Quantcast StorefrontBacktalk - Techniques, Tools, and Tirades about Retail Technology and E-Commerce
E-Mail Us
An Ocean Apart: Why A U.K. Retailer Handled A Site Glitch So Differently
June 27th, 2008

When an order processing snafu shut down the delivery operations of one of the U.K.’s largest grocery chains, the $38 billion retailer acted starkly different than the typical U.S. retailer.

The London-based 823-store Sainsbury’s grocery chain immediately issued almost a half-million dollars’ worth of £10 (roughly equivalent to $20) vouchers to some 30,000 disgruntled customers and personally–through staff volunteers and no software automation—called every one of those 30,000 to apologize and tell them about the vouchers. Read more.

Blueprint for Growth & Innovation:

The Power of a Valued Partner.

Selecting a strategic partner has become more critical than ever to growing retail organizations. Discover, and learn what to look for in a business partner that will position your organization for growth and innovation. Click here for this free white paper on the Power of a Valued Partner.
Are App Dev Backlogs Inevitable Or Warning Signs?
June 27th, 2008

A new Retail Systems Research report is challenging the way retail IT looks at application development backlogs. The report is based on a survey showing that some 79 percent of retailers have app dev backlogs of at least a year, with one-fifth of those hitting delays of more than two years.

But that’s not news to retail IT execs, who have come to see huge backlogs as a way of life. A time-revered IT tradition, if you will. The report, however, argues that the battle between system maintenance/security patches—which always get top priority—and the creation of new capabilities that the business needs should be thought of in different terms. Some are opting for outsourcing more, which would allow them to reallocate resources to accelerate new capabilities. “There’s been this shift where business has been taking more of the direction of IT investments,” said RSR’s Nikki Baird. “It should no longer be about ‘either/or.’”

China’s Online Market Stronger Than Most Analysts Think
June 27th, 2008

The conventional wisdom has held that China is not likely to embrace E-Commerce, because of the Chinese aversion to credit payments and fears of piracy and poor quality products. But a Forbes story this week makes a powerful argument that E-Commerce—and a credit-card lifestyle in general—will be coming to China very soon and in a big way.

“In interviews the China Market Research Group (CMR) has conducted with 500 young adults between the ages of 18 and 32 in six cities across China, nearly 80 percent of respondents said they had made an online purchase in the last six months. The vast majority expected to buy something again in the next quarter. Seventy percent said they weren’t putting aside any money in savings accounts and that they would use a credit card for online purchases if they had one,” the story said, adding that the study “suggests it is a lack of credit cards and other payment options, rather than a cultural aversion to buying online, that has curtailed the growth of e-commerce in China. But the problem of payment is resolving itself. Credit card use is booming as domestic banks like Bank of China and China Merchants Bank roll out services targeting consumers in China’s smaller cities. We expect the number of credit cards in China to increase fivefold, from 56 million at the end of 2006 to 250 million by the end of 2013.”

Medical Study Raises New RFID Fears
June 27th, 2008

Although the question of RFID safety has been debated extensively over the years, with conflicting study results, a major new medical study released this week points to very specific electromagnetic dangers within nine inches of the transmitter.

The highly respected Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found 34 electromagnetic interference instances out of 123 tests, with 22 of them rated potentially hazardous. “Interference changed breathing machines’ ventilation rates and caused syringe pumps to stop” at a distance of about nine inches, according to a story in The Wall Street Journal. This may give serious pause to some retail IT operations, who can have dozens of RFID devices in loading docks and assembly lines, in addition to trucks and even on shelves.

Report: SMS Does Not Handle Volume Well At All
June 27th, 2008

In one of the first wide-scale studies of SMS’ capability to hold up under volume pressure, the technology fared “surprisingly” poorly, according to Keynote Systems. This has particular significance for retailers, who are exploring the technology’s use for mobile communications connecting to both online and in-store.

