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...
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