Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

The next time you’re about to make a global hardware purchase, it’s probably not a bad idea to do a little multinational price comparison. According to one survey released this week, American Mac users would be well served to not buy overseas.

The identically configured piece of Mac hardware costs about 26.5 percent more in Australia than in the United States, according to this blog entry by Pingdom, a company that monitors Web sites and servers. Although it’s not as big a difference as it is in Australia, Mac products in Europe still cost about 18.7 percent more than in the U.S. The blog speculated on reasons why. Asked the blog: “Does Apple charge more outside the U.S. because it can?”…

Some are questioning, though, whether the chain's lower priced approach might limit the number of consumer phones that can access the related content. Read more...

On Monday (Aug. 11), the $3.8 billion Jones Apparel Group became the latest retailer to launch an RFID item-level trial, albeit a conservative one, testing it at "a couple" of the 221 stores it operates under the Nine West name, said Norm Veit, executive VP of Management Information Services at Jones. Read more...

When JDA Software announced on Monday (Aug. 11) that it was buying supply chain vendor i2 Technologies for $346 million in cash, it wrote a new chapter in one of the most radical stories of stunning success rapidly turning into, well, something a heck of a lot smaller.

Probably the best analysis on this fascinating move comes from ZDNet blog writer Dennis Howlett: “I well recall the heady days when i2 boasted of its then record-breaking $9.3 billion acquisition of Aspect Development at a time when i2 was attempting to become the dominant demand planning and B2B Internet business trading platform provider. Its 2000 customer conference was an exercise in corporate arrogance, with the then president Greg Brady lambasting journalists like myself who could not see the sustainability of i2’s business strategy. That was the same year i2 offered a bounty of $500 to anyone who went and got the company’s logo tattooed on themselves. Some weeks later, i2 re-designed the logo.”…

At least one RFID vendor is arguing that they are. That vendor, SimplyRFID, is arguing that read distance targets that used to be 10 feet are today as far as 40 feet.

“In the last year or two, RFID performance has definitely gotten a lot better. It used to be 10 feet [read range] was the goal, and you’d be happy to get 12,” Simply RFiD president Carl Brown was quoted saying in an RFIDUpdate story. “Now we’re seeing 20 feet without any issues at all. You can even have the tag in strange orientations and you’re still going to get the read. This technology is moving fast. Antenna, readers, cables, tags are all changing every six months.” The story details how they arrived at their figures. Not so sure it’s all realistic, but the details make for some interesting reading.…

Guest Columnist David Taylor is the Founder of the PCI Knowledge Base, Research Director of the PCI Alliance and a former E-Commerce and Security analyst with Gartner.

At this week’s National Retail Federation CIO conclave, NRFtech, the CIO of J.C. Penney presented the keynote, which focused on the top five priorities for the business and the technical implications of these priorities. PCI compliance, perhaps not surprisingly, was one of these top five priorities.

During the discussion, the CIO, Thomas Nealon, commented that one of the biggest challenges when it comes to PCI is explaining to businesspeople why it’s a priority. This is a common refrain among merchants of all types and sizes. Because there are a lot of examples of this in the Knowledge Base, I thought we could discuss some of them, so that others may be able to use them in their own companies.

It seems Circuit City has concluded that the Web isn’t just a fad, after all, with a major E-Commerce revamp coming just a couple of weeks after the chain confirmed a substantial multimedia push for its employee-training extranet.

Beyond alliances with a host of publishing companies to share their content on circuitcity.com, the changes announced Tuesday (Aug. 13) acknowledged that most Circuit City customers use the Web to decide if they’ll go to a store. “The Internet is our new front door,” said Brian S. Bradley, Circuit City’s senior vice president for multi-channel. The changes include blog entries, more demos and an interactive forum for talk with each other and Circuit City sales reps. Love how the interactive forum is painted as a CC innovation. Wonder if these guys ever heard of Usenet?…

"What is surprising is that the top 15 sites are typically much less reliant on the Internet for their revenues than the bottom 15," said Lawrence Shaw, founder of Sitemorse, which co-created the study. "If the table was reversed, then it would make more sense." Read more...