“Response times for some short codes degraded severely during the busiest hours of the day. One CSC (common short code) showed a 60 percent peak-period slowdown every day, indicating a major capacity issue was present,” Keynote said. “Many of the CSCs monitored showed significant reliability issues. Several (experienced) more than 10 hours of outage while one (experienced) more than 50 hours.” Read more.

Will Voice Prints Work For Payment Authorization?
June 27th, 2008

A UK company is pushing retailers to use voice-recognition to authenticate purchases over the phone and online.

The Voice Commerce Group’s Voice Transact package has consumers call the service, quote a pre-arranged product code and then a series of digits dictated by the automated system. Verizon is involved in the rollout. VCG CEO Nick Ogden was quoted in E-Commerce Times saying that there are “current problems with the system, the biggest of which was interoperability between different banks’ systems and the standards used in the technology.”

Federal Appellate Panel Backs Circuit City In Gift Card Patent Case
June 26th, 2008

A federal appellate court backed a group of retailers Monday (June 23)–including Best Buy, Circuit City, Costco and Lowe’s—by ruling that their gift card systems do not violate any patents.

This case has been winding its way through the federal court system for almost four years. It began when a telecom reseller called Realsource Communications said a 1998 patent protected the way it dealt with phone card payments. Read more.

PCI Compliance: Who’s Re-Minding The Store?
June 26th, 2008

Internal audit is not staffed to enforce PCI at the store level, argues GuestView Columnist David Taylor. Except for about a dozen leading retailers, most retailers do not have enough IT-skilled internal auditors to meet the requirement for a “continuous” review of store-level IT security.

Since almost no one can afford to add another group of people with both auditing skills and IT skills, nor can most retailers afford to pay consulting firms to do this, I tend to recommend very specific PCI audit training courses for your internal audit staff. One way to do this is to send them to the same two day course that PCI auditors go through. Read more.

Wal-Mart Proving That Green Can Indeed Mean Something
June 26th, 2008

The environmentally friendly green retail campaigns have been an embarrassing mix of pseudo-environmental policies that have little real benefit to those true policies that have real impact. Rather, these campaigns are akin to demanding that recycling be enforced.

But Wal-Mart and a handful of others have been trying to do green the right way, with policies that will have a significant environmental impact and that also improve operations. Read more.

E-Commerce Getting A Bit More Respect
June 20th, 2008

The Moody’s Investor Service has upgraded how important a retailer’s E-Commerce activity is when assessing that retailer’s overall economic health.

Although this isn’t a radical change for the financial firm—and the thought that E-Commerce is important is hardly surprising—it’s one of several recent moves suggesting that the young teen-age Web is starting to be taken a wee bit more seriously. Read more.

Oracle’s Challenge: Legacy Mindset Goes Far Beyond Legacy Apps
June 20th, 2008

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.

Oracle 13: Swiss Cheese Integration?
June 20th, 2008

After three years of acquisition and integration, Tuesday (June 17) saw the official launch of Oracle’s Retail Release 13, consisting of some 33 retail applications, only four of which were new. The rollout was billed by Oracle as the be-all and end-all of end-to-end integrated retail application suites, but some analysts said the integration was lacking.

“Given that they waited so long, I would have expected better connectivity with some of the supply chain assets that they’ve acquired over the years and not have to wait until who knows when for some of that connectivity,” said AMR Research Director Mike Griswold. Read more.

Report: Self-Service To Top $1.7 Trillion By 2012
June 19th, 2008

North American self-service transactions will process $607 billion this year, a figure that is projected to soar to $1.7 trillion by 2012, according to a report published Wednesday (June 18) by the IHL Group.

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.

Bank Breach Hits ATMs, No Retailer At Fault This Time
June 19th, 2008

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.”

Re-Thinking Payment Gateways
June 19th, 2008

GuestView Columnist David Taylor suggests that a surprisingly large number of major retailers today are using inhouse or outsourced payment gateways to reduce the scope of their compliance effort, as well as their costs.

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.

Netherland Supermarket Chain Trying Biometric Payment
June 19th, 2008

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.

