Guess this is what the cliché-afflicted would call a “sign of the times.” Macys is killing the Bloomingdale’s catalog while Amazon.com is selling copies of Bloomingdale’s 1886 catalog for $12. (Can you imagine the number of out-of-stocks in that thing?)

Current Bloomie’s owner Macys is killing the classic catalog “by early 2009″ to focus more on its Web site and “reduce redundancies” (corporatespeak for pinkslip panic). A Macys statement even came up with a politically correct reason to zap the catalog: “Eliminating the paper catalog is also consistent with our sustainability and environmental policies of communicating more with customers electronically and less in paper.”

With the many new self-checkout offerings being introduced this week from the likes of IBM, NCR and Fujitsu, it’s not a bad idea to focus on what will truly decide whether these machines do anything to help retailers.

To state the obvious: It’s getting consumers to use them. I say it’s obvious, but one wouldn’t guess that based on what the vendors were saying this week. Read more.

As retailers continue to experiment with mobile commerce, one potential problem is when mobile customers prove to be truly mobile. Let’s say a national chain sends an E-mail blast to the cellphones of 10,000 Boston-area customers, inviting them to visit the store for a free sample on Wednesday. The chain limits the offer to the Boston area through area code and other data.

But it just so happens that there’s a huge convention in San Jose that day of the Society Of People Who Live In Boston. Your San Jose locations get flooded with people asking for their free gift, leading to a lot of baffled employees and angry customers. This observation comes courtesy of a colleague who has far too much time on his hands to think up such things.

British retailers are seeing a resurgence in cash purchases, mostly due to a weak economy and consumers who are “nervous about borrowing or spending on debit cards,” according to a new report from the British Retail Consortium (BRC).

The British retail group used the opportunity to beat up banks and card brands for overly high interchange fees. (Then again, retail lobbying groups need no special occasion to make such points, as they often volunteer them when asked about the weather.) But the question remains whether the consumer reactions that are pushing cash usage in the U.K. are likely to be replicated in other parts of the world. Read more.

Pizza Hut is taking the “other people who bought also liked” approach mastered by Amazon.com and is trying to apply it to pizza and breadsticks and their Web site.

The new feature—dubbed Virtual Waiter and introduced by the fast-food chain on April 24—is based on “technology that gathers data from millions of online orders and suggests menu items that best match customers’ orders.” But a demo showed that the technology was much more sophisticated than that suggested. Read more.

Wal-Mart executives this week promised Arkansas legislators that any product with a radio tag would be clearly labeled, as the retail giant tries to put the inventory-tracking devices on all products sold at Sam’s Clubs by 2010, according to this BusinessWeek story.

After checkout, customers would have the option of removing the labels containing the tags, Wal-Mart told the state legislators. “If a manufacturer installed the tag inside a container, workers would be able to deactivate it before a customer leaves the store,” the story said.

Starbucks on April 23 cut back its financial projections for the year, citing continuing declines in its store traffic, especially in California and Florida. This is announced just a few weeks after Starbucks said it would shake up its Web presence.

But as we’ve noted before, Starbucks has always had an unusually weak Web presence, especially for a chain that for years dominated social networking buzz among younger consumers long before MySpace, Facebook or YouTube were factors. Is this the price that must be paid for years of Web neglect? Could an enthusiastic Web site have helped in-store sales?

When North Face—a unit of the $7.2 billion VF Corp. and a major manufacturer of athletic gear and clothing—officials started looking at the tidal wave of consumer-generated Web videos being created, they saw consumer passion. It’s the same kind of passion that exists in sports enthusiasts, which is who the retailer needs to reach.

Those North Face executives are far from alone. As retailers and consumer goods manufacturers have been watching—mesmerized—consumers watch more than 10 billion U.S. Web videos in February, they have tried to figure out ways to make it work for them. Read more.

E-Commerce customers have several complaints about online buying, but the top concerns are Web images that don’t match the real thing and sites that make it difficult to easily ask any questions, according to a late March Opinion Research Corp. Web survey of 1,092 consumers.

Linda Shea, the polling firm’s senior vice president and global managing director of customer strategies, said the inability to answer questions was particularly telling, and it was the result of an E-Commerce double-whammy. It reflects a rapidly increasing set of consumer expectations when it comes to E-Commerce sites at the exact same time that retailers are slashing customer service budgets, she said. Read more.

