When it comes to competing against Amazon, eBay or even Japan's Rakuten, one of the more challenging aspects is their third-party marketplaces, which give each a seemingly endless inventory at minimal risk. But the odds may be getting more even, as shoppers are starting to notice that some manufacturers are strictly enforcing their authorized reseller rules.
The immediate impact on shoppers is they may find that the expensive flat-screen TV, surround-sound speakers or refrigerator that looked like such a bargain on Amazon voids the warranty. The arguably-unrealistic expectation from consumer goods manufacturers—which sharply strengthens the hands of traditional e-tailers trying to fight against these third-party marketplaces—is that shoppers would not only notice the actual name of the merchant shipping the item, but would take the time to run that name on the manufacturer's site to see if they are truly an authorized reseller. Or they could just make the purchase from Target.com or Bestbuy.com and know for certain.
With the nation's worst credit card security disaster on its resume and AmericanExpress and Visa cutting its contract, payment processor CardSystems has few long-term options.
In what might signal the closing chapter in the CardSystem credit-card security breach saga, CyberSource announced its intent to acquire all of CardSystem's assets for an undisclosed amount. Read more...
With 1,200 stores in 47 states, the Cold Stone Creamery chain is growing quickly with its do-it-yourself ice cream concoctions. But the acting CIO is trying to whip those do-it-yourself treats into a corporate CRM sundae.
The managers at one of the nation's fastest-growing ice cream chains pride themselves on customers who know exactly what they want sweet-wise when given the tools to make it. Read more...
SAP AG officially made its countermove to Oracle Corp.'s retail efforts with the announced purchase of Canadian POS player Triversity. Not coincidentally, the deal—which had been in the works for almost two months—was announced the day Oracle's OpenWorld conference opened.
Financial terms of the deal were not announced, nor were the revenues of privately held Triversity confirmed. Read more...
TSAP and Oracle are fighting a marketing battle that recalls the grand days of vaporware. By making acquisitions to fill product holes, instead of filling product holes, they promise to deliver a solution that is greater than the sum of its parts. But retailers need to wait months and years to see if it pans out. The software industry has for years had a proud tradition of announcing product long before an actual product existed—vaporware, in other words: software specs and capabilities that didn't really exist but might exist in the future. Read more...
For years, the retail and supply-chain worlds have spoken of item-level tagging as the holy grail of inventory control, but added it can't be done until tag prices hit 5 cents. With recent pricecuts delivering 12.9-cent chips, is that Holy Grail imminent? When leading RFID chip manufacturer Alien Technology announced it was cutting the price of its 96-bit Gen 1 RFID labels some 44 percent to 12.9 cents apiece, it was more than a typical price cut. It pushed the industry tantalizingly close to the much-ballyhooed 5-cent RFID tag.Read more...
With an estimated $10.5 billion of idle spare change lying around American households, Amazon sees that found money as found money. And it will now accept it for purchases. Pity the poor penny, the neglected nickel, the despondent dime and the queasy quarter. The times are changing and for change, it's for the worse. Read more...
A U.S. Court of Appeals panel this week issued a ruling in a long-running patent infringement lawsuit that threatened retailers using bar-code readers. The panel affirmed a lower court ruling that the patent infringement case should not go forward. The case involves several bar-code system manufacturers that were sued by a foundation that owns the patents from an early bar-code inventor named Jerome Lemelson. Read more...
The most altruistic gift is an anonymous contribution, in which a giver wants to help but does not want to benefit from the donation. Sometimes, though, anonymity is not possible, and that's where things can get dicey. Read more...
The concept of e-commerce micropayments—small Web purchases typically less than $2—is nothing new, but it has never gained widespread acceptance among e-retailers because credit card fees took too much of a bite out of a micropayment to make the exchange profitable.Read more...
When Emcor Group CIO Joe Puglisi recently decided to upgrade his company's version of Lotus Notes, he quietly "pre-deployed" it with a cross-section of his company's business managers. He plans, he said, on using the favorable comments from that group to act as a sort of viral marketing to make the upgrade come as more of a customer desire than an IT demand. Read more...
CardSystems violated contracts by not encrypting data and retaining data it wasn't supposed to—and then became the nation's largest data-theft victim. Now it wants bygones to be bygones. When credit card processing firm CardSystems announced Thursday that an independent auditor had declared its systems sound, one CardSystems executive said he now wants Visa and American Express to take it back. Read more...
Generous people wanting to help victims of Hurricane Katrina should direct their financial contributions carefully, so that the money isn't diverted by e-commerce thieves.
Scammers taking advantage of the disaster don't need much capital or personnel: The Web provides them all they need in the way of cover, illusion and false identities.Read more...
Yahoo Inc. has gone into beta on an enhanced version of its e-commerce hosting service, which is positioned for the small business that can't justify its own Web team nor the time to outsource it to programmers and Web designers. Read more...
