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.”

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.

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.

E-Commerce avatars—computer-generated 3-D replicas of consumers with precise measurements to help purchase clothes that fit better—may soon use digital video to incorporate a consumer’s posture, facial expressions and smile. At least that’s one goal of Mercedes De Luca, who was a Yahoo VP of Global IT until last November and today serves as the CIO for Myshape.com.

One of the most challenging aspects of apparel E-Commerce is that sizing can be so, well, psychotic. A specific size can vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, if not with different garments from the same manufacturer. Read more.

A group of credit card thieves in Seattle tried to maximize their profits by using their stolen credit card data to open a loyalty card account with Best Buy, where they could get could extra benefits along with their stolen products, according to a federal indictment filed Nov. 19. One had tried a similar rewards scam with a Home Depot reward card and a Sears gift card.

According to a probable cause document, the defendants’ lack of discretion may have done them in. Best Buy regional loss prevention officer Steve Castillo “noticed a strange pattern of purchase activity,” according to the federal filing. How strange? The reward card was linked to 77 different credit card accounts between April 2007 and June 2008. And it was used to make 125 separate credit card purchases totaling $252,000, the filing said. Read more.

When are related product lists helpful and when are they distracting? Is it an obviously useful upsell or is it doomed to the fate of the salesperson who shows a customer one too many choices? HP thinks it’s often the latter and has sharply trimmed the number of related items it shows. And the company is claiming a 30 percent sales increase as a result.

An interesting detail in this BusinessWeek piece points out that an Argentinean physicist apparently analyzed—on HP’s nickel—data from Facebook, YouTube, Digg and Amazon to mathematically model user attention. Conclusion: “The long lists of recommended add-on products commonly featured on E-Commerce sites yield diminishing returns. Web shoppers tend to stop paying attention after a certain point.” Aside from the fact that all of the sites selected (other than Amazon) skew to one demographic extreme of Web shoppers, this raises the question: Don’t HP E-Commerce workers ever shop online for themselves? They truly needed a physicist to tell them this?

Amazon.com, which arguably has one of the most extensive retail CRM databases and purchase recommendation engines, envisions a Catch-22 future for gift cards. The key is making them more personalized, more customized. And yet, anything that hints of privacy violations is off-limits. It’s like a starving man being given the keys to a well-stocked food locker as long as he agrees not to eat anything.

Such is the plight of Michal Geller, Amazon’s director of consumer gift cards. Down the road, Amazon is toying with other ways to truly customize cards. But avoiding privacy issues, Geller said, is non-negotiable. “Anything related to privacy is off the table,” he said, forcing Amazon to focus on “some creative ways (that are) not creepy.” Read more.

A loyalty card that consumers can turn on and off could potentially usher in a consumer revolution of sorts, allowing the majority to punish merchants they see as misusing CRM data that has been entrusted to them. At least that’s one scenario painted by the president of the company that is pushing the card.

Beyond the simple fact that a consumer with such a card could decide to cut off a particular chain’s access to the CRM data juice to which they have grown addicted, Equifax President Steve Ely argues that his firm could leverage the masses of consumers. In so doing, he could tell consumers which retailers have been disappointing a certain percentage of their fellow consumers. Read more.

When E-Commerce execs try and understand abandoned shopping carts, they often overlook concrete clues. One of the best is whether shoppers clicked on the store locator link right before leaving.

But deciding what to do about abandoned carts, that gets complicated. The innocuous-looking store locator is akin to waving a red cape in front of the face of an E-Commerce manager bull. In this case, even the bull is very real. And, yes, it all comes down to incentive plans, the least focused-on reason why Merged Channel programs so often fail. Read more.

Equifax on Thursday (Nov. 13) announced an E-Commerce CRM and payment card that consumers can activate and deactivate based on how they feel about the site they are visiting.

The credit database giant argued that such a card could potentially reduce “the need for companies to retain customers’ personal identification information, which could also result in the reduction of risks posed by data breaches.” Although that theoretically could be the case, the only way such a card—dubbed the Equifax online identity card—will be successful is if it’s adopted by a large number of retailers. And each of those retailers would have to be willing to surrender one of their most precious pieces of data: customer history. Read more.

