Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

A new price-comparison site went beta this week. On its own, that’s certainly not worthy of note as new such sites crop up fairly often. But this site—called www.pronto.com–is making two interesting claims. First, it’s billing itself as world’s most comprehensive comparison-shopping site, backing that up with a further claim of 45 million products from 50,000 retailers. But the second claim is that it will display results with no influence from ads or purchased placement.

Traditional comparison sites today only show products that retailers want to be shown, while Pronto claims to show all, just as the very initial meta-sites did, in the early days of the Web. “Many top retailers advertise less than one-third of their inventory on leading comparison shopping sites and consumers pay the price for this lack of comprehensiveness,” said Pronto CEO Dan Marriott. “Most people don’t want to shop in a store where two thirds of the retail space is empty so why would they do so on the Web?”…

There’s not that much that is retail-specific about this, but it’s difficult to not at least note the introduction of a 16-GByte, which claims the title of the world’s highest-capacity card. The card, with a suggested price of $1,050, truly has the potential to shake up the IT world. When that much memory can sit atop a fingertop, it is going to enable some fascinating things.

The SanDisk Extreme III CompactFlash cards claim minimum write and read speeds of 20 MBytes/sec. and are slated to ship by late December, SanDisk said.…

Edgar Dworsky, a former assistant attorney general for consumer protection in Massachusetts, has launched a Web site solely focused on catching misleading retail advertisements.

“My comments to advertisers who pull this stuff: Why antagonize potential customers with hidden ‘gotchas’?” Dworsky said. “Not only will you likely lose their business, but they will tell their friends—and hopefully also the state attorney general—about the deception.” Initial examples? A Chrysler campaign touting a “if not satisfied, return within 30 days” that only in the fineprint mentions some $2,000 in associated charges, a Charles Schwab promo touting $9.95 commissions, but using a microscopic footnote to point its only for those with “$1 million in qualifying assets” and Mazda, which pushed low prices that required very large down payments.…

A fascinating story in ComputerWeekly reports on British retail powerhouse Marks & Spencer and their efforts to increase the number of products being tracked at the item-level from 25 million to 49 million.

Staff in 42 stores use Bluetooth retail handheld devices to scan garments in a weekly stock check. Every tagged garment in a store can be read in 90 minutes.…

When we see news releases that try to spin something out of nothing, we typically *sigh* and write nothing. Every now and then, though, a PR stunt is so brazen and misleading that it begs to be shared. Cisco this week gave the retail world just such an offering.

It trumpeted on Monday the introduction of the “Cisco Unified Communications for Retail solution.” The fact that it uses the word “solution” is the first hint that it’s worthless, unless they’re referring to liquids sitting in a beaker atop a Bunsen burner. But other than that word, it sounds impressive. Major vendor introducing a retail-only package. What followed? They took four old case studies (one was so old we reported on it more than a month ago) and called it a new offering. What those retailers had purchased many months ago were existing products. They weren’t even beta sites. Oh well. If you hear about Cisco’s Unified Communications For Retail package, you can feel safe in ignoring it. It reminds me of one of my favorite Johnny Carson jokes. He described the White House Press Secretary’s job as “When the President has nothing to say, he puts it into words.”…

There must be something slightly surreal in creating a company whose products only function well when another company does its job poorly. Then again, if it makes a buck and helps its customers, what’s wrong with that? I mention this in light of a statement issued Monday by a Colorado company that helps EBay customers do better in the sea of EBay bureaucracy.

If EBay kept its systems clean and simple, then Colorado Springs-based Internet Business Skills wouldn’t have a chance. Therefore, they have a very bright future. The company bills itself as “the only company providing analytical intelligence to eBay sellers in order to reduce fees” and I think it’s a safe bet that their description is accurate. The product–Pyrolytics 2.0–analyzes inventory, keywords and price to help customers reduce listing and marketing fees.…

A survey released Monday morning tells us all what we already knew, that consumers still run into a lot of problems when trying to make online purchases. Although the high percentage of consumers reporting problems (88 percent) is eye-opening, the upshot isn’t.

