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E-Commerce Site Crashes To Soar This Holiday Season, With Upgrades, Partners And Discount Traffic The Likely Culprits
Several factors are lining up -- including rushed technology upgrades, more site handoffs for everything from mobile to social networking widgets and a surge in traffic from bargain hunters -- that could easily make this holiday shopping season one of the crashiest in years, if not the crashiest. Store Locator Is The Unsung Hero Of Web Analytics
The innocuous-looking store-locator is akin to waving the 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. Would CRM Work If Customers Had An On/Off Switch?
Equifax has announced an E-Commerce CRM and payment card, which consumers could activate and deactivate based on how they feel about the site they are visiting. The marketing battle for such a card could move to consumers -- which appears to be Equifax's initial approach -- on the rationale that if enough consumers have the cards, retailers would have little choice to accept the cards and the corresponding loss of data control. Sears Mobile Move Illustrates The Mobile E-Tail Challenge
When Sears rolled out its mobile effort (Sears2go) this month, it illustrated the challenges for a retailer trying to craft a clean and stable mobile strategy at a time of extreme flux for the mobile space. Best Buy's API Strategy Goes Way Beyond Social, Mobile
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. Costco's Embrace Of Online Customer Comments Illustrates How Innocuous They Are Now Viewed
When Costco 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. FROM RISNEWS:
Circuit City Hits the Wall, Eight More Retailers Announce Store Closings
Citing pressure from the recession and increased competition from Best Buy and Wal-Mart, Circuit City announced yesterday it has filed for Chapter 11 protection.

"Store Locator" The Unsung Hero Of Web Analytics
Nikki Baird: Measures, incentives and compensation are still a major roadblock to cross-channel. Until retailers figure out how to get both channels working towards what's best for the whole business (and more importantly, what's best for the customer experience), most of the cross-channel efforts we'll see out of them will be timid experiments at best. How Much Do You Really Know About Your Security Consultant?
A Reader: Firewalls and passwords are "perimeter" components of security that help keep the bad guys out, but almost as important are intrusion detection systems, auditing systems, and file integrity monitoring systems. They help ensure your good guys are still good. Costco's Embrace Of Online Customer Comments Illustrates How Innocuous They Are Now Viewed
Adam Cohen: What marketers are starting to understand is that conversations about brands and products are taking place all over the internet, in blogs, forums and social networks. By opening up user reviews, companies are bringing the conversation directly to their own websites and creating a more compelling platform for users. Handheld RFID Reader Claiming 25-Foot Read Range, 400 Tags/Sec. Read Rate
Allison: What prevents a hacker from buying and reading RFID credit cards from further away? A Reader: The gear in this article is newsworthy for its impressive read-rate performance at these distances, and not just for its long distance reach. Something like this could work well covering an entire loading dock, for example. Hackers have already demonstrated homebrew equipment that can read UHF RFID tags from 69 feet. Most credit cards are based on ISO-14443, which uses a much longer wavelength than UHF tags and typically claims a maximum read distance of a few inches. Hackers have demonstrated low-cost reading equipment with a range of about a foot. Forever 21: Assessor Missed 5-Year-Old Transaction Data
Bob Rich: Experience certainly plays a role, but price has nothing to do with it. In this case, the focus is on the presence of a file or files that i doubt _any_ QSA would have found (how many QSAs scan every drive in the enterprise). The question is how access to that file was obtained Home Depot, McDonald's Pushing Non-Traditional Kiosk Trials
Cath Sample: Effective retail kiosks should connect effectively with the POS system,so that to the POS software they appear as another lane. However the kiosk interface should be entirely different from a POS interface. It's interesting that MacDonald's have now tested and proved this. Bryan Larkin: When I was with a dotcom in the late 90s and our product team put the sku for an IBM server in for a Palm Pilot cover, so when someone purchased a leather Palm Pilot cover for $12 bucks or so, they'd get a server instead. Since most retailers are still getting very bad data from their suppliers, they either need to have a great product data quality solution or expect some really interesting results from kiosk orders. As Kiosks Become More Sophisticated, Security Risks Soar
Scott Wright: I used to think of "kiosks" as just being general purpose Internet access points available to the public. But it's important to be aware that the term is being used to describe more powerful devices that must be secured according to the data they handle, and the threats that they face. Editor: What if the next-generation of self-checkout takes the impulse buy to the next level and allows candy bars and magazine to be dropped into the groceries at the push of a button? Why not allow for a customer to replace some other purchase to be delivered to their home later? Yep, we're going to be needing new words to describe this stuff.