Forced to try and boost revenue in a tight economy, Best Buy is pushing an aggressive plan—based partly on open APIs—to sell to customers wherever on the Web they’re hanging out, rather than trying to get them to virtually travel to the retailer’s online storefront.

At a glance, Best Buy’s efforts sound similar to the social networking site widget efforts pushed recently by rival national pizza chains Pizza Hut and Papa John’s. But Best Buy’s plans are far more adventurous; the retailer envisions pushing its content out to mobile, blogs and video sites in addition to social networking sites. But the company also plans to create wiki-like rich content by leveraging what one Best Buy exec dubbed “150,000 tech-savvy employees, some 65 percent of whom are 16 to 25″ years old. Read more.

When Costco on Monday (Oct. 27) announced that it would support—for the first time—customer comments on its products, the move was less noteworthy for the $71 billion chain’s late-to-the-party embrace than for what it says about the industry’s acceptance of a once much-feared feature.

Costco’s deployment of Costco Reviews went out of its way to avoid anything controversial or, for that matter, innovative or creative. Almost all of the functionality has been outsourced to an Austin-based social commerce vendor called Bazaarvoice, which will review all comments and post them within 24 hours, once any profanity or “completely inappropriate” comments are removed, said Ginnie Roeglin, Costco’s Senior VP for E-Commerce. Read more.

Although there is little doubt that the United States is in for a very rough economic period over the next half-year or more, there is ample reason to believe that retail IT may escape mostly unharmed.

Let’s not get too optimistic here. “Mostly unharmed” doesn’t mean escaping untouched. But it does mean that when large companies—especially retailers—have to suddenly make do with a lot fewer people, they need that good ole IT magic more than ever. They need the efficiencies that IT promises and the employee-replacing devices that IT enables. Read more.

The battle for book sales should be an online natural. But as Barnes & Noble discovered this week, the compelling, intimate experience of a physical bookstore is still proving elusive.

B&N, with almost 800 bookshops in all 50 states, on Monday (Oct. 27) introduced what it dubbed “My B&N,” a program designed to create personal profiles for all customers so that they can more easily interact with other customers. Read more.

Technology that has been deployed to digitally watch—and analyze—how consumers interact with digital signage could also be used to interpret what they are doing while looking at a cereal shelf.

Are they ignoring the product or are they picking it up, reading the label and then quickly putting it back? Does the timing and eye movement indicate they were repulsed by the sugar content (near the bottom) or the low fiber count? Read more.

When 1,361-store $4.6 billion chain Big Lots unveiled its first E-Commerce site Tuesday (Oct. 21), it decided to borrow a gimmick from its brick-and-mortars and re-create what it dubbed the stores’ “treasure hunt atmosphere.” Specifically, every morning, the chain plans to announce on the site a “deal of the day,” which is a limited-inventory product at supposedly ultra-discounted rates. Big Lots is also posting certain advertising circulars online only.

It’s an interesting twist on giving consumers a reason to repeatedly come back to the store. It’s also coupled with a loyalty CRM program called BuzzClub, which seems to be offering the same kind of discounts available in most loyalty programs. But Big Lots has come up with a chutptza-ish marketing claim for those customers who successfully apply for a loyalty card, and the chain listed it as the first of eight bulleted advantages: “Get access to all merchandise on BigLots.com.” And that’s something that non-loyalty card members will be denied?

A major Japanese mobile phone loyalty card trial slated to run from February through June of next year might prove to be a powerful prototype of how other countries might deploy mobile payment networks.

The trial features three retailers: a small technology café; a midsize, regional Tokyo-area chain; and one of Japan’s largest retailers–Bic Camera, whose revenue last year was roughly equivalent to $6 billion. The trial’s goal is to show that the consumer phones can hold the loyalty card data of more than 100 retailers, depending on how much data each retailer wants to store. Read more.

