Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

When Oracle finally introduced its Retail 13 integrated suite this week, after three years of acquisition and integration, the teams working for the world’s largest enterprise software vendor might have breathed a sigh of relief. They might have hoped that the hardest part was behind them.

But creating a vast integrated suite is not the hard part. Convincing retail IT execs, worried about politics, perception and pragmatism, to turn over their most valuable data to one license-fee-hungry vendor? That’s where the real fun starts. Read more.…

When IHL began work on the report, "I did not expect the acceleration that we're seeing in the out years," said IHL President Greg Buzek. "I did not expect how fast it's growing."

Ironically, Buzek said, the jump in later years is being partially caused by the sales slowdowns of today. As dollars are getting tighter, retailers are pushing more sales through less-labor-costly self-checkout systems and paying for the installation of more such systems. Those additional machines, over the years, will increase the number of dollars being processed by self-service. Read more...

One of the repeated arguments made in retail data security circles is that retailers tend to have much weaker security because it’s not as much of a cultural priority as, for example, banking. So it’s a little bit consoling that the latest ATM databreach is apparently not the result of a retail breach, not the result of social engineering and the trusting bank clerk, but is the first proven incident of a bank server’s breach linked to ATM fraud.

A computer intrusion into a Citibank server that processes ATM withdrawals led to two Brooklyn men making hundreds of fraudulent withdrawals from New York City cash machines in February, pocketing at least $750,000 in cash, according to a Wired story. Although Citibank told Wired that its systems had not been breached, Citibank “warned the FBI on February 1 that ‘a Citibank server that processes ATM withdrawals at 7-Eleven convenience stores had been breached,’ according to a sworn affidavit by FBI cyber-crime agent Albert Murray.”…

At some point in the last decade, nearly every organization involved in electronic commerce did an evaluation of payment gateways. So, what's changed? Read more...

Are European retailers going to have any better luck than American retailers with consumer-facing biometric payments? The 750-store Albert Heijn supermarket chain, the largest such chain in the Netherlands, is about to find out.

While various European chains (such as Germany’s Wagener Department Stores) have enjoyed modest success with biometrics, the Albert Heijn chain’s June 17 statement said it would commit to the trial for six months.…

San Francisco-based U.S. District Court Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker gave lawyers on both sides until June 26 to address his concerns. The judge didn't specifically say that the lawyer's fees were too high, but merely that "plaintiffs' counsel has not established the basis for its fee request," leaving himself the opportunity to potentially approve the figure if he is satisfied with a justification. Read more...

A Verizon Business security report analyzed more than 500 data breach incidents over four years and found that 73 percent started from the outside and only 18 percent were inside jobs. Read more...

The hypothetical Nordstrom example shows how much less respect is paid to the online consumer than the brick-and-mortar one. Does the inherent anonymity in the Web cut both ways? Like the site visitors emboldened by their namelessness who post comments and get into flame wars that they would never have the nerve to try in person, are E-tailers treating their customers with a disrespect that they would never dare consider in a physical store? Read more...

The 74-page settlement outlined several efforts by Ameritrade, but it did not include any cash payments to the consumers who sued the company. Among the agreements were that Ameritrade will warn consumers about investment SPAM, pay for limited security testing, seed E-mail accounts seeking violators, pay $20,000 to the Honeynet Project and $35,000 to the National Cyber Forensics and Training Alliance as well as buy some of the impacted consumers a one-year license for an Ameritrade-selected anti-SPAM software package. Read more...

E-tailers in continental Europe are just now starting to get hit by slower growth, but they are still shining much more brightly than their U.S. counterparts, according to new figures from eMarketer.

In the first five days of sales earlier this year, French trade group FEVAD noted a 25 percent rise in revenues from nine leading online retailers in 2008, compared with the same period in 2007. “The group predicts that B2C e-commerce will grow 30 percent this year,” eMarketer said. “That is down from 35 percent in 2007, but still quite healthy.” …

"Whether we're talking about logs generated by network or application firewalls, intrusion detection systems, file integrity monitor tools or the operating systems themselves, I've come to the conclusion that the only people who don't hate them are the vendors who sell them. But, whether we hate them, disrespect them or merely ignore them, we need to learn to live with them." Read more...

Just in time for Friday the 13th, Oracle is finally ready to unveil Oracle Retail V 13, with a formal rollout slated for Tuesday (June 17).