The lead with the announcement of the Harris Interactive survey–paid for by TeaLeaf– pretty sums up the “and this surprised you in what way?’ response: “Online transaction failures can wreak havoc on Ebusiness.” I read that a few times and tried to figure out what point Harris was trying to make. Were they expecting online transaction failures to help E-business? Perhaps they had anticipated consumers saying that they would ignore online transaction failures and continue to work with that site regardless. The word itself–“failure”–pretty much telegraphs the answer.

That all said, if the survey makes IT execs say, “OK. We knew about these relentless glitches, but we sort of hoped no consumers would notice” take notice, that’s fine. But I’d just as well hope that IT execs who think that way get punished. There’s something just about that.…

A New Zealand company is pushing a digital signage/RFID system that fills an aisle with smells to reinforce marketing messages. In the Regency duty free shop at Auckland International Airport, for example, digital images of vodka company Absolut’s raspberry vodka were reinforced by—yep—a strong raspberry smell. The system isolates the smells for specific customers and can spray as many as 2,000 different fragrances into different parts of the store at different times, according to a report in the Sunday Star-Times in New Zealand.

“What we’re getting into now is really something more than digital signage,” said OpenEye chief executive Gareth Croy. “It’s more the digital experience” with one-on-one electronic messaging. “You pick up a bottle of Johnnie Walker Green Label and put in your shopping basket. Suddenly, the digital sign near you tells you you can buy two bottles of Johnnie Walker on special for $100. Visual images then reinforce the message.” If a customer uses an infant-carrying pram, OpenEye has the security camera track the customer’s movements and co-ordinates digital signs and audible messages pushing the hottest items for babies. As for smells, options include vanilla for women, leather for men, chocolate for all and cut grass for gardening issues.…

Kimberly-Clark is reportedly taking its RFID testing into the United Kingdom with a series of trials with Tesco, according to a BrandRepublic story. The typical loading dock and conveyor setup builds on trials the Huggies-maker has already been doing with Wal-Mart, Target and Albertsons in the U.S..…

When Amazon.com has server problems, it shares them with other key retail players, including Target.com and Borders.com. At least that's the E-Commerce lesson those three retailers—and perhaps others—are learning this week. All three retailers began seeing a sharp drop in server response times starting Wed., at about 9 AM, according to sources familiar with their servers. The three are connected because, to varying degrees, Amazon is hosting chunks of the E-Commerce sites of both Borders and Target.

How sharp were the drops? Amazon's uptime is typically one of the best, hovering between 98 percent and 99 percent, the sources said. Starting Sept. 20 at about 9 AM, it plummeted into the 80s and by the night of Sept. 21, it had dropped to 73 percent. But early Sept. 22, it had dropped to 60 percent before the problem was apparently fixed at about 4:30 AM Sept. 22. The drop in response time for Borders and Target fit "the exact same pattern," starting at the same time and increasing and decreasing at the same rate, one source who examined the data said. Read more...

When a federal judge in California agreed that a lawsuit from the National Federation for the Blind can proceed against Target, E-Commerce executives should have breathed a collective sigh of relief.

The lawsuit essentially argues that Target's online operation violated the American with Disabilities Act because it is not designed to easily accessible to blind users. Target's defense has been that the ADA does not explicitly talk about Web sites so, Target reasons, it's not covered. That argument is wrong for so many reasons. For the moment, let's set aside that the argument is wrong legally (the California judge already dealt with that one). From Target's perspective, it's more relevant that the answer is wrong from a marketing, customer service and an IT and design perspective. Read more...

Oracle’s latest earnings report is strong, but is also pointedly trying to “rub rival SAP AG’s nose in the fact that Oracle’s applications business is growing faster,” in this wonderful piece in Computer Business Review Online. The bottom line: Oracle’s acquisition strategy seems to paying much better dividends than SAP’s.…

RFID tags are secure for only a handful of very specific situations, according to a new report from Forrester Research. “RFID is not mature enough yet to protect your company secrets,” the report said. “This technology will inevitably bring changes to business processes, but adopters need to anticipate the potential threats that can arise with new changes and know the limitations of their RFID systems.”