Home Depot and McDonald’s are both in the middle of non-traditional kiosk trials. McDonald’s is on its fourth such trial, after having concluded that the first three simply didn’t work well. Not too many retailers would opt for a fourth trial after three unsuccessful attempts.

The non-traditional Home Depot kiosk trial is based more on the units themselves—small mobile units, some as tiny as 5-inches tall—and the size of the chain’s planned kiosk commitment: Well north of $100 million for full deployment, according to the technology consultant handling one of the trials. Read more.

Consider this: Is there a connection between a growing support for various cloud computing approaches and the increasingly active IT role that franchisees are taking?

Yes, it’s a wacky juxtaposition, but stay with me for a moment. There has been a steady noise coming from retail franchisees who are trying to drive more of their stores’ IT strategy. Why now? This IT manager said it’s another impact from the economic freefall. When the dollars were flowing freely, having sophisticated reporting wasn’t seen as a priority. “Some didn’t care about their labor or inventory. A third of our franchisees couldn’t have told me what their product costs were,” the exec said. Read more.

Carrefour, the world’s second-largest retailer, on Monday (Oct. 13) confirmed that it was awarding a substantial piece of business intelligence analysis business to Teradata.

A very brief statement didn’t reveal any details, other than a self-serving quote from Teradata. “Carrefour is taking a dramatic step forward in consolidating their data infrastructure to better compete on analytics and get quick, precise answers to complex business questions,” said Eric Joulié, vice president Western Europe and president of Teradata France.

It’s 9 PM on a Saturday and Bill hits the E-Commerce site of his local pizza parlor to order a pie with pineapple and anchovy toppings. The site knows his favorite orders, and his payment data and his order are quickly processed. Then it flashes a message that they just ran out of pineapple and asks would he care for an alternative topping?

With the new Web site that $1 billion Papa John’s launched this week, restaurant workers update the site with topping out-of-stocks by calling a headquarters’ call center, which sends a message to have the site updated for that specific restaurant. But the chain is preparing for a much faster system, where employees at each store could tell its POS system about running out of pineapple as easily as ringing up a cheesesteak to go. Read more.

If you’re going to be in New York City on Wednesday (Oct. 15), you might want to drop by the StorefrontBacktalk panel on strategic kiosk use (yes, there is such a thing) at the Javits Center during the KioskCom/Self-Service Expo show.

We’re going to start things off by examining Home Depot’s kiosk approaches and concerns (one of our panelists has been working on it for months) and then debate the security risks of kiosks, the difficulties of POS (and back-office) integration and—for laughs—talk about some of the more futuristic robotic kiosks in the wings. It’s from 3:15 to 4:15 PM and we’d love to have you join us. Someone needs to ask probing questions. If you don’t, I’ll have to, and what fun would that be?

Japan’s NTT and three large Japanese retail chains—Bic Camera, Nojima and Runsystem—confirmed Thursday (Oct. 9) a trial that the group says will “securely integrate the reward cards of more than 100 retailers into a single mobile phone.”

NTT will run the contactless card trial—called Gyazapo—from February to June 2009. “Once a dedicated application is downloaded into the phone, (the system) enables loyalty points, ID photos and other membership information of multiple retailers to be registered under a single platform,” according to an NTT statement.

Google’s YouTube on Tuesday (Oct. 7) officially opened its click-to-buy program, allowing users to click on a song they like in the background of a video and instantly download it. Or perhaps click on a product seen in a video or on a poster in a video.

“Click-to-buy links are non-obtrusive retail links, placed on the watch page beneath the video with the other community features,” Google said in a blog announcement. “Just as YouTube users can share, favorite, comment on, and respond to videos quickly and easily, now users can click-to-buy products—like songs, books and movies—related to the content they’re watching on the site.” This is a logical and interesting move, but it will take a very long time before even a few percent of YouTube videos will have anything to click on. Still, a journey of 1,000 Exabytes begins with a single click.

