When Macy’s distributed a very cryptic statement on Dec. 23 that “some” debit card customers had been charged had seen “multiple” debits for single transactions, it went virtually unnoticed.

But questions quickly surfaced. For example, retailers have specific systems designed to catch multiple identical transactions from the same account. Why didn’t the Macy’s system catch anything until some accounts were charged two and even three times? One Macy’s manager familiar with the incident said it involved a Macy’s payment processor and that the connection with the processor “was experiencing a slowdown that day due to traffic or systems issues. When that slowdown occurred, that’s when the double charges occurred.” Read more.

A financial report on the troubles found last year with major department stores places the blame for the revenue drop not on the economy, but on chains that are “increasingly out of touch.” As detailed in this comprehensive Media Post story, the Cavallino Capital report found that only 6 percent of consumers did most of their shopping in stores like Macy’s, JC Penney or Dillard’s this year, compared with 15 percent in 2000.

“The problem is that these stores have relied too heavily on the things shoppers care least about, like coupons, loyalty programs, delayed payments and contests,” said Cavallino Chairman John Rittenhouse. “And they’ve neglected the basic rules, the things consumers say always matter, like having the merchandise they expect in stock, having helpful people staffing the store and a customer-friendly return policy.”

Some of the latest stats pouring in from the 2008 holiday shopping season are raising some interesting trends, including a sharp (not-before-seen) increase in traffic right after Dec. 25 along with a much deeper drop in site visits from those earning more than $150,000/year.

Both trends come from the Hitwise post-holiday report and both could support radically different conclusions. For example, consider the drop in affluent consumer site visits. Read more.

Amazon.com issued a statement on Thursday (Dec. 30) giving its customers fewer than 12 hours’ hours notice that it was cutting off Bill Me Later as a payment option as of Dec. 31. The highly anticipated move was a result of Ebay’s purchase of Bill Me Later in October.

The thought that EBay’s October purchase of Bill Me Later would kill the Amazon deal is hardly new, with one party involved in the firms saying back in October that “the Amazon and Bill Me Later relationship is dying if not dead already.” But the history of Amazon and Bill Me Later dates back a year, when Amazon announced in December 2007 that it would accept Bill Me Later as a payment option at some point in the future. Read more.

E-Commerce holiday purchases this year dropped 3 percent from the corresponding period last year, hitting $25.5 billion, according to ComScore. ComScore defined the holiday season as running from Nov. 1 to Dec. 23.

When they expanded that to look at almost the full fourth quarter—defined by them as running from Oct. 1 through Dec. 28—the numbers actually got slightly worse, with year-to-year identical quarter comparisons with 2007 showing a 4 percent drop to $36.8 billion. The top-ranked sites saw some significant increases and decreases in their unique visitor numbers. For the full list, please Read more.

For years, Google has given its Google Checkout service to retailers for free, as long as they bought ads on Google. Alas, no more. Explained one Google manager: “Why have it as a loss leader if it’s doing OK? We saw very healthy results after we decided to charge for the service.”

The change of heart—covered quite well in this Investor’s Business Daily story—is part of an overall cost-cutting program at Google. “They are cutting back on things like their free cafeteria hours, subsidies of their on-site day care, so trimming subsidies to their merchant partners is no doubt part of that belt tightening too,” Forrester Research Analyst Sucharita Mulpuru was quoted as saying.

Allowing customers of Gap.com to easily jump to other Web sites in the Gap family, and put all their selections in one shopping cart, undermined perception of the brand and eroded user satisfaction, said the president of a company that tracks E-tail site satisfaction.

The Gap’s Web site has one of the lowest user satisfaction scores in the “2008 Holiday Top 40 Retail Satisfaction Index,” a survey-based report from ForeSee Results. ForeSee President and CEO Larry Freed blamed the low score on diminished user perception due to well-intentioned changes to Gap.com. Read more.

Amidst the avalanche of downright depressing retail economic news this holiday season, there are recurring hints that E-tailers—as a group—fared far better. But because we’re starving for any sign of optimism, are we interpreting those signs unrealistically?