Forrester says that risks include the lack of ability to see modified data on a RFID tag, passive tags lacking confidentiality protection and an attacker’s ability to send their own signals and block others.…

After Yahoo announced today that it would scale back its third-quarter financial expectations because of weak recent Web ad sales, Google and Ebay joined Yahoo in a shared stock-fall ride. Let’s set aside for the moment that Wall Street’s “what have you done for me lately?” financial analysis is not the way to run an E-Commerce company. But there does tend to a lack of there there with much in E-Commerce today.

Yes, online ads are much easier to measure. But consumers are clicking less and less and advertisers are starting to question how strong a sales lead a clicker is anyway. Advertisers are absolutely pulling dollars away from print and putting it online. But will the online ROI keep them for the long term? I have serious doubts. (But, please, while you’re debating that point, click on a bunch of our Google ads. I love being proven wrong.)…

Motorola has taken over RFID and barcode vendor Symbol Technologies for almost $4 billion in cash, which came to about $15/share.

Wall Street saw this as good news for Symbol and not-so-great-news for Motorola, as Motorola shares dropped 50 cents in afternoon trade on the New York Stock Exchange, while Symbol shares increased 3 cents at $14.70 on the NYSE. But its stock price had already soared about 15 percent on Monday when it absorbed rumors that it might be purchased.

Motorola CEO Ed Zander issued a statement that the positions Motorola well for a digital future: “Everything is going digital and everything digital is going mobile. This is especially evident in the way businesses are run today. Motorola and Symbol share the same vision of a digital, mobile world for enterprises that matches the world people enjoy at home and at play.”…

The question of whether smartcarts are truly smart investments got a brief exploration in a recent AP story, that spoke of the struggle of smartcarts to make money, but that seemed to miss the point. Ultimately, yes, Smartcarts are intended to boost profits and sales and I believe they will, assuming the CRM-friendly data they generate is put to shrewd use.

In the short-term, though, they have a much more urgent goal: stop the customers from going elsewhere. They are there to show customers that grocery stores can indeed make shopping efficient and fun again. But like any other sophisticated piece of retail technology, they won’t work if they’re not integrated into the store. A store that throws them out there with just a bunch of videos in the screen–as depicted in the story–deserves to lose its investment.…

The CIO of the nation's largest movie theater chain struggles with how to push 500 popcorn-popping patrons through the refreshment stand before their movies start. For David King, CIO of the $2.7 billion Regal Entertainment Group with theaters in 40 states, the challenge is a combination of arithmetic and consumer incentives.

Beyond staggering movie start times and trying to get people to arrive earlier, King's non-technology options are limited. Among some of the options is stealing some ideas from sports arenas. "We're even going to be experimenting with some things that are ballpark-like where people will take orders in the auditoriums and have food and refreshments delivered to them," King said. "In a variation on that, we're looking at something called hawking, which is like the guys who walk up and down aisles in a ballpark with Cokes and a tray that has a strap around their neck and they sell Cokes out of the tray to the patrons." Read more...

Recent changes to credit card security rules reflect a maturing of the payment rules, with wireless monitoring requirements made much more strict while file software integrity monitoring frequency and the encryption demand have both been softened.

"This is a bow to reality," said Mark Rasch, a former federal prosecutor who now specializes in retail security issues. "The first version was more of a Utopian of what Visa and MasterCard thought were workable standards based on what people should do. This is a minor tweaking based upon what people are doing." Read more...

This week’s show included a special guest, David King, CIO of the Regal Entertainment Group, which is the nation’s largest movie theater chain, bringing in about $2.7 billion a year from theaters in 40 states. King lead a spirited discussion about the new PCI changes and how his chain is viewing them, including a new wireless requirement. On the RFID front, the panel looked at the new Gen2 support promised from both Wal-Mart and the Metro Group as well as what may be truly behind it. Metro’s experiment with physically separating payment from checkout also prompted a debate of whether two lanes would be seen as being slower even though it’s faster.

