Evan Schuman

In the first year or two of e-commerce, one sign of sure trouble was seeing a high number of abandoned shopping carts. Ive always loved the term “abandoned shopping carts” because its one of the rare examples in technology where the term quite accurately—and explicitly—describes what it means to describe. It refers to a customer […]

The time-honored tradition of retail rebates assumes that many customers wont bother. Staples Inc. this week challenges that approach with an online campaign aimed at making rebates point-and-click easy. In the first phase of Staples Easy Rebates, Staples is partnering with Parago Inc. to provide an automated online approach to rebates. After making an in-store […]

Many large retailers are “ill-prepared” to handle the likely flood of data expected from RFID implementations, and many havent even mastered their current bar-code systems, according to a new report from analyst firm VDC (Venture Development Corp.). “OK, weve now got most of our suppliers finally on board with automatic identification and data capture technologies […]

In a move that is expected to slash one kind of retail installation project from nine months to three, a National Retail Federation division has unveiled the initial public release of its IXRetail Time Punch XML schema. The division—The Association for Retail Technology Standards, or ARTS—also introduced Customer 2.0, which is intended to aid the […]

In one corner of Microsoft Corp., the smaller the better is the order of the day for new customers. Microsofts latest retail push is focusing on the smallest of retailers, those with perhaps a single checkout lane and no more than nine stores. Microsofts pitch is a fully bundled $3,000 package with software and just […]

Shoppers this holiday season are going to run into a blizzard of next-generation kiosks, about three times as many of the devices as they saw last year, according to a new report from analyst firm Frost & Sullivan. The report comes as retailers learn that its better to give than to receive, especially when CRM […]

Forrester Research is projecting that online holiday sales this year will hit $13.2 billion, which represents a 20 percent increase compared with last year. Thats great when compared with a projected brick-and-mortar sales percentage increase of 4.5 percent for the same period, but much less so when compared with last years online retail growth of […]

In the clothing business, selling a suit that doesnt fit a customer makes little sense, even if its highly profitable. The same can be said for retail e-commerce strategies: There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all Web site. Casual Male, with more than 533 stores in the United States and Puerto Rico, dominates the […]

As the holiday season approaches, we have good news and bad news on the major retail multichannel front. The good news is that some retailers are getting a lot better at handling the technology. The bad news is that their employees often dont know about it, making the advantages moot. Retail executives are optimistically projecting […]

Although it is almost universally accepted that a truly integrated multichannel retail approach is the ideal, few retailers have been able to get anywhere close, reports a recent Aberdeen Group research report. The report cites quite a few roadblocks, ranging from corporate attitudes and fears to difficult technology integration problems such as consistent order and […]

While many retailers are struggling to make multichannel operations work at all, Best Buy is taking a leadership position in making the retailer a single brand with multiple points of access. But Best Buy is an almost perfect example of the difficulties in making all channels appear as one to the customer, as it excels […]

With wireless uncertainty as its staunch ally, Vivotech on Monday will introduce a system to help retailers quickly convert existing POS units to accept wireless entries. The reason some retailers may find this an attractive option is, ironically, because their interest in contactless payment approaches is lukewarm. If the interest was nil, then there would […]