Merged channel is all the rage—as it should be—but one key analyst is arguing that retailers must merge their channels, not their IT groups.

The problem is that most IT functions in-store are behind-the-scenes. To put a finer point on it, argues Nikki Baird of Retail Systems Research, is that in-store IT is not usually creating things that are customer-facing. This matters because retailers like to prioritize IT projects based on traditional ROI spreadsheet metrics, which rarely apply to new ideas for customer interactions. Read more.

Merged channel and E-Commerce issues will be the fighting words of the day at Retail Perspectives 2008 in Montreal on Monday (Sept. 22), where StorefrontBacktalk will be speaking and moderating discussions on those topics plus PCI, in-store strategies, supply chain and global tactics.

Panelists include IT execs from Build-A-Bear, Tesco and Reitmans, and confirmed audience participants include JC Penney, Jones Retail, Brookstone, Carters, Fortunoff and Casual Male. We would love to see you there.

Best Buy on Monday (Sept. 8 ) officially rolled out its homespun version of a retailer-neutral gift registry, but one that lets Best Buy see every transaction, whether it’s marked private or public.

The application, called Giftag, requires a small applet to be downloaded and then integrated into either Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox browsers. Once installed, users can theoretically visit any E-Commerce site, find something they want and then click on an icon to select it. The application also allows users to select specific elements of the retailer’s page to visually highlight it for a friend or relative. Read more.

One of the biggest ongoing headaches for E-Commerce execs has been customizable options for browsers, pop-up blockers, firewalls, spyware blockers and any other applet that is hawked to consumers. Without such consistency, it’s impossible to control—or even predict—how Web pages will look and act for various customers and prospects.

With a new entry into the browser battleground—Google’s Chrome—comes more customization nightmares. This problem is going to get a lot worse very quickly as many E-Commerce sites try and get more complex with more interactivity, multimedia and even 3-D experiments at the same time as consumers are getting more comfortable playing with their browser settings. Read more.

If the slip of a lip can sink a ship, perhaps a retailer’s flick of the click can kill a prestigious campaign mighty quick. The best way for a retail chain to make a customer happy is to offer him/her a program that few others can get. And the best way to undermine that—as Best Buy discovered on Wed. (Sept. 3)—is to then accidentally make that offer to every single reward customer you have.

The chain sent out invites to its exclusive Premier Black members—supposedly limited to the biggest spenders in the chain—on Wednesday, but inadvertently E-mailed it to the full CRM database. Oops! Read more.

Wal-Mart on Wednesday (Sept. 3) launched what it dubbed the Walmart Smart Network—a series of next-generation digital-ad systems—to 2,700 stores. The funky aspect of this rollout is that all 27,000 screens will be centrally controlled via an Internet Protocol Television connection.

In theory, this will allow content to be adjusted based on a virtually endless list of criteria and could be tweaked on a per-store, per-screen and time-of-day basis, said officials with Wal-Mart, who seem to be unsure when they’re Wal-Mart and when they’re Walmart. (Both were used.) “Every screen and every message has a purpose and we will be analyzing point of sale data on an ongoing basis,” said Stephen Quinn, chief marketing officer, Walmart Stores, U.S..

Calvin Klein finally gave its HTML blessing to E-Commerce, offering its first for-sale items on its Web, although the E-Commerce launching as U.S.-only. Anyone visiting from outside the United States will be routed to the existing corporate brochure site.

The site is trying to attract subscribers with a gimmick this month: Offering consumers the chance to win a $1,000 online fall shopping spree in exchange for registering. Calvin Klein is also—sort of—offering a free shipping deal, but only for customers who buy more than $200 worth of apparel at a time.

In an overall down market where the 150-store Nordstrom chain is seeing a 4.3 percent sales drop, online operations are jumping 15 percent–accounting for almost 8 percent of all sales. Company execs now project online to soon top 10 percent. Even more intriguing: Nordstrom is reporting a sharp increase in the number of multi-channel shoppers, who now represent almost a third of all sales.