Federal Judge Rejects Ameritrade Settlement
June 15th, 2008

One day after lawyers presented a proposed settlement in the Ameritrade 6.2 million-customer data breach, a U.S. federal court judge has tentatively rejected the settlement (on June 13), questioning the value of the deal for the consumer victims and the size of the $1.87 million attorneys’ fees.

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.

New Security Reports: Beware Of Your Partners
June 13th, 2008

A pair of unrelated reports out this week are challenging several fundamental IT security assumptions, including that data breach laws will reduce consumer losses and that insiders account for more thefts than external evil-doers.

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.

Secrecy Shouldn’t Be Convenient
June 13th, 2008

Incidents at Amazon and Ameritrade this week raise troubling questions about whether secrecy is used far too often and too quickly. Let’s say that a large Nordstrom’s store suddenly—without explanation—shut its doors at noon on a weekday, refusing to let anyone in. After several hours, the doors opened and people were let in, with no explanation. On the next business day, it happens again. And, again, no explanation.

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.

Settlement Proposed In Ameritrade Data Breach Lawsuit
June 13th, 2008

After admitting it had security holes that allowed a security breach of more than 6.2 million customers, attorneys for TD Ameritrade this week agreed to a settlement of a class action lawsuit.

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.

European E-Tailers Faring Well
June 12th, 2008

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.”

The Rodney Dangerfield Of Security Controls
June 12th, 2008

GuestView Columnist David Taylor thinks of logging and envisions Rodney Dangerfield.

“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.

In Time For Friday The 13th, Oracle To Roll Out Oracle Retail 13
June 12th, 2008

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.

Amazon.com Crashes Again On Monday
June 10th, 2008

For the second consecutive workday, Amazon.com suffered a major crash on Monday (June 9), with the increasingly unlikely scenarios explaining why the historically robust site is failing.

The cause of the crash, which apparently took the weekend off after bringing down Amazon completely on Friday for almost three hours before seriously (but less severely) slowing down Amazon for several hours on Monday, ranged from excessive site sophistication to some kind of malware attack or excessive load. Frustratingly, there are reasons to discount all three scenarios. The fact that Monday’s slowdown was global–while Friday’s was solely domestic–complicates matters. Read more.

Amazon Crashes Friday, Site Complexity Blamed
June 6th, 2008

E-Commerce leader Amazon.com completely crashed for almost three hours on Friday afternoon (June 6), with one Web site performance tracking firm attributing the crash to excessive site complexity.

“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.

