Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

To be fair, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Google today has the largest slice, by far, of the search engine pie. New Hitwise stats released Wednesday (May 5) give Google 71.4 percent of the search market, compared with 14.96 percent for Yahoo, 9.43 percent for Bing and 2.18 percent for Ask. (Interestingly enough, of those four engines, Google is the only one that gained marketshare from March to April. Ask, meanwhile, lost a painful 37 percent in that same month.)Read more...

The value—and extreme value it is—comes from a search engine finding products that simply cannot be found otherwise. Read more...

A key provision of the proposed bill (nerdy detail: This is a draft of the legislation circulated for comment. It has yet to even be officially introduced) is to restrict information given to a retailer from being distributed to an outside business, such as a marketing firm that sends spam or junkmail. That's politically safe territory. But the wording is sufficiently vague to raise other concerns.Read more...

How is it that the term "cloud computing" came to be? Granted, it's better than all its predecessors. But a cloud is about the most unstable thing Michaud can think of. It moves whichever way the wind is blowing; it may disappear; it may become a terrible storm. Exactly what marketing genius is responsible for this term catching on?Read more...

Given how much we here at StorefrontBacktalk write about what works—and especially what does not work—in retail Mobile Commerce today, it has always been rather embarrassing that our rants about mobile were invariably darn near impossible to read on mobile devices. In theory, that problem is no more.

We have now launched native mobile versions of our site and newsletter for seven of the most significant global mobile platforms, platforms chosen to accommodate almost all of our current subscribers. (We have had mobile versions for a couple of years, but they weren’t written for each platform. Now they are.) The new mobile versions are for iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Palm, Windows Mobile and Symbian. Like most mobile rollouts, the content looks decidedly better on more recent versions of these platforms. We’ve also endured our share of mobile rollout frustrations, such as having two phones with apparently identical hardware, software, carrier and location show different versions of the site. If you spot any errors or problems with our new mobile versions, please shout, in an E-mail-like fashion.…

Our tale is about an interesting startup called Blippy. (Note: A very prominent co-founder of Blippy's is Philip Kaplan, the Pud of F*cked Companies fame. Yes, that makes one of the deepest ironies in Silicon Valley coming up the street right now.)Read more...

In our increasingly strange new world of social networking and mobile commerce, a whole range of unexpected places will need to deal with PCI DSS. This week's example is Blippy, the social exhibitionism site that last week posted more than just some members' purchases online. It also posted their payment card numbers for the world to see.Read more...

The incident raises questions about the credibility of customer comments, in addition to all the difficulties today of doing much of anything anonymously.Read more...

We here at StorefrontBacktalk are looking to add to our stable of columnists. (Or should that read, “add to our unstable columnists?”) Specifically, we’re looking for some of retail’s most insightful and opinionated E-Commerce thinkers to form a rotating group for a weekly column on various E-Commerce efforts. The goal is to have each columnist deliver only perhaps one column a month. (To be clear: The columns—and not the columnists—are to rotate.)

The qualifications are flexible, but the ideal columnist is a retailer who has focused on E-Commerce for enough years to have strong opinions about what works and what doesn’t and who is willing to share those views with the world. If you’re interested, we’d love to hear from you! Please E-mail Evan at eschuman@storefrontbacktalk.com.…

But how is it that in today's world of technology and "going green," he asks, do we still manage to collect so many tiny pieces of paper? It's time to go electronic.Read more...

A post-conviction look at how Gonzalez was caught suggests a change in the type of retailers likely to be targeted and ways today's largest chains can protect themselves. But it also raises questions about whether the very nature of such a large-scale a cyber-attack could ever succeed, assuming success is defined as both getting the money and not getting caught. Retailers are worried about protecting against similar attacks, but it's not likely to be repeated—at least not in the same way.Read more...

On Friday (April 23), the 723-store Barnes & Noble book chain added yet another layer: A mobile device that acts very differently when it happens to be inside one of the book chain's stores.Read more...

All of these companies have quickly admitted their current—to be charitable—accuracy deficits. Milo executives, for example, agreed that their engine needs a lot of work. But they also stressed their efforts in improving inventory accuracy. Although that is certainly important, it should be a Phase Two goal. If someone is asking for a "green vest to wear" and the results are showing videos, books, a glow-in-the-dark safety light and a top response of "Nerf Dart Tag Fury Fire Blasters" (actual search target and results from Milo's engine), the fact that it may be accurate in knowing the number of Nerf Dart Tags a toy store has isn't very helpful.Read more...

InternetEvolution points out a legal quandary: many concerts prohibit cameras. Given that iPhones—along with other smartphones—include cameras, could they be banished?Read more...

Visa already has lots of access to lower cost security options, and the world's largest payment card brand has even better access to huge retailers. We didn't say affectionate access, but it is access nonetheless. No, this deal is partially about E-Commerce and mostly about Mobile Commerce, with perhaps a few million dollars worth of PayPal paranoia thrown in.Read more...

There's no small amount of irony that Amazon—which has a well-earned reputation of leveraging every piece of customer information in any way possible to boost sales—is the one making this privacy argument. It's as though Amazon is channeling a classic line from Animal House: "He can't do that to our pledges. Only we can do that to our pledges."Read more...

By also using the phone to purchase food, beverages, t-shirts and other merchandise at the show, Apple's approach goes beyond convenience because of the CRM potential. For the first time, producers can learn precisely which guests are purchasing which extras and for how much.Read more...

It is a somewhat simple concept: The amount of fees paid by a merchant to process a credit card transaction is directly related to how secure their environment is. You create a standard scorecard for each merchant's "risk factors," similar to a credit score.Read more...

To that end, Conway was once asked, "If a VoIP network is used for cardholder data, what sections of PCI DSS would apply?" It was an easy question to answer: All of them.Read more...

Substantial efforts in recent years to protect the data within a split second of a card being swiped have done little beyond making PIN pads the victim of physical attacks. Units are replaced either with a skimmer attached or by a clone of the full device.Read more...

TJX has for years been the Poster Child for retail data breach. And to date, it is also the best example of how little material impact these breaches have. Read more...

But the idea is actually grounded in reality and boosts near-term revenue. Like it or not, mobile coupon redemption is not especially easy for most retailers. Read more...

What if instead of a disloyalty cardboard card, this approach became a disloyalty mobile app? Instead of forcing the rival store to do anything, the phone's GPS (geolocation) kicks in and confirms that the consumers are where they claim to be when they click an icon for that rival retailer. Read more...