Best Buy’s Online CRM Move: Focus On Why Conversion Rate Is Low
Best Buy is trying to push its substantial in-store CRM program to help its online conversions. Although a noble effort, it's a difficult challenge, trying to get shoppers to not merely change their...
View ArticleFor Fraud And Trust, A Powerful Reminder That Retail Reality And Perception...
A new insurance company survey's shopper perception figures detail what, in the shopper's perception, constitutes a breach. Let's say a major chain has been breached. Standard bank procedure these days...
View ArticleSocial ROI: Isn’t A Loyal Shopper Already Going To Buy From You?
The indirect nature of social media marketing for retail makes for a lot of frustration. IT execs are desperate for any concrete examples of ROI and pollsters (working for vendors) are only too happy...
View ArticleAmazon’s Supply Chain Kicking The SKUs Out Of Walmart’s
After some 19 years of struggling with E-Commerce, Walmart is once again learning that managing a merged channel retail strategy is almost never going to beat a well-run pure-play e-tailer like Amazon...
View ArticleSwimwear Site Shifting Its Mobile Site Display Power From Browser To Server
A swimwear and lingerie e-tailer called Bare Necessities is experimenting with a server-based (rather than browser-based) approach to re-sizing its site for various mobile devices. The benefit—if it...
View ArticleLabs Strategy: Why Embracing “Failure” Is A Great Idea But A Horrible Word
Oracle posted a very interesting short thought-piece Wednesday (June 19) about the different ways retail chains do—and should—handle lab strategy. Often labs are pure internal mechanisms, but they are...
View ArticleFacebook’s 6-Million-User Breach A Frightening Reminder To Retailers About...
Retailers who worry about data and PII security issues were reminded Friday (June 21) that they have to worry about not only about their own systems, but the security mechanisms of every data-sharing...
View ArticleUpdated: No, Target Won’t Be Slashing Its IT Budget By Two-Thirds Next Year....
Is Target (NYSE:TGT) about to slash IT spending? No, it turns out, it's not. An investors' note from Citi analyst Deborah Weinswig on Friday (June 21) said Target has reached "peak spending" on IT and...
View ArticleWhen Testing The Largest Retailers Against Google’s M-Commerce Standard,...
With a looming threat that Google will punish sites that do not strictly comply with its specific mobile guidelines, one SEO firm decided to pull out the Fortune 100 list and test everybody on it,...
View ArticleExtremely Sad News
It pains us greatly to have to report to you that our PCI Columnist, Walt Conway, passed away on Tuesday (June 26) after a battle with pancreatic cancer. Professionally, Walt had that rare ability to...
View ArticleBanks to Retailers: Online Fraud? You’re On Your Own
When a land title company in Missouri checked its bank account, it found it short by $440,000. Seems that someone had logged into its account at BancorpSouth and wire-transferred the funds to some...
View ArticleHow Much Trouble Could You Be In If Online Customers Can Hide Where They Are?
One of the largest Internet providers in New Zealand is now letting customers pretend they're somewhere else when it comes to buying things online. That's likely to be a thorn in the side of digital...
View ArticleAs Chain Trials Facial Recognition, Channel Assumptions Flip
A major Russian convenience store chain, Ulybka Radugi, is now running a trial of facial recognition to choose digital in-store ads to be displayed and POS coupons to be offered. But as more chains...
View ArticleWhy Quarterly Vulnerability Scanning Is An Impressively Stupid Idea
The current PCI DSS quarterly vulnerability scanning requirement is nothing short of ridiculous, given the fact that most operating system vendors and some application software providers release...
View ArticleSquare Mastering PayPal’s “Don’t Tell Store Associates And See What Happens”...
When a Reuters story this week detailed that retail associates were oblivious about a Square service being offered in their stores, it had a frighteningly familiar ring to it. We have repeatedly run...
View ArticlePhone Makers Are Still Opening Security Holes By Spying On Phones
A security researcher in Seattle has identified yet another program running in the background of some smartphones in the name of collecting quality of service information. This time the phone is...
View ArticleVanity Domains Inch Closer For 23 Big Retailers, But Not Walmart Or Amazon
Vanity top-level domains (TLDs), which seemed like such a good idea a year ago to Walmart, Safeway, Amazon and Google, are slowly grinding their way forward. Last week ICANN, which is selling the new...
View ArticleWhy Did Merged Channel Fail Barnes & Noble?