Other than CIO King, our panel this week featured the Retail Systems Alert Group’s Paula Rosenblum, IDC’s Pete Abell, Chris Noell from TruComply and former federal prosecutor and security consultant Mark Rasch. StorefrontBacktalk Editor Evan Schuman moderated.…

McDonald’s in Japan is letting cellphone-touting consumers instantly see the nutrition information–such as it is–for all of their fastfood, courtesy of a barcode printed in the food’s wrapper. According to a Cellsuite news story, the wrappers have QR codes printed on the labels, taking users to a site that will detail the calories and fat of the product.

The piece says this should save McDonald’s costly printing runs to keep the data current, but I’m not so sure that information would change that often, unless the product itself is tweaked. But it also says this could reinforce McDonald’s image for selling healthier food. Although the openness is to be applauded, I’m wondering if it might have the opposite result. When I’m eating a quarter-pounder, the nutrition specs are the last thing I want to see.…

The German-based retail giant The Metro Group this summer started quietly experimenting with a radical change in supermarket layout and procedure: physically separating where groceries get scanned and where customers make their payments.
The move is designed to both cut costs and accelerate customers through the checkout process, said Gerd Wolfram, the groups' chief technical officer and the managing director of Metro Group Information Technology. Read more...

Two huge global retailers—Wal-Mart and the Germany-based Metro Group—pledged Tuesday to only support Gen2 systems from now on, in a move that one RFID analyst said was intended to do some damage control because of an RFID "pullback" from another global retailer, U.K.-based Tesco.

Wal-Mart opened the day by issuing a statement from CIO Rollin Ford promising that "all Wal-Mart installations moving forward would only read Gen 2 tags. As the remaining pallets and cases with Gen 1 tags make their way through the distribution network, Wal-Mart will convert all of its systems to only read Gen 2 tags." Read more...

Look for Symbol Technologies next week to introduce a mobile Gen2 RFID reader that is designed to be integrated into forklifts, pallet jacks and stretch wrappers. The unit—to be dubbed the RD5000—runs on Windows CE 5.0 and can use Bluetooth. At a cost of about $8,000, though, it’s a tad bit pricey. The vendor will also claim that it saves battery life because it uses sensors to detect the device’s proximity to tagged items, shutting down when motionless or out of tag range.

“Previous RFID deployment strategies have depended heavily on the predictable movement of goods, with RFID readers installed at ‘choke points’ such as dock doors,” said Anthony Bartolo, vice president and general manager of Symbol’s Wireless Infrastructure and RFID Divisions. “By RFID-enabling material handling equipment, organizations gain increased visibility to items in the supply chain all the way to the shelf or staging area.”…

Our panel this week whipped up some sweet insights into Starbucks’ headaches with an electronic coupon that they had intended to be strictly localized but the Web had other plans. It also jumped into the renewed interest from some major retailers into using closed-circuit video feeds for a lot more than catching thieves, including CRM and preventing child abductions.

Our panel this week featured IHL President Greg Buzek, the Retail Systems Alert Group‘s Steve Rowen, Forrester Research‘s Sucharita Mulpuru and The Lakewest Group‘s Sunita Gupta. StorefrontBacktalk Editor Evan Schuman moderated.…

Watch for a mini pricewar with electronic labels to start at this month’s Demo conference when an outfit called W5 Networks says it will be the first to drop below $5/label, with a $3.50/label introduction. The company is also claiming to be “the first to provide retailers with feature-rich promotional capabilities (such as club card pricing and buy one get one free), which has also been a barrier to replacing paper labels with electronic ones.”

The company has a former retail CIO (former Ross Stores CIO Richard White) at its helm along with cash from US Venture Partners and Thomas Weisel Venture Partners. Board members include the former chairman of Safeway Stores, Pete McGowan, who is also the owner of the San Francisco Giants.…