One of the most annoying parts of many a casual restaurant outing is at the end, when you just want to say “Check, please” and all wait staff seem to sense this and decide instead to join the Waitress Relocation Program.

Microsoft has decided to help (OK, they smelled money in those missing food servers) and created a device that permanently sits on the table. Redmond is backing this hardware that can take payment, print out a receipt and do it all without having to catch anyone’s eye. It allows the tip to be added (minus a deduction for subjecting you to the machine), and it can show various promotions. (OK, so having mandatory TV commercials when you’re dining out is probably not a good thing.) It also has a button to summon a manager if there’s an issue.

The National Retail Federation’s Shop.org is lobbying the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to not flag consumers when their shopping behaviors are being tracked online, arguing that it would merely serve to frustrate those consumers.

In considering voluntary guidelines for E-Commerce behavioral advertising, the FTC is considering asking sites to display a “pop-up” notification whenever information is collected. Wrote Shop.org: “We all know how frustrating pop-ups can be when you are simply trying to read the latest headlines on a newspaper website. Now transfer that experience to a retail website where customers have come to expect a seamless experience from homepage to checkout. These types of ‘hiccups’ could be devastating.”

A DVD rental kiosk outfit has rolled out a kiosk that keeps track of orders and awards free videos for frequent shoppers. The idea of a kiosk that has a long-term memory and an active CRM component is a wonderful next step (OK, a baby step) for intelligent kiosks.

The new units from DVDPlay use E-mail addresses in lieu of a loyalty card. “By entering an E-mail address during the rental process, the stand-alone DVD rental machine’s patent-pending software recognizes the number of customer rental transactions and, after every tenth rental, generates a promotional code for a free movie that is automatically sent to the customer’s E-mail account,” said a statement issued by the company.

Wal-Mart is pushing to create online communities for its customers, where Wal-Mart employees can sit on the sidelines, take notes and be influenced, or so suggests the chief marketing officer for online operations at the world’s largest retailer.

“Consider 130 million customers in a community sharing information on products they buy and use,” said Cathy Halligan, in this Marketing Daily story. “We learned you need to listen to these customers and implement the top-requested features.”

A group of 109 McDonald’s restaurants in the Salt Lake City region are doing a mobile commerce trial, with participating consumers getting free iced coffee. Although those 109 stores are barely one coffee bean’s worth, given the $22.8 billion chain’s 31,377-store network, the trial is interesting both for its capabilities and for how much data-control McDonald’s was willing to give up.

McDonald’s is launching iced coffee as part of some new menu options and “part of our objective was to create additional awareness,” especially among the younger consumers who McDonald’s assumes will be receptive to a mobile coupon campaign.” Read more.

E-Commerce is growing sharply—much more rapidly than in-store sales. It grew some 21 percent, to $175 billion last year, crediting E-Commerce with six percent of all retail sales, according to new figures from Forrester Research. It was part of their annual State of Retailing Online Report that they do with NRF’s Shop.org.

That E-Commerce figure will hit $204 billion this year (when it’s percent of total retail will climb to seven percent) and will continue to have major gains for the next several years, hitting $335 billion in annual sales by 2012, Forrester said. But one of the report’s authors, Forrester Research Director Carrie Johnson, said that this isn’t necessarily cause for retail celebration, as she projected that many of those increased sales are little more than online cannibalizing in-store sales. Read more.

The Web world defies prediction—or does it? Conventional wisdom would have the new up-and-coming retailers faring better online, while the old-style bigbox merchants lag behind. And yet, Starbucks has had far more online troubles than it should have while Sears, according to this intriguing Chicago Tribune feature, is soaring online.

The number of people who visited Sears.com and Kmart .com at least once in February—an industry metric known as unique visitors—rose 20 percent, to 14.7 million, from the same period last year. That makes Sears’ Web business the second-fastest-growing site among mass merchants in 2007. Sears clearly has some serious challenges, but go tell that to the company’s Web people.

When Best Buy removed annual fees from its bonus card, the company yielded about 10 times the number of shoppers opting to sign up for its rewards program, according to this Forbes.com story.

A location that gains a reputation as a “flat-screen store,” for example, is identified as one frequented by more people with disposable incomes. Hence, salespeople are trained to pitch complimentary products, like sound systems and attachments. Interesting story….