Amazon's Gift Card Future: Personal, But Not Too Personal 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.

TiVo And Domino's Try E-Commerce Without The PC Or Phone As more retailers try to go where the customers are rather than getting them to come to the retailer, TiVo and Domino's are taking the next logical step with a TV-as-E-Commerce-Device approach.

O, Kiosk, How Doth I Differentiate Thou? We make calls on PCs and surf the Web on our phones. The lines of separation are blurring fast. But in the world of retail technology, the difference between a kiosk and digital signage is one of the more difficult distinctions to make. How to describe that difference? To one CFO, the answer was obvious: A poem. In rhyming verse. Rhyming verse that is so bad it's almost good.

Do You Have a Mobile Blindspot? The further employees get from corporate, and from corporate networks, the more likely they are to do things with their computer that security managers would rather they didn't. GuestView Columnist David Taylor asks if these people might be doing things (e.g., downloading malware) that could bring down your company?

All Web Meltdowns Are Not Created Equal When file transfer site YouSendIt—with more than 100,000 paid users bringing in some $10 million this year—crashed on Monday (Nov. 17), it illustrated the kind of crash that should make retailers very concerned.

Security Podcast: 12-Year-Old Data And Publishing Encryption Keys Podcast panelists debate card replacement problems, including inadvertently printing encryption keys on customer receipts and the refusal of the card brands to shorten how long expiration dates are valid. "We now have to worry about data that's been there as many as 12 years."

Will Consumers Punish Retailers That Misuse CRM Data? 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.

NRF Says Gift Card Spending To Drop Amidst an avalanche of hype about the desirability of gift cards this holiday season, the National Retail Federation on Tuesday (Nov. 18) predicted a six perfect drop in gift card sales this season, from $26.3 billion spent during last year's holiday season to a projected $24.9 billion for this season.

What A Bond Villain's Datacenter Would Look Like Some 30 meters below solid bedrock underneath Stockholm, an abandoned nuclear bunker has been transformed into what could only be described as the world's coolest datacenter.

E-Commerce Site Crashes To Soar This Holiday Season, With Upgrades, Partners And Discount Traffic The Likely Culprits Several factors are lining up—including rushed technology upgrades, more site handoffs for everything from mobile to social networking widgets and a surge in traffic from bargain hunters—that could easily make this holiday shopping season one of the crashiest in years, if not the crashiest. (Note to copydesk: I don't care if crashiest is not a word. It should be.)

Sears Mobile Move Illustrates The Mobile E-Tail Challenge When Sears rolled out its mobile effort (Sears2go) this month, it illustrated the challenges for a retailer trying to craft a clean and stable mobile strategy at a time of extreme flux for the mobile space.

"Store Locator" The Unsung Hero Of Web Analytics 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.

How Much Do You Really Know About Your Security Consultant? The Web is overflowing with analysis of the TJX data breach disaster, but what's intriguing is the possibility that some of the indicted suspects may have worked as code writers in the light of day for some major companies, including Morgan Stanley.

Would CRM Work If Customers Had An On/Off Switch? 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 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.

Site That Finds And Integrates Coupons With Low Pricing? We see tons of variations on the meta-search concept for E-Commerce, but this site seems to have hit on a truly practical combo: An engine that finds the lowest prices and simultaneously finds relevant coupons and then integrates the two.

Visa's Global PCI Effort: Small Carrot, No Stick Visa, long the key driver of compliance with the PCI security standards, is helping to clear up merchant and service provider confusion regarding the global deadlines for PCI DSS compliance. But GuestView Columnist David Taylor notes some unusual phrasing and concludes that Visa wants to ease the compliance process to get more service providers outside the United States on board.

Target, Best Buy Turn Gift Cards Into Literal Entertainment Devices Instead of making gift cards worthless once they're emptied, Target and Best Buy have opted for the other extreme: With enough micro electronics, the gift cards themselves might be worth more than the merchandise they can buy.

Wal-Mart To RFID Crack Down On Chinese Suppliers By January Wal-Mart will insist that its Chinese suppliers comply with RFID tagging by January 2009. And given various recent safety problems reported from China, Wal-Mart is also requiring sub-contractor information be included with every tagged product.