Search Through Blog Blurbs
Search Through All Stories
Quickly catch-up on the latest in E-Commerce and Retail Tech with our free weekly newsletter, with urgent bulletins as news merits.
StorefrontBacktalk will never sell your E-mail address to anyone at anytime.
Evan Schuman is the former retail technology editor for eWEEK.com, PCMagazine, CIOInsight and retail reporter for RISNews and Consumer Goods Technology. Having covered IT issues for 21 years - and other stuff like legal affairs, politics, Wall Street and the environment for about eight years before that - Schuman is in a good position to gripe about technology trends and sometimes accidentally make a good point.
An Ocean Apart: Why A U.K. Retailer Handled A Site Glitch So Differently
When an order processing snafu shut down the delivery operations of one of the U.K.'s largest grocery chains, the $38 billion retailer acted starkly different than the typical U.S. retailer. The London-based 823-store Sainsbury's grocery chain immediately issued almost a half-million dollars' worth of vouchers.
Are App Dev Backlogs Inevitable Or Warning Signs?
A new Retail Systems Research report is challenging the way retail IT looks at application development backlogs. The report is based on a survey showing that some 79 percent of retailers have appdev backlogs of at least a year, with one-fifth of those hitting delays of more than two years.
China's Online Market Stronger Than Most Analysts Think
The conventional wisdom has held that China is not likely to embrace E-Commerce, because of the Chinese aversion to credit payments and fears of piracy and poor quality products. But a Forbes story this week makes a powerful argument that E-Commerce—and a credit-card lifestyle in general—will be coming to China very soon and in a big way.
Medical Study Raises New RFID Fears
Although the question of RFID safety has been debated extensively over the years, with conflicting study results, a major new medical study released this week points to very specific electromagnetic dangers within nine inches of the transmitter.
Report: SMS Does Not Handle Volume Well At All
In one of the first wide-scale studies of SMS' capability to hold up under volume pressure, the technology fared "surprisingly" poorly, according to Keynote Systems. This has particular significance for retailers, who are exploring the technology's use for mobile communications connecting to both online and in-store.
Will Voice Prints Work For Payment Authorization?
A U.K. company is pushing retailers to use voice-recognition to authenticate purchases over the phone and online. The Voice Commerce Group's Voice Transact package has consumers call the service, quote a pre-arranged product code and then a series of digits dictated by the automated system.
Federal Appellate Panel Backs Circuit City In Gift Card Patent Case
A federal appellate court backed a group of retailers Monday (June 23)—including Best Buy, Circuit City, Costco and Lowe's—by ruling that their gift card systems do not violate any patents.
PCI Compliance: Who's Re-Minding The Store?
Internal audit is not staffed to enforce PCI at the store level, argues GuestView Columnist David Taylor. Except for about a dozen leading retailers, most retailers do not have enough IT-skilled internal auditors to meet the requirement for a "continuous" review of store-level IT security.
Wal-Mart Proving That Green Can Indeed Mean Something
Wal-Mart and a handful of others have been trying to do green the right away, with policies that will have a significant environmental impact and that also improve operations.
Oracle's Challenge: Legacy Mindset Goes Far Beyond Legacy Apps
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.
Oracle 13: Swiss-Cheese Integration?
After three years of acquisition and integration, Tuesday (June 17) saw the official launch of Oracle's Retail Release 13, consisting of some 33 retail applications, only four of which were new. The rollout was billed by Oracle as the be-all and end-all of end-to-end integrated retail application suites, but some analysts said the integration was lacking.
Netherland Supermarket Chain Trying Biometric Payment
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.
E-Commerce Getting A Bit More Respect
The Moodys Investor Service has upgraded how important a retailer's E-Commerce activity is when assessing that retailer's overall economic health. Although this isn't a radical change for the financial firm—and the thought that E-Commerce is important is hardly surprising—it's one of several recent moves suggesting that the young teen-age Web is starting to be taken a wee bit more seriously.
Report: Self-Service To Top $1.7 Trillion By 2012
North American self-service transactions will process $607 billion this year, a figure that is projected to soar to $1.7 trillion by 2012, according to report published Wednesday (June 18) by the IHL Group. 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."