Oracle’s main retail suite is not expected to undergo any radical changes (even the name change is expected to be slight); it’s mostly claims of better integration and interoperability.…

"One thing that is true about Amazon's site is that it is very complex, utilizing numerous backend database, proxy servers, distributed application and Web servers, lots of dynamic images, etc.," said Shawn White, director of external operations at Web site performance tracking firm Keynote. "Even accessing the homepage involves complex multi-step interactions between the Web browser and a number of backend systems within Amazon." Read more...

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 Meijer department store chain–with 182 stores in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Kentucky–is getting creative with its Web site, food recipes and online coupons. A widget for the chain allows a visitor to see a desired recipe, drag it into a calendar and have shopping lists automatically populate with the needed items along with targeted coupons for key ingredients.

Developed by Qponix, a joint venture between Meijer and Fry, the program is testing whether the online coupon-recipe-shopping-list integration will help boost sales in a soft-sell kind of way.…

New York State has started pushing to collect sales tax from e-tailers that have no physical presence in the state, prompting Amazon and Overstock to fight back. But as this BusinessWeek story describes, e-tailers are fighting back with different legal strategies.

All are hoping against the odds that other states don’t pull the same revenue-generating attempt. If New York gets legal greenlights, several more states will quickly mimic its efforts, leading to a flood of almost every state within two years. If it’s going to happen, better it happen quickly. With one or two states, consumers will feel the tax pain and will look elsewhere. When it’s universal, though, it will blend into that amorphous cost of doing business and will cease changing behavior.…

Note to retailers looking to offer free Wi-Fi: It’s a good idea to first make sure you can make the offer. Starbucks discovered that an offer of two hours of free Wi-Fi a day simply wasn’t working.

“Due to overwhelming interest in Card Rewards we are currently experiencing difficulty accessing Starbucks Card accounts. We are working to fix the problem and ask that you please try again later,” said a page shown to site visitors, according to this IDG News Service story. A Starbucks spokesman said that the problems were on Starbucks’ end, not AT&T’s. “Customers overwhelmed the site when joining Starbucks Card Rewards,” said Doug Cavarocchi, a Starbucks spokesman, in an e-mail. …

A university study of cellphone users’ habits–which found that nearly half of the people tracked kept to a circle little more than six miles wide–is raising some ethical issues and might suggest a non-traditional retail testing method.

The Northeastern University study–according to this Associated Press story–could only have done its secret tracking because it was conducted outside of the United States, because such testing would likely be illegal here. Retailers looking to try out new mobile strategies might consider testing the domestic-only applications overseas.…

When Best Buy launched a Spanish version of its site last fall (2007), E-Commerce officials quickly noticed unexpected activity, such as customers spending twice as much time on the Spanish site.

“Spanish speakers could well be hungry for online product information, as only 18 of the 102 largest online retail sites had any Spanish content in late 2006,” said this Internet Retailer story. Best Buy chose not to translate all products into Spanish, instead limiting them to “complex products, such as computers and home theater systems” but “not more easily understood products such as movies and music.”…

Most U.S. Web sites fail the most basic of site performance tests, according to new stats issued by Pingdom. “The worst performance grades were given to Foxnews.com, IGN.com, Gamespot.com, CNN.com, Break.com and ESPN.go.com. The best performance grades were given to Google.com, Live.com, Orkut.com and Craigslist.org. This is not entirely surprising considering their minimalistic style.”

But the more interesting part of the Pingdom stats is the analysis that looks at the sites’ size, HTTP requests and caching. It’s worth a read.…

Computerworld columnist Frank Hayes–a former colleague of mine from CMP and an awesome folk singer as well–has a wonderful column out about why the Wal-Mart RFID effort is still having problems.

Although some of the proprietary arguments are slightly overstated, Hayes makes a great point about how Wal-Mart’s $2 per pallet non-RFID penalty reflects a lack of understanding of why suppliers have resisted RFID tagging. It’s the software implementation costs and the fact that different retailers demand different versions. Hayes’ column is worth reading. (But not everyone seems to agree. The RFID Journal took exception to the piece, on several levels. And then some RFID Journal readers took exception to that disagreement.)…

The dotcom side is trying something similar, but the virtually infinite nature of online means that the Borders site can display as many books as it wants. The ability to drag the shelf to the left or right keeps the cover images flowing. Called the "magic shelf," that feature "is way more robust than it was before" in beta testing, said Kevin Ertell, the Borders E-Commerce exec who is in charge of the site. Read more...