Now that Barnes & Noble has lost its CEO and is further exploring "strategic alternatives," it looks increasingly like the last bookstore megachain has reached its last link. On Monday (July 8),...
View ArticleApple Drops Amazon “App Store” Lawsuit, Now That Everyone Knows What The Real...
Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) has given up its fight with Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) over app stores—specifically, its trademark lawsuit over the name “App Store” for an online store where customers can buy apps. All...
View ArticleIBM, Google, Best Buy May Have Cracked E-Commerce Pain Point
A group of dozens of tech firms—and two major retailers—are working on a standardized way of storing E-Commerce data for websites as JavaScript objects. IBM, Google, Adobe, Accenture and other IT...
View ArticleQR Codes Are A Terrible Idea. Why Is Image Recognition Even Worse?
QR codes are ugly. They're intrusive. Most designers hate them because there's no way to make them look any less like the brick-full-of-blocks they are, especially when they've been slapped next to a...
View ArticleeBay Lawsuit Asks: Is An E-Commerce Store Really “A Place Of Public...
An eBay court case poses a question that gets a lot more interesting the more you think about it: If an e-commerce site is used extensively by a large number of shoppers as their primary store, does it...
View ArticleBest Buy Learns The Downside To Locking Out E-mail Changes
A Best Buy online anti-fraud mechanism has unintentionally created a security hole. I was placing an order with a local Best Buy physical store, using the web site's pickup-in-store option. Because the...
View ArticleICANN’s Vanity Domains Will Break Some Of The Internet And We Won’t Help Fix...
From the Department of What’s The Worst That Can Happen?, Vanity Domains division: ICANN, the organization that’s selling do-it-yourself replacements for .com for $185,000 each, is meeting this week in...
View ArticleVictoria’s Secret Mobile Site Chokes On Plus-Size Images
First Victoria’s Secret’s (NYSE:LTD) mobile website choked during the last week of June, resulting in slow content delivery, failed connections and damaged or missing content. The next week it was...
View ArticleIncenting Non-Purchase Behavior Great, But Only If Numbers Add Up
To make a CRM rewards program effective today, it needs to move beyond points only offered for purchases. (Heck, even the Pope is offering concrete incentives for following him on Twitter.) Gilt.com,...
View ArticleAmazon And The Limited May Be Stripped Of Their Brands When It Comes To...
After a week of meetings in Durban, South Africa, focused on vanity domain names, it looks like Amazon's (NASDAQ:AMZN) application to use its own name is still being denied, while U.S. apparel chains...
View ArticleA Patent On Clicking Website Images? Nope, Appeals Court Affirms
For once, JCPenney has something to be happy—not just hopeful—about. On July 22, a federal appeals court delivered what should be the final blow to a patent-infringement lawsuit that dates from CEO...
View ArticleChanging Terms of Service? Be Ready For A Class Action Lawsuit
Think you have complete control of the terms of service (TOS) of your website? As a retailer, you probably assume that you can dictate terms to customers, especially about any services you offer them...
View ArticleSelf-Service Shifts Legal Risks, May Let Customers Off The Hook
One of the great things about the Internet and computer technologies is that they can empower consumers and businesses to do things that ordinarily require a middleman. Consumers can purchase their own...
View ArticleHow To Deal With Merged Channel Inventory?
As merged channels (also known as omnichannel) become the default for an increasing number of retailers, the challenge of efficiently handling the supply chain and managing inventory becomes...
View ArticleWill Warranty Enforcement Be Amazon Marketplace’s Achilles’ Heel?
When it comes to competing against Amazon, eBay or even Japan's Rakuten, one of the more challenging aspects is their third-party marketplaces, which give each a seemingly endless inventory at minimal...
View ArticleIs Domino’s Site Getting A Tad Bit Defensive?
Automated Web responses to consumer comments are great time-savers, presuming the programming assumptions End my that irritation, definitely viagra puts. Without little pharmacy without prescription...
View ArticleSurvey Finds Personal Recommendations Half As Influential As Comments From...
In our ongoing looks at survey stats and why they often don't mean what you might think they mean, here's a fun one. A new report from comScore and Millennial Media has a chart that looked at...
View ArticleCongress Wants To Regulate Customized Pricing. Yeah, That Will Certainly Work...
If legislation pending before the House Energy and Commerce Committee is passed and signed into law, online merchants will be severely restricted in their ability to use "big data" and behavioral...
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