Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

This is a little off the high-tech path, but it’s such a frighteningly vile retail story, it’s hard to not include it here. A Green Bay, Wisconsin, company called PureCart Systems LLC is trying to sell to retailers an automated shopping cart purifying system.

Company president Jim Kratowicz is quoted Post-Crescent newspaper as cheerfully saying, “”They are never clean. They are covered in meat and poultry juices, a leaky toddler’s diaper and other germs. And you put your fruit and produce there and even your purse.” He also cites an ultra-plesant report from the Univ. of Arizona that found that 54 percent of shopping carts contain bodily fluids, and 21 percent of them tested positive for blood, mucus, urine or saliva.

The PureCart system uses a peroxide-based solution to try and kill 99.99 percent of bacteria and more than 90 percent of viruses.

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Global Data Synchronization Network (GDSN) efforts got a major boost this month from Wal-Mart, as the retail giant set this month as the deadline for many of its suppliers to comply or die trying.

The Jan. 1 deadline was included in an October letter that was dispatched to an unspecified number of suppliers demanding both compliance and an aggressive data-cleansing effort, according to a report in Computerworld.

The story said the letter claimed that GDSN is no longer a “bleeding edge” technology but is “now a mature solution providing tangible benefits for retailers and suppliers.” Touted benefits reportedly included improved purchase order accuracy, fewer administrative errors, better supplies of stock and greater speed in getting product onto the shelves.…

Amazon has launched a new site—called Endless.com and focused solely on shoes and handbags—that will offer free overnight shipping for all purchases. Could the move start a shipping war?

The site is focused on the highly-competitive footwear and handbag sector, where sites like Zappos.com have long offered free shipping. But by upgrading the free shipping to overnight, Amazon is trying to shake things up a bit.Read more...

Was the inefficient technology deployment a reason for HomeDepot’s CEO resignation? An interesting Retail Systems Alert Group analysis suggests it absolutely was.

The group’s Paula Rosenblum writes that HomeDepot was relying too much of technology–and cost cuts–alone and was surprised when customers started to disappear.…

Online auction behemoth eBay is having an unexpectedly strong impact on brick and mortars, with piles of retailers set up just to provide physical purchase and pickup points for eBay merchandise. One such merchant–iSold It LLC, with about 200 locations–manages about 50,000 different auctions per month.

An interesting story in CIOInsight reports on the software challenges as the merchant tries to links directly to various eBay sites for pricing and listing information. It’s trying to deal with this by using a community of roughly 40,000 ISVs, all of whom are using eBay’s own APIs.…

A major E-Commerce customer satisfaction survey is showing traditional brick-and-mortar retailers quickly catching up with the traditional pureplay Web retailers.

Although the figures released this week by ForeSee Results still show the same players safely on top—including Netflix, Amazon.com, LLBean.com, QVC.com, Apple.com and Old Navy.com—and the same players (including Costco, CompUSA and CDW) on the bottom, ForeSee CEO Larry Freed sees surprising advances by some of the at-one-time Web challenged multi-channel retailers.Read more...

The best gift for a cyber thief is retail and banking apathy. The good holiday news for those thieves is that, this year, they're making out a like a bandit. Security and privacy are among the top issues for consumers so it seems odd that so many retailers and banks often take security so very lightly.

Please don't get me wrong. Officially, all executives with those entities say they take such matters seriously, but when we listen to the day-to-day management, the priorities seem to be elsewhere. Consider an upcoming report from the Aberdeen Group, which details a survey of retail IT execs who were asked to discuss contactless payment.Read more...

Amazon.com this week touted sales figures that make the 2006 holiday season its best, with one day (it was Dec. 11th, for those who track such trivia) ringing up more than 4 million items.

The company also boasted of some impressive speed sales, such as selling 1,000 Xbox 360s in 29 seconds and 1,000 Axion DVD players in 34 seconds. (Note to marketers: Add more Xs in your brand names.)