The seemingly happy E-Commerce signs were all around, right after Christmas. On Saturday (Dec. 27), Forrester reported that “more than half of E-tailers we just surveyed still said they were up in sales through December 20.” The day before, Amazon tried to make a splash by reporting that its “2008 holiday season finished as (Amazon’s) best ever.” But both statements lacked context. The Amazon statement in particular was ultra vague, even by Amazon standards. Read more.

As retailers debate how much they truly want to embrace mobile payment efforts, the Mercator Advisory Group is reporting that the tide will soon become unavoidable.

Mercator is now forecasting that smartphone-based remote mobile payments will reach $389 million in 2009, $1.7 billion in 2011 and $8.6 billion in 2014.

Tracking global retail from the United States, it’s clear that Canada is the country most similar to the United States when it comes to retail procedures. Surprisingly, the next closest region is not the United Kingdom but Australia, and then arguably South Africa. So it’s always interesting to see the few technology areas where American and Australian retailers diverge, and EPC is shaping up to be one of them.

The culprit is the apparent success of many scan-packing/EANway rollouts, which has made it difficult to justify paying for the transition. Sound familiar? Read more.

Kraft Foods, Nestle and Procter & Gamble are now able to synchronize item data with Metro Group stores in Russia, a collaborative effort being touted by the players as a “landmark” deal that illustrates the rapid expansion of the Global Data Synchronization Network (GDSN).

There’s no question the global data sync effort, in which manufacturers share product information with sellers through GDSN-certified “data pools,” is gaining ground. But not all industry observers are sold on GDSN. For example, Retail Systems Research Managing Partner Paula Rosenblum said she remains skeptical about the true ROI of the practice. Read more.

Extensive analysis of a consumer’s Web interactions has been used for years to try and target sales pitches more effectively. But new research suggests that such analysis may pale in comparison to the next wave, where every digital comment made by consumers anywhere—in a product comment, an IM, on a social network site, in E-mail and via exchanges with a live chat tech support person, coupled with Web traffic analysis—can be mined for hints as to their emotions and other thoughts.

The science and technology of it is really not that far-fetched. The fact that so many consumers—especially younger consumers—today share so many of their thoughts and private moments in so many public settings alone would allow even a casual observer to learn quite a bit about someone. But it gets far worse. Read more.

The story of the technologist who crafted an elaborate RFID poker table, complete with an HD camera to stream real-time games globally, is interesting mostly in how he attached ultra-thin and extra-flexible RFID tags to each playing card in such a way as to make it not interfere with the way the cards felt.

The details of how he did it aside, the concept is interesting in potential future retail uses, assuming that the per-tag price can be brought down low enough. For a grocery store’s greeting card section, what if the store—and its suppliers—could know which cards were picked up and which ones were opened? Read more.

Despite the putrid economy and the tightening of holiday shopping lists globally, the number of site visits logged in at comparison shopping sites has gone down sharply, some 15 percent lower than was recorded during last year’s identical period, according to Hitwise. More logically, Hitwise found an even larger increase—25 percent—in the number of visits to Web coupon sites this year.

The increased interest in coupons is easy to explain, but the drop in comparison site traffic is much more baffling. It could be that overall traffic is lower, as consumers wait for the last-minute ultra-panicked sales. But the latest overall E-Commerce stats don’t support that theory. A more likely explanation for the drop in comparison site traffic is the improved sophistication of search engines, especially Google. That theory also edges close to a semantic distinction, raising the question of what Hitwise labels a price comparison site. Read more.

Visa Mobile on Monday (Dec. 15) threw a major endorsement behind Google’s Android mobile OS, pledging that its mobile payments offerings will run on any phone based on Android. As of this week, though, that’s a total of one: the T-Mobile G1 phone.

A handful of retailers—including 1-800-Flowers, Jos. A. Bank, Planet Hollywood and Overstock.com but excluding any of the top 100 brick-and-mortar chains—went along for the ride, pledging discounts to be beamed to T-Mobile customers using Chase Visa and debit cards. Read more.

‘Tis the season to be jolly. Unless you’re in charge of uptime at upscale retailer J.Crew’s Web site.

