Evan Schuman

Amazon.com shook up the e-commerce world Jan. 3, unveiling a new site that offers free overnight shipping for all purchases. The new site—called Endless.com—is focused on the highly competitive footwear and handbag sector, where sites like Zappos.com have long offered free shipping. But by upgrading the free shipping to overnight, Amazon is trying to shake […]

Amazon.com the week of Dec. 25 announced sales figures that make the 2006 holiday season its best thus far, including one day (Dec. 11, for those who track such trivia) on which it rang up more than 4 million items sold. The company also boasted of some impressive speed sales, such as selling 1,000 Xbox […]

Securities regulators on Dec. 19 filed a disciplinary complaint against one of the nations largest investment firms because, at best, it wasnt sure what e-mail was backed up. The worst-case scenario has Morgan Stanley telling investors that their e-mail records were destroyed in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York City, while knowing that […]

As retail RFID mandates promise to force more small- and midsize manufacturers into the radio-frequency identification business, NCR has put together an IT Cliffs Notes for RFID, featuring basic software, an RFID printer, a bar-code scanner and “a startup supply” of Gen2 RFID labels. The NCR RFID Retail Compliance package will sell for about $12,000 […]

As a species, human beings are very good at self-preservation, but were not exactly at the top of the class for doing what we should be doing if we dont have to. This is nothing new. Leaders of various organized religions thousands of years ago figured out that doing good acts because its the right […]

When it comes to the meat-and-potatoes of the RFID retail business—the tagging of pallets and cases—2006 is going to go down as a very disappointing year. A new report from Cambridge, England-based IDTechEx paints a sad but realistic portrait of frustrated suppliers and very isolated pockets of ROI examples. It does, however, hold out hope […]

As gift cards have soared in popularity in recent years—some $25 billion in gift cards are expected to be sold this holiday season alone—the attempts to use them fraudulently have also soared. But some of the theft techniques are woefully out of date. Does this mean that gift cards are secure financial tools for retailers […]

The problem of Internet accessibility for the visually impaired is global, with a United Nations study finding only three leading Web sites around the world—out of 100 studied—meeting the needs of “persons with disabilities,” according to a U.N. statement issued Dec. 5. The study, commissioned by the U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs and […]

On the day after Thanksgiving, Macys.coms site gave site visitors a flood of error messages and responded to page requests at a speed six times slower than normal, and it did that from about 4 a.m. until about 2:15 p.m. But the site didnt literally shut down, but for about an hour of that time. […]

Traditional credit card companies are fighting for their lives against a plethora of new alternatives, ranging from debit cards, non-credit-card contactless payment, cell phones, eCheck, PayPal and Bill Me Later, not to mention newfangled hybrids that merge loyalty and CRM, gift cards, incentive coupons and POS cards, such as a pilot at the Subway chain. […]

Despite consumer—and even some IT executive—beliefs that e-commerce poses a much greater security risk than store-based point-of-sale systems, a new Gartner report concludes that the opposite is true. Gartner is reporting that by 2008 most attacks will be on physical POS (point-of-sale) systems and that by 2009 only one out of three such systems will […]

In 2006 alone, retailers lost almost $2 billion because of consumer security fears, with about one-half of those losses ($913 million) coming from people who avoided sites that seemed to be less secure and the rest (about $1 billion) came from consumers who were too afraid to conduct e-commerce business at all, according to a […]