The trial is apparently focused solely on evaluating the units' selling capabilities—and Best Buy's ability to handle and protect payment—and will not be integrated with any of the company's other systems, at least for this trial. That would mean no interactions with CRM, inventory or supply chain, and even payment systems handled outside of Best Buy's network. Read more...

Winn-Dixie’s impressive financial turnaround is the result of many issues, but some are suggesting that a new embrace of mainframes played a key role. When the venerable 521-store grocery chain declared bankruptcy back in 2005, CIO Charlie Weston’s initial thoughts were that such a tact had its advantages, namely refocusing the company on fundamentals, including IT.

Today, Weston is saying that the lack of focus on those IT issues “fundamentally contributed to the bankruptcy.” IBM is pointing today to the chain’s decision to not go distributed and to stick with—and upgrade—its mainframe as a sign of legacy support.…

One of those retailers—Barnes & Noble—issued a vague statement suggesting that the chain might not have been aware of the incident before the Secret Service team started making those 11:30 AM calls.Read more...

But now, the security of the accused thieves' data loot is the least of their problems. Indictments and informations released Tuesday (Aug. 5) charge the 11 conspirators with stealing 41 million credit and debit card numbers from major retailers including TJX.Read more...

This is not to say that most executives don't know where their data starts and where it's sent. But as data routes its way through off-site backup, into employees' laptops and USB flash drives, is shared with key customers and partners over an extranet and even spoken in a call center, that data can end up in quite a few unexpected places. Read more...

The more RFID-tagged items retailers place on Z-bars or shelves, or in boxes, the lower the read rate will be when those items are scanned, according to a study out of the University of Arkansas. By setting up store-like scenarios in a university lab, researchers conducted three feasibility test scenarios of RFID tagged apparel and shoes.

What they found was that when an associate scanned items, the number of items scanned affected the read rate. For example, researchers scanned RFID items hung on a rounder. When there were 97 items, they found a 99.38 percent read rate. Compare that to the 89.89 percent accuracy of 180 items scanned.…

Still, those technological trendsetters are found in pockets throughout Europe, Asia and Australia, with most overseas retailers still slow to embrace self-checkout, according to a new report from European retail tech analyst firm Planet Retail. That said, for those merchants who have deployed, they are often exceeding their U.S. counterpart. Read more...

The global ERP market grew 16.7 percent last year, hitting a market valuation of $20.7 billion, according to figures recently reported by Gartner. SAP is clearly dominant as the vendor with the largest marketshare, with SAP’s 28 percent being exactly double the second-largest marketshare for an ERP vendor: Oracle.

The third, Sage (7 percent), is coincidentally exactly half of Oracle’s marketshare. The next two vendors–Info Global Solutions and Microsoft–took 6 percent and 4 percent, respectively. That still left the largest slice of the marketshare pie–at 41 percent–to be split among a wide field of “others.” …

If it makes U.S. retailers feel any better, their U.K. counterparts aren’t faring any better in making cross-channel and especially merged channel efforts work. The percentage of online sales among those merchants has plateaued, holding steady at 4.4 percent for the last two years, according to a Martec report.

What makes those numbers look even weaker is that those figures have flat-lined while the percentage of U.K. retailers offering E-Commerce sites have been sharply increasing, hitting 68 percent this year, compared with 58 percent in 2007. …

Senior members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee have instructed top brass from several companies with strong Web interests–including Google, Microsoft, Comcast, AT&T and Verizon–to report back on whether they’ve tweaked their ads to match consumers’ online habits. Although no E-Commerce companies were initially contacted, if Congress tries to restrict Web sites from customizing their content, it will have a huge retail impact.