It has been said that CIOs at large companies today have limited direct power and—more than almost any other C-level executive—need to push the IT/business agenda by persuasion and by maintaining good relations with other stakeholders. Taking that to heart, the CIO of Overstock.com recently sent off a note to key business partners taking the heat for a wide range of technologies that weren't working out. Read more...
Are consumers seeing self-checkout as the anti-customer-service initiative they feared? Not according to one industry study, which predicted self-checkout revenue would double in 2005 (compared with 2004) to $161 billion, and could hit $454 billion by 2008. The study, conducted by retail consulting firm IHL Consulting Group, found some intriguing trends. Read more...
With almost 3,000 stores in all 50 states, the Rent-A-Center retail chain needs to be able to expand quickly and easily. But its business model allows customers to rent and return merchandise with little notice, forcing store layouts to be flexible. What if 30 customers return mattresses to the same store tomorrow? Read more...
A major regional fast-food chain—with 433 restaurants in the Southeastern United States—is going to offer free wireless connections to anyone who wants to surf while sitting in a burger joint.
The Krystal Co. (the nation's second-oldest fast-food restaurant chain, founded in 1932) is clearly hoping that a lot of customers will be intrigued and will munch on a burger and fries while gulping from its unlimited refill 802.11 fountain. Read more...
At a time when IT executives are finding users less and less tolerant of network delays, CIO William Morgan has perhaps the least tolerant set of users in the world.
Morgan runs technology operations for the 215-year-old Philadelphia Stock Exchange, the nation’s first stock exchange. But its age doesn’t make its daily load any easier, with networks having to handle 120,000 messages per second and peaks of 200,000 messages per second.
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Typically, a CIO arguing for a $30 to $40 million IT investment for new payment systems has to answer a lot of questions from a skeptical CEO, chief financial officer and board members. But that wasn't the experience of Canadian Tire Corp. CIO Andrew Wnek. Read more...
At a time when IT executives are finding users less and less tolerant of network delays, CIO William Morgan has perhaps the least tolerant set of users in the world.
Morgan runs technology operations for the 215-year-old Philadelphia Stock Exchange, the nation’s first stock exchange. But its age doesn’t make its daily load any easier, with networks having to handle 120,000 messages per second and peaks of 200,000 messages per second.
But because it is a financial exchange, any delay?even a half-second?is not acceptable.
“We measure transactions in milliseconds these days. This business can’t tolerate delays: We’re pricing customer orders,” Morgan said. “It’s survival for us.”
In recent years, financial activity has pushed that IT demand much higher. “If you go back five or six years, probably the number [of messages per second] was 10,000 or less,” which is one-twelfth today’s volume, Morgan said.
Morgan delivers that real-time speed with some homegrown applications sitting atop Sun Microsystems Solaris 10 servers, Stratus fault-tolerant servers in a Nortel network.
The CIO argues strongly for using as much standardized software as possible; the exchange’s Web site runs on Windows, and e-mail is using Microsoft Outlook.
“We use the standard Windows environment for all that, but not for our trading. On the trading side, there simply aren’t many packages,” he said.
“There are many for broker dealers, but a select for exchanges. There aren’t that many exchanges and, because of the custom nature of each exchange’s business, it’s very hard to find an off-the-shelf” package.
Having the network deliver all of those messages per second?Morgan’s people stress test their system with 200,000 messages per second?is only part of the battle.
After the messages are delivered, they have to be stored, catalogued and archived. These days, that’s about one-half billion messages every day.
All things …
In the Visa data theft case, much has been made of a security audit that cleared the clearinghouse that improperly handled the data. But security experts see audits rarely shedding much light on what the CIO doesn't already know. Read more...
The Overstock.com Web site is all about pricing, as it pitches itself as saving consumers as much as 80 percent compared with other retailers. But in its rapidly growing IT department, the obsession is speed. How fast? During a major deployment of some large Teradata packages—including CRM, profit analytics and an enterprise data warehouse—Teradata bid on the assumption that such large installations typically take between nine and 12 months to deploy. Overstock's IT department finished the deployment in 70 days, said company CIO Shawn Schwegman. Read more...
When it comes to privacy issues, the online airline/travel industry is moving in the opposite direction from most industries and is using personal data more aggressively than it did just a few months ago, according to a new report from an industry consulting firm. Read more...
In the Information Age that we're in, quality of information trumps quantity every time. And for CIOs, that's good news. But there's a big piece of bad news, too. The flood of information at the command of customers is both good and bad, and many customers—especially consumers—rarely can tell the difference.Read more...
Top payment-system executives traveled to Washington on Thursday to try to convince members of Congress that no new laws are needed for credit card payment security, that the industry can police itself just fine. But the facts delivered during the testimony told a very different story.
What forced the hearing was a well-publicized security breach in May, when CardSystems Solutions reported that someone had broken into its systems and stolen the details of as many as 40 million payment cards, including names, account numbers and expiration dates. Read more...
Cards issued by European banks when used online cross border don't usually support AVS checks. So, when a European card is used with a billing address that's in the US, an ecom merchant wouldn't necessarily know that the shipping zip code doesn't match the billing code.
-Marc