The European Commission is cracking down on search engine data-retention, with a new proposed rule that search engines should delete personal data about their customers within six months.

The BBC News site said this recommendation is likely to be accepted by the European Commission and could lead to a clash with search giants like Google, Yahoo and MSN. “Google and MSN anonymise user data after 18 months, while Yahoo does the same after 13 months,” the BBC reported.

ISPs have been quietly expanding their use of deep-packet inspection. They are capturing everything a user does–to the point where “at least 100,000 U.S. customers are tracked this way, and service providers have been testing it with as many as 10 percent of U.S. customers, according to tech companies involved in the data collection,” said a new report in The Washington Post.

The service providers exploring and testing such services have largely kept quiet–”for fear of customer revolt,” according to one executive involved who was quoted in the Post story. Each company allows users to opt out of the monitoring, though that permission is buried in customer service documents.

A series of restaurant chains—including Subway, Tully’s and Brinker (Chili’s, Macaroni Grill, On The Border, etc.)—have been experimenting with a way to use regular credit and debit cards as loyalty cards.

Although the merchant behind the program—Chockstone—stresses a variety of security mechanisms, the nature of the program itself seems to fly in the face of PCI guidelines that discourage using credit card numbers for anything other than payment transactions, similar to the unsuccessful attempts to get American businesses to stop using Social Security numbers as defacto employee and customer identification numbers. Read more.

The retail move to embrace 2-D barcodes that began with a Sears trial in December and strong interest from BestBuy, the Gap and Target is inching forward, with a 500-store trial starting Thursday in San Francisco.

The trial, involving CitySearch, Antenna Audio and Scanbuy, is a fairly basic mobile integration effort. “More than 500 restaurants, shops and businesses reviewed by Citysearch are placing printed bar codes in their windows, and people who have Scanbuy software loaded on their phones can simply take a picture of the code and their phone’s Internet browser will immediately take them to the restaurant’s corresponding Citysearch page,” said a statement from the group.

Saks is seeing how far it can take Web multimedia, by trying to morph its online catalogue with live video and creating a live model runway show.

The test focuses on Saks’ three best-selling departments: Contemporary ready-to-wear, handbags, and shoes, according to this MediaPost story. “Since Saks knows that about 99 percent of its shoppers have broadband access, ‘it’s been great for us,’” said Denise Incandela, president of Saks Direct. “You can have movement, voice-over, music and information, with narrators talking about what’s important in each look.”

When Starbucks used its shareholders’ meeting on Wednesday to roll out several new initiatives, the new coffee makers and blends got much of the attention. But two of the new plans—a revised CRM program and a new Web site—illustrate nicely how well Starbucks understands customer service and how it still hasn’t figured out the Web.

The change to the Starbucks Card Rewards program shows not just an understanding of customer service, but a realization that the best way to make a CRM program successful is to focus on benefits—true benefits—for both the customer and the retailer. Instead of merely tracking purchases and offering small discounts (adjusting the price of a cup of flavored coffee down from ludicrously overpriced to merely absurdly overpriced. Buy one more croissant and tomorrow you can enjoy a cup of Joe that is only insultingly overpriced), Starbucks is getting creative about rewards. Read more.

Next Tuesday, it’s likely Washington state will have a new RFID law on its books, one that will be the first in the nation to make malicious stealing of data via RFID a crime. But the bill is a far cry from what’s the bill’s assemblyman sponsor had envisioned—and what he says he will still fight to get.

The bill had been pushed by Assemblyman Jeff Morris. The final version of the bill—which Morris said he expects Washington Governor Chris Gregoire to sign into law on Tuesday—makes anyone guilty of a Class C felony if they “intentionally scan another person’s identification device remotely, without that person’s prior knowledge and prior consent, for the purpose of fraud, identity theft or for any other illegal purpose.” Read more.

Among the retailers that are referenced as most intelligently embracing merged channels–the true channel-agnostic merchant–is Borders, whether it’s with their new concept stores or their breakup with Amazon.com.

It’s therefore an especially troubling note that they are having financial difficulties, as detailed in this New York Times piece. It’s an age-old business belief that few chains truly buy into and adopt major strategic changes until it’s too late. I hope that Borders turns out to be the exception.