But Nordstrom is doing online differently, according to this wonderful profile in The Puget Sound Business Journal (Seattle). First, Nordstrom is delivering the identical merchandise online and offline, a tactic quite different than many other cross-channel retailers. Secondly, its call center staffing has not been outsourced, a move that the customer service-intensive chain said gives it a competitive advantage.

It’s late on a Friday night and as Jane Smith walks into her local grocery frozen food aisle, she notices a neighbor walking away carrying a frozen pizza, right near a digital advertisement for 20 percent off of a Budweiser six-pack. Jane reaches into the freezer to grab her favorite Häagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream but notices that the digital ad instantly changes to hawk 40 percent off fresh apple pie in the bakery section.

This concept is being trialed right now by Germany’s $81 billion Metro Group, in a project with Procter & Gamble. Read more.

For the first time in its more than 100-year history, J.C. Penney on Thursday (Aug. 14) launched a CRM program for all of its customers. Until Thursday, the only CRM program the chain ever had was limited to J.C. Penney credit card customers.

But the $20 billion retail chain, with roots dating back to 1902, decided to use its customers’ payment card numbers as customer identification numbers. To avoid PCI conflict, J.C. Penney is using a form of tokenization to convert those payment card numbers into “a different ID number,” said company spokeswoman Kate Parkhouse. Read more.

Polo Ralph Lauren has launched a mobile commerce project in the United States that pushes its homegrown version of 2-D barcodes, with its Quick Response (QR) codes appearing initially on print advertisements.

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

Best Buy has launched a cautious kiosk trial, with 12 machines housed at eight airports in the United States. How cautious a trial? It was announced Monday (Aug. 11) and is slated to end Sept. 1. Although it wasn’t clear when the trial started, two weeks is not giving it an especially long leash.

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

One of the fundamental challenges of PCI compliance is that the rules assume the CIO knows where all of the company’s data is. In today’s typical retail enterprise, though, this can be a remarkably flawed assumption.

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

As U.S. retailers struggle to get customers to use self-checkout lanes and to manage the process, overseas merchants are moving well into Self-Checkout Phase Two, with digital cameras used to identify foods by comparing items with an image database and making self-checkout theft much more challenging with multi-chute fully automated tunnels.

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

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

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

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

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

Kroger, the $70.2 billion grocery giant with almost 2,500 stores in 31 states, has started a mobile coupon program that links the customer’s loyalty card (Kroger Plus, in this case) to a mobile phone.

The consumer uses the phone to access a list of available coupons, selects them and they are automatically added to the CRM account. Once in the store, the phone isn’t even necessary, as the coupons are now available to anyone using that loyalty card. Read more.

Like most large retailers, the $12 billion electronics chain Circuit City often has trouble motivating its store associates to research its varied product lines, especially because such research must be done by associates on their own time, for free.

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

An EU undertaking called the SMART project—set to start widespread testing in October—is getting good support with some creative efforts. It’s looking at scenarios such as “if one product is selling well at store A but selling badly at store B, RFID-powered inventory systems could initiate the transfer of the product from one store to another,” according to this ComputerWeekly story.

The project Web site goes into some other interesting possible directions, such as smart-shelves that tell consumers “whether the product is available in the back-room or whether there is a joint/ personalized promotion” and “shelf replenishment practices that change based on real-time information about availability and product shortages.” One of the tests includes “automatic discounting system for products–specifically, meat–that is nearing its (expiration) date.”

When Amazon.com and Tivo on Tuesday (July 22) said they would be selling E-Commerce merchandise directly from Tivo screens, it was the most visible sign yet of an imminent radical change in merged channel. Move over mobile, call center, catalog, in-store and online: Make Room For TV.

Deals like the Amazon-Tivo arrangement will present context-relevant ads to appear right alongside—or embedded within—various entertainment and information shows. For advertisers, this is merely the next logical step following obvious product placement in entertainment shows. (”Gosh, Grandma, what a large Apple logo you have!”) For retailers, though, it’s a way of getting that profitable E-Commerce site somewhere other than on a PC or on a smartphone. Read more.

