Congress 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...
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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...
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