The Hannaford supermarket chain confirmed on Monday a “data intrusion” during payment authorization transmissions that exposed some 4.2 million credit and debit cards and led to 1,800 reported cases of fraud thus far.

During the breach, “no personal information, such as names or addressed, was accessed or obtained” but the breach did expose customer credit and debit card numbers along with their expiration dates, said Hannaford CEO Ronald Hodge. Read more.

About one month into a major near field communication (NFC) trial, officials at fast-food chain Jack In The Box discovered a problem they hadn’t anticipated: cashiers didn’t know how to ring up a sale when the customer presented their cellphone as payment.

“We need to do a little more training,” said Michael Verdesca, the chain’s VP for systems development. Read more.

Hello, blog readers! We’ve been approached by a company that wants to create a 3-D environment for StorefrontBacktalk, complete with avatars for all readers. Before we explored this more seriously, we wanted to ask our readers whether we should proceed. Therefore…

The Metro Group’s RFID trial efforts have been well-known, but this is an interesting International Herald-Tribune story discussing some of the privacy debates within Europe on their efforts.

The piece quotes a Metro person as saying that a recent European Union effort to force the tags to be deactivated at POS as the kiss of death for consumer-facing RFID. “If we have to deactivate at the check-out, then the technology is going to stay within the logistics process - to say where is a box or where is the pallet in the distribution center. It won’t come on consumer items. They’re going to kill the technology with that.”

Wal-Mart has quietly launched its latest blog effort–called Check Out–and the site shows unusually strong un-Wal-Mart-like candor. This move is key in E-Commerce because retail blogs are becoming a powerful tool, lying somewhere inbetween a social network and video sites. The big threat of E-Commerce to established large retail chains is its potential to ignore the power of the brand and equalize all with good designs.

The reality is, though, that brands still matter very much. Those brands come with all of the good and the not-so-good reputations of that retailer. Will Wal-Mart The Usurper’s reputation be tamed with a friendly and candid blog face? Read more.

When the Sharper Image chain of 184 stores announced late in February that it was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and that it would no longer honor its gift certificates, the community quickly rallied around its injured compatriot, like sharks coming to the aid of an injured swordfish.

First up was a gift card exchange site called Leverage. Leverage didn’t offer to make good on the Sharper Image gift cards, but it did offer to make whole any of its own customers who bought Sharper Image gift cards through Leverage’s site. That move will cost Leverage “a few thousand dollars,” said Leverage CEO Mark Edward Roberts. Read more.

Are we looking at a near future where consumers’ purchase profiles will be used by law enforcement to track down fugitives?

The potential is absolutely there, with retailers collecting molecular mountains of shopping history—sometimes more than a decade’s worth—and law enforcement seeking creative ways to find criminals (or people they think are criminals) who are quite determined about not being found. Read more.

Despite recession fears, retail POS purchases increased some 5 percent last year, which is more than twice as much as had been projected, according to a new report from the IHL Group.

There are several reasons for the unexpected spike, chief among them PCI demands hitting smaller retailers and new profit-enhancing techniques that require current POS equipment, said IHL President Greg Buzek. Read more.

When Borders unveiled its first “concept store” this month in Ann Arbor, Mich., it offered a handful of new digital features, all intended to set up the chain’s rollout of a merged channel Web site (expected to go live sometime before the end of April). But what was interesting were their choices and some of the rationale behind it.

For example, one of the digital services for their in-store kiosk was from an E-Commerce site called Shutterfly.com. That decision went beyond the attraction of digital photos, said Kevin Ertell, Borders’ E-commerce chief. Read more.

One of the most impressive improvements in E-Commerce in recent years involves chat. Whether it’s passive chat’s ability to communicate exactly where the shopper is and where they have been or active chat’s sense of when a customer is about to abandon a cart or is otherwise is need of help, the recent improvements have been powerful.

But it’s been difficult to quantify the ROI of such chat functions, mostly because it’s impossible to know reliably what the customer would have likely done had a chat session not happened. Forrester Research this week this to quantify the slippery ROI arguments for interactive chat and made an eloquent case for chat investment. Read more.

Customers who seek coupons and who say are interested in sales and promotions are actually 13 percent less likely to make a purchase than those customers who say they want content, such as author interviews or book excerpts. That courtesy of some research that Borders did as it prepares to relaunch its Web site.

