As far as the retail customers of Retek are concerned, the current battle between Oracle and SAP for control of the Minneapolis retail technology firm would be better won by Oracle, according to an analyst report published Wednesday by the Aberdeen Group. Read more...
With causes ranging from new, low-priced vendors to needing more lanes open simultaneously, IHL Consulting Group reported that prices for typical point-of-sale base units in North America plummeted, from about $2,200 in 2002 to $950 in 2004.Read more...
You're cleaning away papers that accumulated during the holidays and find a portable CD player that is identical to the one you use every day. It was given to you as a gift and you have no receipt, nor any clue where it was purchased. On a whim, you take the CD player to your favorite local retailer. Customer service scans the item, reports to you the date it was purchased and the name of the retailer it was purchased from, tells you that the other retailer's rules give you four more days to return it, and hands you a freshly printed receipt for you to use for that return. Read more...
Running the technology operations for a billion-dollar retail clothing chain is difficult enough during the holidays, let alone if most of your customers are too young to get their own credit cards, or even drive. Just ask Ron Ehlers, vice president for Information Systems at Pacific Sunwear of California Inc., which runs 743 PacSun stores in 50 states and Puerto Rico. Read more...
If the "Max" in Office Max is supposed to refer to the amount of time its e-commerce server takes to respond, it's aptly named. And Target's target is apparently not lightning-fast e-commerce experiences. Those conclusions are courtesy of the latest round of Web traffic analysis from the folks at Keynote Systems. Read more...
In many ways, 2004 will be seen as a technological turning point for retail: the year that many technologies that have been hyped for years started to become real. Traditionally, retail has always been a mixed barcode for being technologically advanced. Read more...
There's no shortage of legitimate reasons why the Sears-Kmart merger will not cause anyone in Bentonville, Ark., to lose much sleep. But most of the arguments boil down to two points. One: Historically, big mergers rarely succeed. Two: Adding weak plus weak doesn't equal strong. Read more...
Forrester Research projected online holiday sales in 2004 would hit $13.2 billion, which represents a 20 percent increase compared with last year. That was great when compared with a projected brick-and-mortar sales percentage increase of 4.5 percent for the same period, but much less so when compared with 2003's online retail growth of 31 percent compared with 2002. 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