Best Buy's API Strategy Goes Beyond Social, Mobile 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.

While U.S. Retailers Close Stores, World's Largest Mall Opens In Dubai While the headlines in the United States tell of store closings and expansions being back-burnered, it's a very different story in at least one part of the Middle East. In Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, Tuesday (Nov. 4) saw the world's largest mall opening ever.

Ohio Man Pleads Guilty To $1 Million Barcode Scam The defendant pleaded guilty to heading a conspiracy that netted more than $1million by using phony UPC labels to obtain products and then sell them on eBay.

One More Charged In TJX Breach Federal prosecutors have apparently accused a New York man of providing a sniffer program to help the TJX cyberthieves steal payment data. The fact that 25-year-old Stephen Watt has been charged with unlawful access to computers, wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering is not in dispute, nor is the fact that he has been accused of delivering a sniffer program to accused TJX mastermind Albert Gonzalez.

RFID Market To Top $5.3 Billion This Year, Says ABI Research RFID sales globally will be more than $5.3 billion this year, with supply chain management, ID documents, ticketing and contactless payment drive shipments leading the way, according to a report released Monday (Nov. 3) by ABI Research.

MasterCard Pushing NFC Mobile Program MasterCard's PayPass is ramping up its mobile program with an over-the-air provisioning service to supposedly make it easier for consumers to personalize their payment data on their mobile devices.

PCI Avoidance Strategies Without a doubt, the most popular strategy for dealing with PCI compliance and data security is avoidance, writes GuestView Columnist David Taylor. Not unlike the game of "hot potato," which dates back to the pilgrims, the goal is to find someone who is willing to put up with the hassle of PCI compliance and then give that person all the credit card data.

Costco's Embrace Of Online Customer Comments Illustrates How Innocuous They Are Now Viewed 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.

The Old PCI Squeeze Play The position that there are far-reaching implications of the Payment Applications Data Security Standards (PA DSS) for the merchant community is hardly new, as they affect thousands of payment, infrastructure and business management applications. But GuestView Columnist David Taylor argues that some concerns raised by Jake Star, technology VP at HEI Hotels and Resorts, take this to the next level: the old squeeze-play level.

Will Retail IT Be Spared The Recession? Although there is a 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.

Barnes & Noble E-Commerce Focuses On Experience The battle for booksales should be an online natural. But as Barnes & Noble discovered this week, the compelling, intimate experience of a physical bookstore is still proving elusive.

Manufacturer Gets Creative To Meet Wal-Mart RFID Requirement Pet product maker Normerica opted for an unorthodox combo of smart boxes with embedded RFID tags and a mobile reader to comply with Wal-Mart's RFID requirement. The application was attractive because it reportedly involved "no significant retooling of its packing or shipping lines."

Handheld RFID Reader Claiming 25-Foot Read Range, 400 Tags/Sec. Read Rate A Hong Kong RFID vendor is boasting about a new $1,950-$2,500 handheld UHF reader "with a read range exceeding 25 feet with standard dipole passive tags and a throughput reaching 400 tags per second." That claim is usually reserved for fixed readers, a very sharp claimed performance boost.

Racial Slur Programmed Into POS At Genesco Store Genesco, which owns more than 2,000 stores operating as nine different chains including Johnston & Murphy, Dockers and Journeys, learned this week how POS receipt customization can be remarkably dangerous.

Does The Rich Niche Twitch To A Different E-Commerce Itch? And If Ditched, Do They Switch? As the U.S. economy collapses (temporarily mind you, but a collapse nonetheless) and holiday sales contract, the one segment rumored to likely fare best is merchants selling to the highly affluent. But in what could be bad news for E-Commerce, those rich niche retailers tend to resist online sales more fervently than other E-tail segments.

Could Software Allow Shelves To Look Back At Consumers? 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?

PCI Group Figures Out That The Word "Vendor" Is The Anti-Credibility The group originally called the PCI Alliance, which changed its name to the PCI Security Vendor Alliance on Tuesday (Oct. 21), has changed its name again—this time to the Payment Card Industry Security Alliance (PCI SA). Mercifully, it never bothered to change its URL, so it's still pcialliance.org.

Big Lots Launches Its First E-Commerce Site With A "Deal Of The Day" 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.