The data from several unrelated retail sensor projects—all of which track consumers electronically during their shopping experience—will be hitting IT desks soon, as no fewer than three such efforts are going to be announced by September.

Retail marketers are notorious for arranging for a ton of data to be collected, only to have the task of making sense of it fall on IT. In this case, marketers and their love of dollars and sensors have outdone themselves, with today’s CRM data of what consumers actually purchase becoming a rounding error when compared with the sensor data tracking every move and every potential move. Read more.

As part of an extensive recent retail sensor trial, technicians noticed a strange phenomenon, one where testing equipment seemed to make every grocery store examined appear to be a massive nursery.

The Nielsen-deployed aisle sensors were using thermal measuring, using a customer’s body heat to indicate a person, which was intended to count the number of people in an aisle at any one point. But the devices registered an awfully large number of babies sitting in the shopping cart seats, according to Peter Hoyt, executive director of In-Store Marketing, a company coordinating that trial. It turns out that the sensors were interpreting fresh-roasted hot chickens—which were emitting significant body heat and were sitting in the baby seats—as newborns. The devices were then reprogrammed and the attack of the chicken babies was quickly halted. (We deserve brownie points for having resisted saying that the test results were fowl.)

Wal-Mart is certainly a company of few words. But when the world’s largest retailer (it’s expecting to hit $400 billion in annual sales later this year or early next year) wants to make a technology endorsement, a few words are all that’s necessary.

Such is the case with the announcement Monday (July 21) that Wal-Mart is standardizing on an Oracle business intelligence package—Oracle’s Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus (Oracle BI Suite EE Plus) to be precise. Read more.

In an eerie snapshot of where some top marketers want to take the next generation of search engines, a Japanese government-backed research project is working on a search that is based on what a user does, not a keyword a user types in.

But the specific tactics being considered—and detailed in a Web site for the group officially dubbed the Information Grand Voyage Project—includes searching history of game programs, blog postings, surreptitiously captured video segments from TVs and computers, tracking Wi-Fi locations and using an RFID reader connected to a cell phone to identify a consumer’s activities “based on data captured by mobile device camera.” Read more.

Staples’ Canadian operation has been quietly testing 2-way live video kiosks at 34 locations, but these kiosks do more than talk with customers: They remotely control hardware, including scanners and payment authorization devices.

The trial, which one Staples Business Depot manager described as “one of the largest pilots that we’ve ever done,” involves one video kiosk—with a high-resolution Web camera, microphone, scanner and a touch-screen—at each store that is networked to 10 kiosks at a Toronto office with customer service reps. Read more.

Despite an almost universal embrace of the idea of merged channel, most retailers aren’t getting any closer to making it a reality, with overly restrictive inventory reserve policies, inconsistent data and political resistance getting most of the blame, according to a new Forrester Research report.

“How many smart people are out there who are simply not reserving inventory” for all channels, asked Forrester Principal Analyst George Lawrie. “You never know where demand is going to crystallize.” He cited morale—not to mention inventory—problems caused by “reserving inventory for stores that could have been sold by the catalog or online channel.” Read more.

A handful of Stop & Shop stores have been using in-store location tracking–coupled with basket content–to narrowly target ads to customers using handheld shopping devices, the chain confirmed in a statement issued Thursday (July 17). Some 92 of the chain’s 360 stores are participating in the trial.

“If a customer is walking down the health and beauty aisle, it can trigger an offer for a new brand of shampoo,” said Michele Deziel, the senior VP of marketing at Modiv Media, which is working with Stop & Shop on the trial, along with Microsoft.

Two recent developments—one involving a New York federal judge and the other involving a group of U.S. senators—are signaling serious difficulties for E-Commerce efforts over the next two years.

The assumption of some anonymity on E-Commerce sites can be critical. Let’s look at a scenario for Amazon.com. One of its most critical value-adds is customer comments—both good and bad—about its products. What if a consumer—employed in the consumer appliance world—purchased a toaster that was absolutely horrible? Read more.