There’s not much of a real distinction between a traditional banner ad on MSN pushing the latest Disney movie and using the same technique on Macys.com to make sure that purses appear on its homepage and–for this particular customer–all are displayed as pink. As long as the focus is placed on permission rather than banning, the damage should be minimal. Nothing to worry about then. When’s the last time you heard of Congress overreacting to something it doesn’t understand?…

Guest Columnist David Taylor is the Founder of the PCI Knowledge Base, Research Director of the PCI Alliance and a former E-Commerce and Security analyst with Gartner.

In the recent federal probe of retail data breaches, most of the merchants had been unaware of the breaches until informed by government or banking officials. The reason for this is the lack of tools and/or poor procedures for logging network and database access and the general lack of review of this information on a regular basis. In short, there is a good chance that if your company is being breached now, you won’t find out about it until the stolen data is used to commit fraud.

People always blame the lack of up-to-date wireless encryption for the TJX security breach. News stores feature reporters "wardriving" mall parking lots trying to find unencrypted access points, which is very "exciting" but only part of the story. The less exciting part is that even if the merchants in question were using weak wireless encryption, the breaches could have been stopped dead if the retailers had adequate access control logging and alerting capabilities. In addition to stopping external cracks, logging and alerting is even more important to catch "rogue" insiders, particularly those who have privileged access to systems.

Indeed, in this federal probe, the security systems of only one retailer even detected the intrusion. And the feds want that retailer’s identity to be kept secret.

In surveys, retail wireless security is not seen as a big problem. Keeping up with the latest encryption protocols is regarded as not that big a deal. (The TJX breach, when it was first reported, was a huge wake-up call.) Rather, the "big" problem is that most retailers do not have sufficient tools to help them sort through the …

It’s the kind of issue that never existed in brick-and-mortars. When a physical store discontinues a physical product, gremlins don’t typically sneak into customers’ homes and take back the paid-for products. And yet, in effect, that’s what Yahoo inadvertently did when it shut down its music download service.

Yahoo announced a few months ago that it was shutting down its online music store, which includes killing the “servers used to validate that the music customers play is not violating copyright laws,” said a report in Forbes. Although Yahoo said that “music purchased on its music service will still work, users may not be able to move files to ‘new computers or devices.’ As a result, Yahoo is encouraging customers to burn CDs to back up the music they purchased.” Last week, Yahoo decided to offer customers coupons to pay for consumers to “replace their music collections on Rhapsody’s music store or give them a refund. Customers will have until the end of the year to take Yahoo up on its offer.”…

As retailers struggle to figure out the proper role for PDAs and cellphones in their merged channel and marketing strategies, it’s good to know that there’s strength–well, comfort at least–in numbers. An ABI Research report released Friday (Aug. 1) projected that “location-based mobile social networking revenues will reach $3.3 billion by 2013.”

The service is defining that market as one that “allows users to share real-life experiences via geo-tagged user-generated multimedia content, exchange recommendations about places, identify nearby friends and set up ad hoc face to face meetings.” As marketers fund such deployments, opportunities for helping consumers find storefronts and turn those locations into desired meeting places soars. Privacy concerns and licensing/revenue-sharing issues aside, this is something few retailers can afford to not watch closely–and creatively. …

The bizarre back-and-forth claims about the San Francisco network admin who was arrested after refusing to reveal key network passwords raises some troubling issues. Most pointedly, there appears to be some evidence that this admin was fired and arrested partially for having engaged in the precise security procedures that he was paid to deliver.

It may not directly impact a retailer, but the network security issues raised here are certainly relevant. Check out this wonderful analysis piece in InfoWorld that does the best job of summarizing and explaining the case that I’ve yet seen.

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Circuit City on Monday (July 28) confirmed that it will go live in mid-August with an experiment that uses convenience—multiple suppliers able to brief from one virtual location—and multimedia entertainment to try and get that associate training to increase. Read more...