Soares said, "it's not costing us anything" because the costs are being picked up by partners, including Fujitsu and AbsoluteSky.

Shoe chain Aerosoles is one of many retailers trying to figure how far they can go in the multi-channel race.

In talking with lots of retail marketing and IT execs recently, there appears to be this growing realization—concession?—that a true multi-channel approach is a shock to the retail system. Indeed, even the word "multi-channel" sends the wrong message. Isn't that the opposite of the true goal? Perhaps the phrase "merged channels" is closer, with "multi-channel" usually a pseudonym for what Google's head of retailing has dubbed "multi-silo-ed."Read more...

Whether or not retailers can be legally punished for giving consumers receipts with full credit-card numbers has become much more uncertain, with a few recent critical—and conflicting—legal decisions.

A series of lawsuits against retailers for violating federal law by printing full credit card numbers on receipts is now facing unclear legal terrain, with two federal judges issuing contradictory rulings and the U.S. Supreme Court weighing in this week on a related case and giving some contradictory directions of its own.

The two-month-old Law Enforcement Retail Partnership Network has announced new retailer members–including JCPenney, Wal-Mart, Safeway and CircuitCity–bringing its membership to 45.

Other new members coughing up the $1,200 annual membership dues include Albertson’s, AutoZone, Coach, Fortunoff, Kohl’s, Limited, Macy’s, Safeway, Saks, Sears, Tiffany, Vitamin Shoppe, Walgreen and Williams-Sonoma.…

Best Buy CIO Bob Willett is arguing that RFID can be a huge boost for retailers, but only if they can convince people they won’t abuse the data.

Willett, in a keynote address at the ERIexchange show in Boston this week, credited some RFID trials with already boosting sales in some isolated areas, according to this story in Computerworld. “Before I’m carried away in a box, I’d like to see checkouts gone from the store,” Willet said. “The technology is there to do it today with RFID. The first major retailer that can do it will be remembered forever and a day as a champion of the consumer.”…

A survey of 20,000 consumers offers good news For Amazon, QVC, Netflix, bad news For Macys, BestBuy, PCMall and SaksFifthAvenue.

The survey, done for years by consulting firm ForeSee Results, takes the top 100 revenue-grosssing Web sites and applied the methodology of the University of Michigan's American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). ACSI scores have a 100-point scale, with the scores closest to 100 being the best.Read more...

New survey results released from the National Retail Federation show a 71 percent increase in retailers noticing organized retail crime activity. Is the news the increase or that it's being noticed?

Statistics are wonderful things, especially survey results. These thoughts come to mind as I look at a wonderful new survey from the National Retail Federation. The survey reported that 79 percent of the 99 retail execs surveyed in April said they had been a victim of organized retail crime in the prior 12 months.Read more...

When Hewlett-Packard this week unveiled its prototype Retail Store Assistant—a kiosk that offers customized individualized promotions transmitted directly to a customer's smartphone—it took a business pragmatic position in the personal shopper battle.

There's little debate that customized shopping—taking the CRM customer-specific data one major step beyond the minimally effective coupons at the end of checkout—is almost certainly going to be a key in-store technology over the next few years, especially with grocers. But the form that this customized shopping will take is a key debate.Read more...

Retailers globally will likely spend $120 billion on IT this year, a figure that--as a percentage--is actually low compared with other industries, according to information published Tuesday by the IHL Consulting Group.

"Retailers individually spend well below other industries, about one-third of the amount per revenue dollar compared to financial services and insurance," said IHL President Greg Buzek.

Low tag read rates are still preventing RFID from gaining the necessary survival momentum as of mid-2007, even though the potential benefits are looking more attractive, according to a report issued Tuesday from U.K.-based RFID analyst firm IDTechEx.

"The tagging of pallets and cases to meet retail mandates is still struggling to take off," said IDTechEx CEO Raghu Das. "This year, IDTechEx expect that only 375 million tags will be used for this sector, the main reason for this is that the read performance is still not satisfactory for most companies. For example, George Chapelle, CIO of Sara Lee, reports that on frozen and dry foods they achieve about a 70 percent read rate, and on chilled foods the read rates is about 30 percent using Gen 2 tags. With such poor read rates, they cannot realize internal benefits."

In the ongoing legal battle of former Wal-Mart marketing chief Julie Roehm against Wal-Mart, most of the accusations have involved inappropriate acceptance of gifts from suppliers. But the latest accusations–on both sides–seem to be really reaching.

Based on this Reuters story, Roehm countered the charges that she accepted advertising agency gifts by saying: Oh, yeah? Well, CEO H. Lee Scott get discounts on yachts, “a large pink diamond for his wife” and free airplane use.”

OK, so that’s not too petty, but it doesn’t address the charges against her. But then Wal-Mart counter-pounched with my favorite accusation: Wal-Mart accused the marketing chief of having accept a dinner from the ad agency. (pause for effect) One dinner? Maybe they mean a $50,000 wedding reception dinner? Nope. It “consisted of small, White Castle-sized burgers.” Maybe the courtroom will break into a rendition of the West Side Story ditty “I Feel Petty.”…