Let’s look at some of the wonderfully trivial Amazon holiday claims for this year. The company announced that “one of Amazon’s most remote shipments” was a copy of Mission Impossible—the Complete First season that went to Wainwright, Alaska. It actually sold a $20,000 MP3 player, which is cast in 750 gold (18 karat) with 63 diamonds (one-karat). The last Prime order placed in time for Christmas delivery contained a Bogen-Manfrotto Classic Tripod (Silver) delivered to Norman, Oklahoma on December 23rd. Its top-selling toys were Radica 20 Questions, Laugh & Learn Cuddly Learning Puppy and Princess Genevieve Doll — Barbie In the 12 Dancing Princesses. The top-selling Kitchen items included the Matfer Exopat Nonstick Baking/Roasting Sheet, Santa Fe Quesadilla Maker and Calphalon’s Commercial Hard-Anodized 12-in Everyday Pan.…

Dr. Pepper and Snapple vending machines in Dallas, New York City and Chicago will now be contactless payment friendly, according to a deal announced Thursday between MasterCard and the Cadbury Schweppes Americas Beverages. As part of that deal, the test machines will accept “all major credit cards” and not just those using MasterCard’s PayPass.

The agreement also included USA Technologies, which makes the e-Port device that lets the vending machines accept contactless payments. The companies said “as many as 1,000” Pepper/Snapple machines effort is the beginning of a larger contactless rollout for 5,000 POS terminals and vending machines in a dozen U.S. cities, including Las Vegas, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Denver, Seattle, Miami, Orlando and Washington, D.C. That larger rollout “will be installed over the next several weeks and represents the largest rollout of contactless technology in the vending and POS markets,” a joint statement said.

The move is not unexpected, as the contactless payment space is one of the brighter spots for RFID. But the vending machine segment is especially compelling as candy/snack/softdrink prices soar, making cash payments more inconvenient.…

Efforts by the Web’s top auction site to have a service that sells products without an auction are stumbling, according to a report in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal. (Note: Subscription may be needed for that link to work.) The story discusses lackluster sales results for longtime eBay sellers and cites Hitwise stats identifying eBay’s traditional auction site as the number one consumer destination among online retailers in November, while the non-auction unit (eBay Express) sat at #87 for the same month.

Much eBay Wall Street discussion recently has put pressure on eBay Express as the way of the future for eBay to compete. I respectfully disagree. Although it would certainly be pleasant for eBay if this new service went well, there’s a simple explanation for its weak showing. It’s not what people expect from eBay. Consumers are creatures of habit and comfort. If they want the auction experience, they go to eBay and that has been a stunningly successful strategy for them. But moving into the non-auction world is diluting their branding and is playing into the strengths of others. People love to have their expectations realized, even if the quality is better somewhere else. Sites that have focused on text stories but then offer multimedia versions are finding low clicks on the multimedia content because it’s not what their readers expect from that site.

Lesson for eBay: monkey with your consumer expectations at your own peril. Better is terrific. Different—for a consumer—can be very bad.…

It shouldn’t be much of a surprise that as Zero Hour approaches for holiday shoppers, the “have run out of time to think of anything clever” giftcard gift will suddenly dominate purchaser thoughts. The latest Web traffic figures from Hitwise–released on Tuesday–showed gift card searches soared 109 percent compared with the prior week. The top giftcard searches were, in sequence, Visa giftcard, AmericanExpress giftcard, iTunes giftcard, Rite Aid giftcard, the Simon Mall giftcard, the Citizen’s Bank giftcard, AAA Visa giftcard, MasterCard giftcards, Discover giftcard and the Home Depot giftcard.

A Hitwise statement attributed to GM Bill Tancer said “branded credit and charge gift cards dominated top searches as gift givers opted for the most flexibility for their gift recipients.” It’s more likely they dominated the searches because advertising made them top-of-mind for desperate consumers.

