eWEEK EDITORS

TheEndRecords.com process hundreds of orders a day, but it quickly discovered that it was having to compete with Amazon.com and others. It found Web-hosted tools—integrated with shipping packages—to be an effective way to compete. Read the entire Internet Retailer story here.

As bad as that number sounds, its actually better than the average for other industries. Among the good pieces of retail news that came out of the survey: of the responses that did go out, more than one-third were identified as “good” at answering the customers question. Read the entire Internet Retailer story here.

In the experimental program in Texas and New Mexico, participants charge their smart card at a health clinic and then uses it at participating retailers. The programs goal is to make fraud much more difficult. Read the entire Retail Bulletin story here.

In 2000, supply chain management (SCM) software was growing by 36 percent a year. This year, that figure is projected to plummet to about 2.5 percent. Does this mean the market is now saturated or have IT eyes turned elsewhere? Read the entire CRM Daily story here.

The Big Blue move is an importance advance for its strategically high-priority on-demand efforts. But taking advantage of Veneticas unstructured-data knowledge by still working through an IBM sieve could prove difficult. IBM has a rich and profitable history of coming late to a party but still dominating and of executing its vision through acquisitions. But […]

A problem faced by many retailers today is to leverage the tons of collected data into decisions and to do it in realtime. Wegmans Food Markets in New York and Chase-Pitkin Home & Garden are two big fans of Demand Intelligence. Among their favorite benefits: treventing excess inventory, evaluating opportunistic buys more strategically and rethinking […]

Dashboards have long been used by IT operations to allow management to see large amounts of information—often continually updated—at a glance. Retailers are now starting to see dashboards as powerful tools to make instant inventory and product placement changes in the increasingly narrow window of consumer sale opportunity. Sears-owned Lands End, for example, uses a […]

Operating under such household names as Bloomingdales and Macys and employing 111,000 people across its 457 stores, Federated has a remarkably complicated supply chain. The companys global operations and frequent acquisitions are only two of the more explicit complicating factors. With a goal of modernizing its chain, Federated has set up its support divisons—such as […]

Another major state is trying to gets its slice of the Web commerce pie. Michigan officials say they lose about $265 million annually in unpaid sales tax from products that Michigan residents buy from out-of-state retailers. The state says thats for two reasons: out of state firms are not required by law to collect sales […]

After years of reluctance and failed efforts, retailers are starting to make kiosks work. Taking a page from their Web counterparts, retailers use the kiosks to make more items available without having to place them all on shelves. Industry consultant The LakeWest Group Inc. estimates that 25 percent of retailers were using kiosks last year, […]

With a focus on Wal-Mart, supermarkets and cross-border prescriptions, the 20 largest drug store chains spend $1.8 billion to shore up their IT operations, including kiosks, self-checkout and RFID. Thats according to a recent IHL Consulting Group report that said most of the money was going to RFID and capital outlays for new store systems. […]

IBMs intent to purchase Venetica Corp., which it announced on Thursday, is the latest gambit to prove that the Armonk, N.Y., company is dead serious about ruling the content integration market. Venetica is a leader in content integration, and, as a current IBM partner, its technology already runs in IBMs DB2 Information Integrator, giving it […]