That conclusion came out of a Borders analysis of a weekly newsletter it has been sending to most of its loyalty program members. Although newsletters drove people into the stores, those consumers who wanted coupons were 31 percent less satisfied—and were 13 percent less likely to make a purchase—than those who sought content. Read more.

These days, retail’s data breach du jour is some manager’s laptop getting stolen.

Breach letters are being sent out so frequently that I wonder if it’s going to pique the business interests of Hallmark. A card for every occasion, when you care enough to breach the very best. Perhaps a merger with their Get Well cards? “Sorry to hear that you’re not getting around these days…. [open card] …. but your CVV sure as heck is. Call 1-800-DATA-OOPS for your free year of credit monitoring, courtesy of your neighborhood retail chain.” Read more.

In very early January, residents of New Hampshire couldn’t pull out of their driveways without running into a presidential candidate. That’s how it is today with retail IT executives and vendors selling PCI compliance packages.

But, for better or for worse, that’s not a long-term situation. Like the presidential candidates who had to fly South for the winter (or fly the coop entirely), these compliance salesfolk have a limited lifespan. Within the next year or so, retailers are going to shift from trying to become PCI compliant to having to maintain PCI compliance. Read more.

Guest Columnist David Taylor argues that not enough merchants know about Tokenization – the automated replacement of a credit card number with another (non-sensitive) number at the POS.

The point that these vendors make is that if you don’t have the data, then you’ve outsourced your risk. But Taylor writes that he’s always lived by the principle that “you don’t outsource risk” because when it comes time to file lawsuits, the merchant will still get named. Read more.

Some 230 Oakland, Ca., commuters started a trial this week where they were issued specially-equipped near field communication (NFC) Samsung phones, devices that could be used to directly pay for the subway, Jack In The Box meals and can interact with underground posters to get directions.

The trial with the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) commuters started Tuesday and is expected to continue for four months, said Mohammad Khan, the CEO of Vivotech, which is one of the technology vendors involved in the trial. Sprint is also a key partner in the project. Read more.

A wireless item-level checkout device being trialed by regional grocery chain Stop & Shop is demonstrating the potential—and simultaneously the difficulties–of distributed checkout.

The 389-store grocery chain—employing about 59,000 in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maine, New Hampshire, New York and New Jersey—has been running this trial since October at 90 of its stores in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island. Read more.

At NRF last week, StorefrontBacktalk did indeed moderate our panel on Merged Channel and topics discussed—OK, argued—included the place of mobile in-store (panel wasn’t a huge fan of it), customer expectations, supply-chain and shared resource hurdles, inventory strategies, compensation options and kiosk tactics.

The panel included Google’s head of retail, John McAteer, Borders’ E-Commerce chief, Kevin Ertell, the corporate development VP at Bill Me Later, Mark Lavelle, Ursula Milan, an E-Commerce manager at the Museum of Modern Art, and the dean of the E-Commerce analytics corp, Jupiter Research’s Patti Freeman Evans. Read more.

The retail 2-D barcode efforts are accelerating, with Sears apparently becoming the first U.S. retailer to begin a public trial, having started in mid-December at a store in Marietta, Georgia.

The biggest current concern—which is also likely to be the most short-lived—is that the service is available on a relatively few number of phones in the U.S.. That concern—a shortage of supported phones—was mentioned by a Sears manager involved in the trial. Read more.

The Shop-Rite regional grocery chain is piloting smartcarts that show different ads depending on a consumer’s shopping history and current shopping lists, the chain confirmed this week.

The carts, jointly crafted by Microsoft and MediaCart Holdings, use consumers’ loyalty cards to grab the historic shopping data and the uploaded shopping lists and deliver data back to consumer goods manufacturers about ad performance, by comparing ads displayed with the ultimate customer purchases. That last part is easy to track because the carts assist directly with checkout. Read more.

Somewhere between the retailer’s deep hunger for customer data and the consumer’s reluctance to reveal more than is absolutely necessary is a compromise. But where to draw that line in the SAN? (Our apologies.)

Office Depot CIO Tim Toews isn’t sure exactly where that line must be drawn, but he’s confident it’s moving more toward the data-sharing side, provided the consumer sees immediate, real and actionable incentives. Read more.