Bank Breach Hits ATMs, No Retailer At Fault This Time
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.
Re-Thinking Payment Gateways
A surprisingly large number of major retailers today are using inhouse or outsourced payment gateways to reduce the scope of their compliance effort as well as their costs. At some point in the last decade, nearly every organization involved in electronic commerce did an evaluation of payment gateways. So, what's changed?
Federal Judge Rejects Ameritrade Settlement
One day after lawyers presented a proposed settlement in the Ameritrade 6.2 million-customer data breach, a U.S. federal court judge tentatively rejected the settlement (on June 13), questioning the value of the deal for the consumer victims and the size of the $1.87 million attorneys' fees.
New Security Reports: Beware Of Your Partners
A pair of unrelated reports out this week are challenging several fundamental IT security assumptions, including that data breach laws will reduce consumer losses and that insiders account for more thefts than external evil-doers.
The Rodney Dangerfield Of Security Controls
GuestView Columnist David Taylor thinks of logging and envisions Rodney Dangerfield. "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."
In Time For Friday The 13th, Oracle To Roll Out Oracle Retail 13
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.
European E-Tailers Faring Well
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.
Secrecy Shouldn't Be Convenient
Two incidents this week show 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?
Settlement Proposed In Ameritrade's Data Breach Lawsuit
After admitting it had security holes that allowed a security breach of more than 6.2 million customers, attorneys for TD Ameritrade this week agreed to a settlement of a class action lawsuit. The 74-page settlement outlined several efforts by Ameritrade, but it did not include any cash payments to the consumers who sued the company.
Amazon.com Crashes Again On Monday
For the second consecutive workday, Amazon.com suffered a major crash on Monday (June 9), with the increasingly unlikely scenarios explaining why the historically robust site is failing.
Amazon Crashes Friday, Site Complexity Blamed
E-Commerce leader Amazon.com completely crashed for almost three hours on Friday afternoon (June 6), with one Web site performance tracking firm attributing the crash to excessive site complexity.
Best Buy's Spanish E-Commerce Discoveries
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.
Starbucks' Wi-Fi Cup Runneth Over
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.
Meijer Testing Intersection Between Digital Coupons, Shopping Lists And Calendars
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.
Is The E-Commerce State Tax Strategy The Right One?
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 all e-tailers 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.
Mobile Madness: What Really Constitutes A Mobile-Friendly Site?
Welcome to E-Commerce Semantics 101. Your philosophical question for the day: When is a site truly mobile-friendly? Mobile commerce today is in that familiar classic battle of Chicken.com versus Egg.com: Retailers know the mobile users are out there, but they also know that few are trying to use the devices for making purchases.
Most U.S. Sites Fail Performance Tests
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.
Security Lessons From Higher Education
GuestView Columnist David Taylor asks: What would you do if one of your employees decided to leverage your brand and set up a little side business inside your store, including selling products via an E-Commerce Web site, setting up a merchant bank account and taking credit cards? You'd probably fire the person, right? But, what if you couldn't?
Why Wal-Mart's $2/Pallet Non-RFID Penalty Isn't Going To Work
Computerworld columnist Frank Hayes has a wonderful column out about why the Wal-Mart RFID effort is still having problems. 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.
Gap Merges The E-Commerce Backend Of Its Four Brands
Shoppers at Gap.com will now be able to use a single shopping cart and consolidate shipping at any of the chain's four brands, the Gap announced on Tuesday (May 27). But the change for The Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy and PiperLime is delicate, as the company still wants those brands to maintain their distinct personalities. Those conflicting goals give the new site a bit of a Jekyll-and-Hyde feel.
Borders' New Site: You Can't Always Tell A Book By Its IP Address
Borders this week officially stepped out of the shadow of Amazon and re-launched Borders.com, with an effort that scores points for creativity. The physical side of Borders (as in brick-and-mortar as opposed to Olivia Newton-John) has been trying to arrange its bookshelves to display more of the covers.
Much FACTA Legal Activity This Week, All In Retail's Favor
For those retailers worrying about the legal threats associated with the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (FACTA), in particular the rule that says they can't give a customer a receipt displaying the last few digits of the payment card nor can it show the expiration date, they can rest a lot easier this week. That's thanks to a ruling on Wednesday (May 28) from a federal judge and the passage of a bill this week softening the law.
