Evan Schuman

The two-dimensional bar code is going to make its United States debut in April 2008 at several New York consumer electronic and cosmetic retailers, according to Herve Pluche, president of 2-D bar-code vendor StoreXperience. Pluche said he has cut the first-ever 2-D deal in the United States, with a rollout scheduled at five locations in […]

Retailers aggressively support the idea of merged channel strategies, but have had difficulty in the implementation phase. One $200 million retail chain—mattress.com—is taking a baby step toward merged channel, by sending copies of online customer chat transcripts to the local brick-and-mortar. “Having the complete transcript of what the customer is looking for onscreen in the […]

With the recent slew of privacy incidents coming to light—including two this week from Sears—red-blooded Americans are doing what we always do in times of sorrow and anguish: filing lawsuits. But, as I was looking at two unrelated privacy legal filings on Friday, I was struck by their different legal tactics and the very probability […]

In what is surely a retail tech addendum to Murphy’s Law, the more sophisticated and elaborate a retailer’s supply chain strategy is, the more it’s likely to fall apart in the last few feet and, naturally, when it’s needed most. I was reminded of this when shopping this past holiday season in a major national […]

On the heels of admitting that it was using spyware on one of its e-commerce sites, Sears officials said Jan. 4 they were temporarily shutting down part of another Sears e-commerce site after discovering that it allowed consumers to see explicit details about the purchases of other customers. The Sears move came hours after Harvard […]

Retail marketers have always been in love with the word guarantee, without feeling the need to embrace its meaning. CRM vendors, for example, have always been fond of promising guarantees without specifying what they’ll do if they can’t deliver. Best Buy’s buy-online-pickup-in-store guarantee program promises $10 to consumers if their order isn’t given to them […]

Did Sears decide to give its holiday shoppers the gift that keeps on taking—spyware? It appears that Sears isnt disputing that it did distribute spyware, but is merely saying that consumers knew that they were agreeing to spyware. The $53 billion retailer is learning that the online world—with its thousands of bloggers armed with screen […]

The industry seems to be of two minds about whether this holiday season was a boom or a bust, and the most recent numbers reflecting online sales are more grist for the analysis mill. ComScore on Dec. 30 gave its latest snapshot of e-commerce sales this holiday season and reported a 19 percent boost compared […]

U.S. consumers are roughly just as satisfied—or unsatisfied—with 2007 online merchants as they were in 2006, according to the latest e-commerce customer satisfaction survey from ForeSeeResults. Also roughly the same was the sequencing of the top—and bottom—players, with Netflix, Amazon, QVC, L.L. Bean and Apple faring the best and OfficeMax, CompUSA, SonyStyle, Overstock and Buy.com […]

Shoppers at Wal-Mart and other chains were unable to use their gift cards much of Dec. 26. While Wal-Mart apologized to customers, it laid the blame squarely on the shoulders of its technology partner. On Dec. 27, Wal-Mart issued an unattributed statement explaining that, “Early yesterday afternoon, we discovered that several retailers, including Wal-Mart, were […]

As the TJX case all but winds itself to a close, it’s not a bad time to look at everything we’ve learned and try and answer the holiday-themed IT security question: Does TJX deserve a lump of coal for the worst data breach in credit card history, affecting some 100 million credit cards? Regular readers […]

Dell will introduce in January a retail kiosk designed to change function throughout the day, eWEEK has learned. Similar kinds of kiosks are already in use by retailers, but the retailers have to define their purpose before deploying them. The new kiosks can be deployed at different spots in a retail location, perhaps at the […]