Holiday Online Sales To Grow This Year, But At A Much Slower Rate Two new reports paint a relatively slow growth picture for holiday E-tailers, although the projections are for double-digit growth this year. The dour side is that both projections are about half of the growth rate experienced last year.

Could Japanese Mobile CRM Pilot Serve As Mobile Payment Prototype? 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.

When PCI Compliance Is A Competitive Advantage Companies are beginning to extend the protection of PCI-driven security controls to other confidential data, which is great, argues GuestView Columnist David Taylor. What is even better, he says, is that some service providers are finding they can leverage their PCI compliance to gain a competitive advantage.

Australia's Woolworths Abandons RFID Plan To Trace Produce Crates Australia's Woolworths, which runs the country's largest supermarket chain, has given thumbs up to one RFID trial and thumbs down to another. "The overall cost for a company the size of Woolworths is still too high, and the return on investment for track and trace is just not enough for us to race ahead."

Pizza Hut, Papa John's To Merge E-Commerce With Social Networks The very premise of E-Commerce is for E-tailers to create a beautiful site, where your customers come to shop. The latest trend, though, is to cut deals with your customers to buy from you anywhere but your site, whether it's on MySpace or Facebook social networking sites, from a cell phone, in the middle of a Google search or while watching a YouTube video.

Study: Identity Thieves Swarm To English Speakers E-Commerce customers who speak English are "the most frequent victims of identity theft, twice the rate of France, Germany and Spain," according to a study released Tuesday (Oct. 21) by PayPal. The E-mail survey of 1,000 consumers was conducted this summer and examined six countries: the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom.

Payment Authorization Terminal Sales Soar Worldwide As retailers across the globe modernize, the installed base of payment authorization terminals has soared almost 22 percent from 2006 to 2007. As happens typically in a growth segment such as authorization terminals, vendor consolidation has concentrated control—and, therefore, retail purchase options—into far fewer hands.

Web Irony Of The Week: Sites That Sell Eyeglasses Have Weakest Support For Visually Impaired In their September stats, U.K. sites that sold eyeglasses and related vision aids fared among the very worst in one criteria: sites that are designed to be easily used by those with vision difficulties.

Report: Power Attacks On Credit Cards Still A Major Threat It's hardly a new payment card security threat, but what has become known as differential power analysis (DPA) is still very much a threat on most payment smart cards. A DPA attack takes advantage of the electrical impulses inherent in any smart card.

Circuit City Identical Online/Offline Pricing Plan Might Actually Work The Circuit City "one price promise" move could ultimately prove to be quite a clever piece of marketing. First, it will be trumpeted as a consumer advantage, even if it means that the price equality will be achieved by sometimes (all the time?) online pricing being raised to match the in-store price.

Home Depot, McDonald's Pushing Non-Traditional Kiosk Trials 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

Wal-Mart, Amazon Learning That Product Downloads Are Harder Than They Look The last few weeks have not been kind to the product download efforts of retail giants. Last month saw Amazon inadvertently giving away tons of music and video downloads, courtesy of a glitch in Adobe's encryption approach. This month, it was Wal-Mart's turn.

How Cloud Computing And Growing Franchisee Influence Are Hitting Retail IT 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.

New QA Review Toughens PCI Assessors When GuestView Columnist David Taylor wrote last week about PCI 1.2 changes, he received quite an earful from readers that some changes are having an even more strict impact.

Is Wegmans' Self-Checkout Trial Truly For Customer Service? When supermarket chain Wegmans confirmed this month its first-ever self-checkout trial, it was billed as a customer service feature. That's technically true, but only in a very roundabout way.

New European Card Data Theft Ring Raising China Questions A report this week from The Wall Street Journal about a European "credit-card fraud ring that funnels account data to Pakistan" and "uses untraceable devices inserted into credit-card readers that were made in China" sparked a lot of retail interest, but it's unclear how widespread or innovative the attacks were.

Wine.com Federal Court Ruling Only The Beginning Of E-Commerce Changing Rules This is the latest volley in a federal court—and soon federal legislative—game of Internet taxation and control. Can states force E-Commerce sites to tax for them? Can municipalities police what gets sold in their communities, even via laptop or PDA?

Home Depot Tackles A Supply Chain That Doesn't Recognize Geography "The systems were very poorly adjusted to reflect differences in locales," said CEO Frank Blake. "We are the single-largest less-than-truckload shipper in the United States. A lot of trucks are going to stores that aren't full. It's not efficient."

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.

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