Metro Using RFID To Track Meat Freshness
Germany's METRO Group is experimenting with RFID inserts to track meat and to immediately locate any product that is about to expire or that has expired. METRO is placing the inlays into the foam meat packing trays used in their Future Store.
Barnes & Noble Launches Its Mobile Site
Barnes & Noble on Wednesday (May 28) launched its mobile E-Commerce site, which is pretty much a super-slimmed down version of its regular site. B&N Mobile includes search, store-finder, book availability and order tracking. It's not an especially sophisticated site, but it puts the world's largest physical world bookstore on a very short list of major e-tailers who have bothered to design a version of their site for the cellphone.
Martha Stewart's New Web Strategy: Do As Little As Possible
Like many ex-cons, when Martha Stewart got out of prison, she had a different outlook on life. So she's going to relaunch her E-Commerce site. But this time, she'll try and do it right by doing as little as possible.
E-Commerce: What Goes Up Must Come Down
New E-Commerce figures from e-Marketer show continued growth over the several years, but the rate of growth will quickly drop. The firm reported, for example, that last year's E-Commerce sales hit $127.7 billion, a figure that they are projecting to steadily rise to hit $218.4 billion in four years.
Fear Of Addition A Key Cause Of Abandoned Shopping Carts
About 36 percent of all E-Commerce shoppers who abandon their shopping cart did so because the purchase total was a lot more than they had expected. That's one takeaway from an April PayPal survey of U.S. e-tail consumers.
Blockbuster Testing Movie-To-Device In-Store Downloads
The Blockbuster movie-download kiosks—slated to start their trial in June—will download movies directly into consumer-owned portable devices in about two minutes, according to a demo at the company's shareholder meeting Wednesday (May 28).
MasterCard To Trial NFC In Canada This Summer
MasterCard Canada this summer will start a 4-month NFC-phone trial, with the backing of some of Canada's largest retailers, including Loblaw, Petro Canada, Tim Hortons', Pioneer Petroleum, Rabba Foods, a major NHL arena and McDonalds.
Wal-Mart Outgrows Its Homegrown Financial System
At $388 billion in annual revenue, handling Wal-Mart's ERP financial application is nothing if not challenging. But when Wal-Mart last year turned to SAP to take over many of the financial functions that the chain had been handling with in-house software, it was a concession that it can't push its homegrown apps as far as it used to.
Delays Making Web App Weaknesses Worse
Guest View Columnist David Taylor believes that Web application vulnerabilities make up more than 60 percent of all software vulnerabilities. "They are so well known that the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) has published a list of these vulnerabilities. They are so easy to exploit that even the most junior hackers can find lists of popular Web application hacks and use them to break into your Web store."
The Lesson Never Learned: Blank Server Passwords At TJX
Much has been made recently of TJX firing a store employee who posted public comments about weak security procedures that still exist at the retail chain that was the site of the worst data breach in credit-card history.
Amazon To Offer Streaming Videos
Amazon is preparing to expand its entertainment offerings, with a planned streaming video launch "in the next few weeks," according to a speech given Wednesday (May 28) by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
PriceChopper Using CRM To Alert Customers To Recalls
A handful of grocery chains—including PriceChopper and Wegmans—have started using CRM data to alert customers to product recalls, an encouraging move to convince consumers that loyalty cards can be used to help them beyond taking 10 cents off a gallon of milk.
Macy's To Merge A Kiosk With A Vending Machine
What do you get when you merge a kiosk with a vending machine? I'm not sure. But whatever it is, Macy's is putting it into some 392 stores right away, the chain announced May 22. That represents almost half of the chain's 800 stores.
The Self-Checkout Future: Customized, Faster And More Dangerous
Jane's contactless loyalty card is detected as the Des Moines attorney approaches the self-checkout. The system knows the counselor's shopping history and anticipates that the counselor likely has a dozen kiwis in her cart. So when she places the barcode-less fruit on the scale, the first fruit it displays in its list is kiwi, followed by the four fruits and vegetables that Jane typically buys.
The Battle: Nordstrom Customer Service Vs. Buy-Online-Pick-Up-In-Store
Nordstrom on Tuesday (May 20) said they would support buy-online-pick-up-in-store for the first time. This e-commerce cross-channel classic has been popular for several years, but Nordstrom--with its stronger than average commitment to customer service--has resisted until now.
Can Microsoft Make Search-Engine-Specific Pricing Work?