Having suffered outages during Cyber Monday, J.Crew again became unavailable—to at least some prospective customers—for an extended period on Wednesday (Dec. 17). In doing so, J.Crew’s site joined a group of Web properties that continued having a tough time this holiday season, including OfficeMax, Blackwell and Sephora. Read more.

In a sharply down economy, retail IT budgets are going to go on a roller coaster ride in the need for greater efficiency. And given how small a percentage of corporate spending is typically represented by the IT capital expenditure budget, IT will probably feel less of the pain than many other divisions.

But—you just knew there was going to be a but—a new Gartner report predicts that it may not be all happy news. As IT spending is slightly insolated and spending in other departments gets gutted, “IT spend as a percentage of retail revenue will go up,” said Gartner Research VP Hung LeHong. “In some ways, that will backfire on the IT group” as they’ll then become a bigger target for cost-cutters. Read more.

One of every three customers walking into an Office Max store to buy a consumer electronics product left empty-handed (and probably bitter) this year because the product was unavailable, according to new research by IHL Group.

Office Max topped IHL’s list of consumer electronics retailers in terms of lost sales due to out-of-stocks, locked cases (with no help in sight) or staffer inability to find stuff supposedly in inventory. But Office Max certainly wasn’t alone in the research company’s hall of shame, with Office Depot and Circuit City keeping it company. Read more.

On the one hand, many clicks on a retailer Web site indicate user engagement. And that’s a good thing, unless cumbersome site design is forcing users to click unnecessarily.

In its recent audit of Cyber Monday shopper activity, site-monitoring company ClickStream Technologies found that too many clicks during the checkout process prompt frustrated buyers to wriggle from the hook. Read more.

Online retailers are relying too little on automation to thwart online fraud, meaning too many employee hours are spent reviewing orders that shouldn’t have raised any flags of suspicion, according to a new report from security vendor CyberSource.

In publishing the results of its 10th annual survey of E-Commerce fraud, the California company said E-tailers continue to lose 1.4 percent of their online revenue to fraud (the same rate of loss CyberSource has seen since 2006) and they compound those losses by failing to sufficiently trust fraud-detection technology. Read more.

Around this time of year, GuestView Columnist David Taylor starts to wax nostalgic about the good old days at Gartner when he used to make grand announcements about his vision for the future of technology.

To keep him off the streets, we’re letting him make more predictions. If you’re looking for comfort, you don’t want to Read more.

“Unprecedented” problems with the United States Postal Service’s popular Click-N-Ship service probably had many holiday shippers clicking and cursing throughout the week, but a USPS spokesman said the worst was over by Dec. 12.

“Obviously, this is one of the busiest times of the year for us and for our customers,” one Postal official said. “Volume definitely played a part, but there was also a technical glitch in the system.” Read more.

Gift card exchange site Leverage, which had pushed one of the more creative CRM ideas out there, has laid off its entire workforce and is hoping economic fortunes will improve next year, according to company CEO/Co-Founder Mark Edward Roberts.

This is an interesting time for gift cards, and it could prove to be a very favorable period for those retailers willing to change gift card policies to match the climate. The CRM potential for these card exchange efforts is huge; retailers could potentially learn who the consumer is, what that person was given (and chose to give up) and potentially even what the card is eventually used to buy. Read more.

Amazon.com this week jumped in with a clever gift card strategy that bordered on brilliant, a tactic that could simultaneously boost revenue and steal sales from multiple competitors.

Even better, it was happening at a time that rumors—many of them false—were making consumers hesitant to buy gift cards from their rivals. Amazon could have made a good argument that consumers would be more comfortable buying from Amazon. So with such a wonderful plan, what would possess Amazon to put a statement that, at the most charitable, could be described as a phrasing so deceptive that even a New Jersey or Illinois politician would find it too over the top? Read more.

Amazon is far from alone this holiday season is pushing some new mobile efforts, standing alongside Walmart, Target, Gap and Sears in the popular holiday “let’s fling random things at the cellular tower and see what sticks” game.

But as is Amazon’s tendency, its experiment is a little bolder and more daring.The concept is interesting, but we’re having a difficult time coming up with a viable ROI for it. If it’s intended to actually generate revenue for Amazon above and beyond revenue that they would have likely already received, it’s much more problematic. Read more.