One other interesting detail from the Hitwise research were the top search terms (in the U.S., at least) that sent consumers to key retail sites: For eBay, that term was “iPod.” (Maybe there’s an afinity between brands that have this psychotic first lower-case and second upper-case lettering.) For Wal-Mart and BestBuy (and, for what it’s worth, Craig’s List), it’s Nintendo. For Target, the magic word has been Ugg boots and for Amazon, it’s Heelys.…

RFID is likely to fare well as long as you stay outside of retail, according to a new report from financial firm Robert W. Baird & Co..

Under a heading of “Good Momentum Beyond Retail Supply Chain Applications,” the reports discusses “positive momentum” with display tagging, airline bag tagging and chemicals and it predicted more strength next year in aviation, library, transportation and fashion markets.

On the down side, the report said legal challenges in the pharmaceutical tagging arena “may slow the adoption of RFID by some pharmaceutical companies.”…

Consumer groups are making their lists and checking them twice, to see which store return policies are naughty or nice. It’s a delicate balancing act, with lax return policies are a huge source of fraud but strict return policies a major disincentive for purchases, especially gift purchases. The typical retail answer has been to “have a strict policy but don’t tell anyone.”

ConsumerWorld.org on Monday tried to shed a little light on those merchants, with Sears, CircuitCity and BestBuy on the naughty list for aggressive restocking fees, Amazon got a lump of coal for keeping as much as half of the purchase price for post-30-day returns and–my personal favorite–the site Grinched Buy.com’s “Easy Returns” policy for being more than 1,400 words long.

On the nice list–which included some of the same merchants–the site listed retailers who have liberalized their return policy into January but who inexplicably have not prominently announced this. The site did them the courtesy of announcing it for them. Moral of the story: If a retailer feels the need to keep a policy quiet, there’s a wonderful chance it’s not a policy it should have.…

Ever since the early days of the Web, marketers and E-Commerce folk have been mesmerized by Web traffic stats, fully believing that it would reveal all if they could only be sufficiently analyzed. The problem with that theory is that sophisticated analysis can only yield helpful information if the original data is accurate. If the original data is flawed, it's obvious that any resultant analysis will magnify those flaws.

How are Web stats flawed? Let's say that an E-Commerce execs wants to know the products that the site's audience is most attracted to, on the theory that the retailer will order more of those. The problem is that the placement of those items—and the length of time they are permitted on the site's most prominent pages—will likely have a huge impact.Read more...

In the ongoing saga of IBM’s patent infringement lawsuit against Amazon.com, Amazon struck back on Thursday, countersuing that it’s actually IBM that is violating patents.

The lawsuit is not subtly phrased: “IBM’s broad allegations of infringement amount to a claim that IBM invented the Internet. If IBM’s claims are believed, then not only must Amazon.com pay IBM, but everyone conducting electronic commerce over the World Wide Web (indeed, every Web site and potentially everyone who uses a Web browser to surf the Web) must pay IBM a toll for the right to do so.”

An IBM spokeswoman–Kendra Collins–said that Amazon’s counterclaims “ring hollow” and represent “nothing more than a transparent litigation ploy,” Collins said, because Amazon never brought up concerns over those patents during four years of cross-licensing discussions with IBM, according to a story in News.com.

In other E-Commerce legal action on Thursday, a lawsuit involving Yahoo and Google AdWords was dismissed, which raises the prospect of an out-of-court settlement.…

A U.S. Patent that deals with the allegedly optimal positioning of RFID antennas, tags and interrogators for read accuracy was awarded to a Dulles, VA, company called Odin Technologies, the firm announced on Thursday. The Patent was applied for on Jan. 22, 2005, and was granted on Nov. 7, 2006.

The improved accuracy is achieved because "the system varies the placement of RFID tag and interrogator antennas with respect to each other and a stationary object or objects. A signal generator sends a known reference signal to the one or more RFID interrogator antennas."Read more...

The dollars spent on contactless payments hardware and software isn’t going to be a huge market anytime, with ABI Research doubting the market will even break $900 million by 2011.

