Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Major retailers won't invest in a truly robust mobile deployment until they see most of their rivals doing so. Yes, this is why American business is in the global position it's in today—that grand American Can-Do-But-Only-If-You-Do-It-First attitude. Read more...

The idea of offering consumers financial bribes if they use a particular search engine has been tried before, without success. But Microsoft's entry into this field—the latest in a series of Redmond gambits to try and breathe life into its search engine—is different from earlier efforts. Read more...

To use a chess analogy, many e-tailers today see the strength of their multimedia entertainment offerings as akin to controlling the center of the board. On top of recent moves by Sears, Blockbuster and Netflix, Napster on Tuesday (May 20) announced what it dubbed the world’s largest music download site, with some 6 million selections.

Napster’s all-MP3 launch reflects an interesting E-Commerce trend. Although pure entertainment plays like Napster, Netflix and Blockbuster will likely be content with the healthy profits of downloadable multimedia (Blockbuster will likely be thrilled with any profit, but that’s another story), it’s the Sears and Amazons of the world that see entertainment as a way to lure in younger consumers, to set up much more expensive purchases down the road. But unlike similar historic strategies, the entertainment downloads are anything but loss-leaders.…

The retail move to embrace 2-D barcodes that began with a Sears trial in December and strong interest from BestBuy, the Gap and Target is inching forward, with a 500-store trial starting Thursday in San Francisco.

The trial, involving CitySearch, Antenna Audio and Scanbuy, is a fairly basic mobile integration effort. “More than 500 restaurants, shops and businesses reviewed by Citysearch are placing printed bar codes in their windows, and people who have Scanbuy software loaded on their phones can simply take a picture of the code and their phone’s Internet browser will immediately take them to the restaurant’s corresponding Citysearch page,” said a statement from the group.…

Retailers and telcos and others are watching test markets such as New York City and seeing how many consumers are using contactless payment. Their assumptions are based on the number of contactless cards in the population. But if that population doesn't realize that they have a contactless card, there's nothing valid that can be concluded when those people do not use them. Read more...

Although that amount might seem trivial, the librarian initially argued that it was likely more than most consumers who filed class-action lawsuits ever received (after attorney fees are paid) and it would be received much more quickly.Read more...

The top entries from those countries that made the list were China's Bailian Group (7.5 billion Euros), which entered the list at number 101, and Russia's X5 Retail Group NV ($3.6 billion) at number 191. The complete list itself also shows other changes in the world, with Tesco PLC ($80 billion) assuming its place as the world's fourth-largest retailer, pushing Germany's Metro AG ($75 billion) down to fifth. Read more...

The trial with the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) commuters started Tuesday and is expected to continue for four months, said Mohammad Khan, the CEO of Vivotech, which is one of the technology vendors involved in the trial. Sprint is also a key partner in the project. Read more...

The latest developer fad spreading through the Web—allowing consumers to drag and drop their personal photos onto virtual models—is now moving into E-Commerce.

My Virtual Model is working with Sears, Best Buy and Lands’ End to move products and catalogues into 2D and 3D. But the ability to personalize models so that the clothing choices can factor in the person’s face-shape and eye-color and those over-sized Dumbo ears is intriguing. The problem is that the photo choice is done by the consumer, which often leads to some humorously mismatched sizes, with the virtual model looking less like something out of Vogue and more like a cartoon in Mad Magazine. …

In another unintended consequence example, contactless payment and mobile payment efforts seem to have stunted the growth of retail biometrics. Is this a marketing fault or the death of an idea that never had much of a chance?

A few years ago, retail biometrics had what seemed to be a very bright future. They promised superior security and a permanent CRM association. If that customer switched credit cards, moved to another state, changed their name and changed cellphone companies, the fingerprint would still allow all purchases to be associated with an individual customer.

The E-Commerce spend in the U.S. for this year's second quarter jumped 19 percent, to $47.5 billion, compared with last year's identical quarter, according to a statement released this week from ComScore.

In a different E-Commerce report this week, Keynote Systems found Amazon and BestBuy as the strongest in online customer experience while CircuitCity took the top slot for site reliability and Staples got kudos for site responsiveness.

Keynote traditionally doesn't release the names of the sites that fared the worst, but the sites that were examined but not mentioned in the top slots were Buy.com, Costco, Office Depot, Sears, Target and Wal-Mart.

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.…

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...

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.…

Traffic monitoring firm Hitwise reported Monday that traffic to the nations’ 100 largest E-Commerce sites increased 6.2 percent for the week ending November 11, 2006 compared with last year’s identical period.

“Online retail strengthened in Q3 and in the six weeks since October 1, 2006 visits to the Hitwise Retail 100 Index have been up an average of 5.7 percent, which indicates strong growth for online retailers during the 2006 holiday shopping season,” said Bill Tancer, general manager of Research at Hitwise. “Historically, Thanksgiving Day is the peak day for market share of visits to the retail category, and this year, based on our data, is poised to surpass 2005. The strongest pre-Christmas spike should come the second weekend in December.”

The top sites–in order from most visited–were Amazon, Wal-Mart, Target, Overstock, BestBuy, JC Penney, Toys R Us (U.S.), BizRate, CircuitCity, Sears, QVC, Shopping.com, Half, Shopzilla and HSN. …

Two new reports show that retailers are getting better at answer customer's E-mail, but this summer's load handling statistics predict a very crashy Christmas.

A small part of the reason behind those load balancing problems is constantly increasing traffic and whether equipment upgrades and additions have kept up—Keynote Systems reported more major E-Commerce site outages in 2006 compared with 2005—but a more significant issue is increasing site sophistication. As retailers add to their sites more advanced services—such as push to talk and multimedia demonstrations—it is causing more drag on their systems than they might realize. Read more...

Giftcards are quickly becoming an extremely popular retail payment option, but the traditional analog cards suffer from a lack of security when used for E-Commerce. One company has a two-factor—and possibly three-factor—way of dealing with that.

Imx Solutions said the products are initially being used by Sears, Kmart and CompUSA along with television’s Ultimate Shopping Network (USN). The giftcard is a mini-CD that uses a company-issued–and hidden–password plus it takes a page from the one-time-password-issuing devices because it has a series of encrypted codes on it that needs to match up with a list of encrypted codes on an Imx server and the correct code “changes twice a minute.” To read the full story, please click here.…

Like a Java version of the sword of Damocles, the threat of a Web tax has loomed over e-Commerce players since the Web was formed a little more than a decade ago.

But fitting for an October deadline, this sword is more of the tissue-paper and cardboard type, one that looks scary only from a distance. Upon closer examination, e-commerce shops are discovering it's a twist on the Halloween tradition called Threat Or Treat. 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...

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...

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...

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.
To read the full story, please click here.…

Back in May 1999, near the height of the dot-com insanity, one of a host of media darlings was an underwear sales dot-com called Underneath.com. Sending boxer shorts to various reporters, this dot-com was written up in BusinessWeek and the New York Daily News, and it made Time Magazine's picks for the best e-commerce sites. Read more...

As Oracle and SAP engage in their half-billion battle for who will takeover retail software vendor Retek, the most obvious reasons for the fight are not the true ones.

The biggest news this month in retail has been the battle between $9 billion SAP and $3 billion Oracle to take over retail software vendor Retek, which had barely $174 million in revenue last year and less than $7.7 million of profit. But that's pretty good compared with the prior year, when it lost a little more than $20 million. Read more...