A favorite of marketers and retailers for years in smartphone-embracing parts of Europe and Asia, the 2-D is going to make its U.S. debut this April in some New York City consumer electronic and cosmetic retailers, according to the president of a Microsoft-backed company who says he has cut the first U.S. 2-D deal.

Although the initial retailer for this trial wasn’t identified, the company has been talking with Best Buy, the Gap, Nordstrom and Target. And for a fee ranging from $250K to 450K, they can leverage the trial to compete against online alternatives. Read more.

For those of you attending the NRF Big Show in NYC next week (The Big Show? With that name, I half-expect Ed Sullivan to do the keynote), I am guessing many of you will be bored with the same old fact-based intelligent panel discussions. Fear not. For a panel packed with emotional outbursts and insights disguised as innuendos, please ….

No, that won’t work. As much I try, it’s hard to pretty up a retail technology/E-Commerce panel as an exciting outing. But for a tech-biz discussion, we’ve got two decent offerings. On Wednesday morning (9:45-10:45 AM, at the Javits, Concurrent Hall A 1A21/22), StorefrontBacktalk will be moderating a look at The Road To Merged Channel. Read more.

Among the major announcements at the National Retail Federation show in New York City next week will be a major 2-D barcode trial backed by Microsoft. But the fun at a show like NRF is to find the offbeat interesting product rollouts tucked away, buried underneath the tons of not-very-significant. Read more.

Retailers aggressively support the idea of merged channel, but have a lot of difficulty in the implementation phase.

One $200 million retail chain—1800mattress.com—is taking a baby step toward merged channel, by sending copies of online chat transcripts to the local brick-and-mortar. “Having the complete transcript of what the customer is looking for onscreen in the store facilitates the sale,” EVP Joe Vicens said. Read more.

Although we try and focus on the IT and E-Commerce issues confronting enterprise retailers, we often get E-mails from consumers describing particularly frustrating retail experiences.

Some of them are so classic that it might be helpful for retail IT execs to hear these customers’ stories in their own voice, without editorial comment or filtering. From time to time—when we see some that look especially intriguing—we’ll share these.

This one comes from a reader describing a holiday shopping attempt: Essentially, I purchased two bar stools (I have a breakfast nook in my new apartment…and no, I never thought I’d use the words “breakfast nook”) from Target, using a Target gift card and a Visa gift card I received for Christmas. Read more.

Did Sears conclude that the only accurate way to see what consumers were truly doing online was to track customers who didn’t know they were being tracked? The $53 billion retailer isn’t disputing that it did distribute spyware, but merely that consumers knew that they were agreeing to spyware.

But the chain is also learning that the online world—with its thousands of bloggers armed with screen captures—is fairly unforgiving when it comes to marketing excesses. Read more.

As shoppers at Wal-Mart and other chains found themselves unable to use their giftcards much of Wednesday, Wal-Mart took the unusual step of apologizing and also the usual step of blaming its technology partner, First Data.

The timing of this nation-wide hiccup couldn’t have come at a worse time for retailers. Merchants and giftcard exchange sites have been pushing giftcard convenience more aggressively this year than ever, positioning it as the ultimate hassle-free gift. To have that network crash on Dec. 26—one of the busiest days for gift returns and gift card redemptions—is certainly not ideal. Read more.

As small groups of Web thinkers sketch out what Web 3.0–the so-called Semantic Web–may look like, how much attention should E-Commerce execs be paying?

In an interesting RetailWire story and discussion, questions are raised about whether this will be a broad transition or merely a niche enhancement for those who bother. But if major e-tailers want to change, the sad reality is that they need to get involved early or surrender the ability to complain later. Given how much E-Commerce execs love to complain, that latter option seems unrealistic.

As the TJX case all but winds itself to a close, it’s not a bad time to look at everything we’ve learned and try and answer the holiday-themed IT security question: Does TJX deserve a lump of coal for the worst data breach in credit card history, impacting some 100 million credit cards?

If we move away from the “Did TJX do everything possible to try and protect consumer data?” question (which merits a “What planet are you on? Of course they didn’t”) and focus on the “Did TJX do what was reasonable and appropriate at the time they did it?” question, things look a lot different. Read more.

In a move with significant potential impact for online marketing, the U.S. Fede