ABI projects that the total market will only be $870 million by that year, up from $260 million for 2006. It argues that the two adoption movers are proprietary transportation ticketing, and open credit, debit, and e-purse payments tied to financial service networks. There is a downside, though, with U.S. and European standards efforts for mobile payments delaying key rollouts.…

A radiation-proof RFID tag? It might be here, for those who believe what a Pennsylvania manufacturer is saying. They are touting a tag that’s safely sterilizable by gamma radiation.

The tag, called GammaTag and manufactured by a company dubbed AdvantaPure, is being positioned for the pharmaceutical, bioprocess/biomedical, food and beverage, and medical device markets.according to a story in Technology News Daily. The idea is that the chip can be attached to devices that needed to overrun by gamma radiation, an act that would wreck havor with most tracking devices.…

As E-Commerce matures, some of the assumptions about when and how shoppers shop need to be updated. Electronic payment vendor Cybersource analyzed some of its tracking data and found that office-time purchases is staying high, with the proliferation of residential broadband not making much of a dent.

Peaking at about 1 PM Pacific/4 PM Eastern, it’s feared that much late-afternoon keyboard tapping is not about pushing corporate profits, other than for retailers. Monday and Tuesdays are still the highest volume days, with weekend traffic at the bottom.

One key change. As E-Commerce grows, the traffic is remaining stronger at all hours, suggesting a morph into a 24-hour store. “The graphs are flattening—albeit with much higher numbers. Online shopping is not only getting bigger, it’s becoming more of a 24 hour phenomenon,” said Doug Schwegman, CyberSource director of market and customer intelligence.…

In another negative end-of-the-year report for RFID, ABI Research on Wednesday reported that the passive RFID label market—particularly UHF labels—has had disappointing growth because of unrealistically aggressive pricing.

“In a classic vicious circle dynamic, production costs for UHF labels—and hence for Gen 2 passive labels—are still at levels tending to inhibit the high-volume deployments that would provide economies of scale,” an ABI statement said. Said ABI analyst Robert Foppiani: “At current prices, many end-user companies in the retail/CPG supply chain struggle to determine a compelling business case for RFID. Those companies that have high value, high risk goods are often able to find a business case to justify the investment in RFID passive labels at current prices. But many members of the value chain are operating on thin margins, and most are unwilling to drop prices any further until there is much greater volume.”

The report said that Alien, Avery Dennison, Texas Instruments, and NXP “hope that their strap technologies will” cut costs while “multiple vendors are hoping to shrink the size of an IC to obtain more units from a single wafer. A number of EPC Gen 2 RFID vendors are engaged in loss-leader activities, offering labels at unsustainable prices in an effort to gain market share. Eventually, some will drop out of the running, or will find niche markets where their products can find a role. ABI Research believes that cost reduction tactics will not have a short-term effect on market volumes. The substantial price cuts seen in the past year were necessary to attract end users complying with mandates.”…

Store execution software vendor StorePerform Technologies will be taken over by RedPrairie Corp., both companies announced Wednesday. Financial terms were not disclosed.

StorePerform’s people will be folded into RedPrairie’s retail productivity division, which is what became of BlueCube Software.…

Earlier this month, giftcard exchange site Plastic Jungle was approached by a giftcard seller, offering two $200 Wal-Mart giftcards. Site CEO Tina Henson declined to buy the cards directly and instead suggested the seller use the site's auction area. The seller did and posted the cards for $125 and $135.

But when the site's authentication team checked on the cards, the Wal-Mart computer reported that the cards were valid and their value was intact, but they had just been purchased the day before. Thinking it was odd that someone would pay $400 for cards and then the next day be willing to sell them for $260, the CEO was contacted, but she shrugged and approved the sale anyway. The cards quickly sold.Read more...

In a strong concession that fines have not worked in getting retailers to comply with credit card security rules, Visa has switched course and has dedicated $20 million for a fund to reward retailers who actually comply with industry-accepted PCI rules by Aug. 31, 2007.

"This is absolutely a different tactic," said Jennifer Fischer, a director with Visa USA, which is the nation's largest payment system company. "We believe that incentives are necessary to achieve compliance. This is the first time a payment card brand has used positive incentives" to encourage security compliance.Read more...