Microsoft's announcement this week that it would offer rebates for purchases made through its search engine is shaking the E-Commerce world. But the very lengthy list of gotchas—including making consumers wait potentially 11 weeks after purchases before seeing the rebate checks—is raising questions about whether this approach will work.
Checkpoint Chooses Cheesy Chore
The grocery challenge with the theft of moist, fresh products—such as cheese—has frustrated retail loss prevention managers because such products tend to react poorly with EAS tags. Checkpoint and Sealed Air Cryovac announced Wednesday (May 21) one possible way around this issue.
GuestView: Most Retailers Are Holding Off Server Virtualization. That's A Bad Idea
More than 75 percent of enterprises are holding off on deploying server virtualization in the cardholder environment until the PCI Security Standards Council clarifies its stance on virtualization, which they hope will come in the October 2008 release of the 1.2 version of the standards. That is a mistake.
Search Engine Shopping Is Causing More Abandoned Shopping Carts
As more consumers use search engines to find products filtered by a single attribute—such as price—shopping cart abandonment rates are increasing, according to E-Commerce vendor MarketLive, which tracks such matters.
Kimberly-Clark Tries To Replicate Retail Trials With Virtual Reality
Using virtual reality, $18 billion consumer goods giant Kimberly-Clark is creating virtual depictions of stores, shelves, products and displays—even sounds and smells people encounter while shopping—to enhance traditional means of research.
Mervyns Decides The Web Might Be More Than A Fad
The 59-year-old Mervyns department store chain, with 177 stores in seven states and about $2.5 billion in annual revenue, certainly can't be accused of rushing into technological fads. On Tuesday (May 20), some 15 years after the World Wide Web launched, Mervyns announced that it would launch an E-Commerce site sometime "in the fourth quarter of 2008."
Some British Retailers Secretly Tracking Customers, Using Their Cellphone's Transmissions
A pair of British shopping centers is experimenting with a creative way to leverage consumer cellphones. The consumers are being surreptitiously tracked by the signals emitted by all mobile devices and a database notes when consumers "enter a shopping centre, what stores they visit, how long they remain there and what route they take as they walked around."
Nilson: Payment Card Retail Purchases Increased More Than $201 Billion Last Year
Although this doesn't shed any light on this year's recession, American consumers were certainly spending-friendly last year, having spent with retailers $201 billion more last year than the year before.
Napster's MP3 Move Part Of Trend: Entertain Them Now, Sell 'Em The Big Stuff Later
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, Blockbuser and Netflix, Napster on Tuesday (May 20) announced what it dubbed the world's largest music download site, with some 6 million selections.
Will Sears' More Intensive Online Strategy Be Enough?
Facing a much tighter financial picture (the latest quarterly report saw comparable net income almost cut in half), Sears has turned to online operations as its best hope for better margins.
Report: RFID Market To Hit $9.7 Billion By 2013
The RFID market has a healthy future, looking at a 15 percent compound annual growth rate over the next five years, hitting $9.7 billion by 2013, according to a report issued Tuesday (May 20) by ABI Research.
BestBuy's Site Recommends Windows-Only Software For Linux Laptop
A tech blogger noticed something strange when trying to purchase a Linux laptop on BestBuy.com. The system's automatic recommendations for that Linux-based laptop included Windows versions of Microsoft Office and Norton Antivirus.
Face-Recognition Biometrics To Look For Under-Age Consumers
Some British convenience stores are trialing a facial biometric program to try and improve the accuracy of guessing the age of customers for age-restricted alcohol purchases. The systems "capture facial measurements that will be checked against a database of profiles of known offenders."
Has Tesco Figured Out How To Make All-Self-Checkout Work?
Tesco's experiment with an all-self-checkout store in the U.S. is delivering surprisingly favorable customer satisfaction stats. Internal Tesco customer surveys for its Fresh & Easy stores are finding some 90 percent of its customers saying they were either "satisfied or very satisfied" with the checkout experience while another 27 percent say that "it doesn't matter" what format the checkouts take.
Verichip Puts Itself Up For Sale, Parts Ways With CEO
Controversial RFID vendor Verichip on May 15 announced that it is selling much of the company, wants to sell the rest of it and that the company has parted ways with its CEO, Scott Silverman.
Trick Or Treat? New PCI Version To Be Here By Halloween
By this Halloween, the PCI Council will unveil the first major revision of the PCI DSS payment card security program in two years. But with the council not releasing any true details about the changes, nervous retailers are truly wondering "Trick or Treat?"