Congress Wants To Regulate Customized Pricing. Yeah, That Will Certainly Work...
If legislation pending before the House Energy and Commerce Committee is passed and signed into law, online merchants will be severely restricted in their ability to use "big data" and behavioral...
View ArticleLondon’s Recycling Bins Don’t Do Mobile Tracking Anymore. (Until This Week,...
At a time when many retail chains are trying to navigate the public-relations minefield of customer tracking, disclosure and data use, a story from London is a useful reminder that nobody is getting...
View ArticleSurvey Finds Personal Recommendations Half As Influential As Comments From...
In our ongoing looks at survey stats and why they often don't mean what you might think they mean, here's a fun one. A new report from comScore and Millennial Media has a chart that looked at...
View ArticleIs Domino’s Site Getting A Tad Bit Defensive?
Automated Web responses to consumer comments are great time-savers, presuming the programming assumptions End my that irritation, definitely viagra puts. Without little pharmacy without prescription...
View ArticleWill Warranty Enforcement Be Amazon Marketplace’s Achilles’ Heel?
When it comes to competing against Amazon, eBay or even Japan's Rakuten, one of the more challenging aspects is their third-party marketplaces, which give each a seemingly endless inventory at minimal...
View ArticleSephora Buys A Software Vendor. Wait, Can They Do That?
In the kind of move you'd expect from Walmart (NYSE:WMT) or Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) but not a retailer who couldn't make the NRF's Top 100 list, beauty products retailer Sephora has acquired a software...
View ArticleCourt To Fed: Keep The (Inter)Change
On July 31, a federal court in Washington sent shock waves through the merchant, banking, and credit/debit card industry by overturning the Federal Reserve's rules implementing limitations on the...
View ArticleCan VeriFone Actually Outsource PCI Problems?
In theory, you can't outsource PCI issues, but VeriFone wants to try. On Monday (Aug. 5), the POS maker announced VeriFone Point, a payments-as-a-service offering that basically takes everything in the...
View ArticleCMOs, Not CIOs, Now Control 11 Percent Of Retail IT Spending
Almost 20 percent of the $60 billion in annual North American retail IT spending isn't under the CIO's control. Who's spending most of that $11.6 billion? The chief marketing officer, according to a...
View ArticleHow To Deal With Merged Channel Inventory?
As merged channels (also known as omnichannel) become the default for an increasing number of retailers, the challenge of efficiently handling the supply chain and managing inventory becomes...
View ArticleSAP Exec Who Switched Barcodes At Target Cuts Plea Deal
Remember that SAP exec who last year was arrested for slapping fake barcodes on products within a Target—and his defense was that he was simply testing his company’s systems? Seems he cut a plea deal...
View ArticleWalmart’s Scan & Go Change Reminds Us How To Make Mobile Work
One of the many advantages of mobile payment is significantly expanding CRM reach, getting to know about a far greater percentage of all of a shopper's purchases. Nowhere is this more attractive than...
View ArticleNow Asda, Morrisons And Europe Are Going After Visa And MasterCard Over...
First there was the $7.25 billion interchange settlement that big chains mostly detested, largely because it would outlaw future interchange lawsuits. Then came a flurry of retailer lawsuits against...
View ArticleWhy Did Gonzales Hackers Like European Cards So Much Better?
Last Thursday's (July 25) indictment of five more Albert Gonzalez gang members by federal prosecutors in New Jersey is a reminder of how big that operation was (and may still be) and how far...
View ArticleChanging Terms of Service? Be Ready For A Class Action Lawsuit
Think you have complete control of the terms of service (TOS) of your website? As a retailer, you probably assume that you can dictate terms to customers, especially about any services you offer them...
View ArticleA Patent On Clicking Website Images? Nope, Appeals Court Affirms
For once, JCPenney has something to be happy—not just hopeful—about. On July 22, a federal appeals court delivered what should be the final blow to a patent-infringement lawsuit that dates from CEO...
View ArticleA New Retail Twist On Copyright Defenses
Part of any retailer’s effective brand protection strategy has to include an "Open Source Monitoring" program – you know, monitoring social media and webpages for anything that could impact your good...
View ArticleAmazon And The Limited May Be Stripped Of Their Brands When It Comes To...
After a week of meetings in Durban, South Africa, focused on vanity domain names, it looks like Amazon's (NASDAQ:AMZN) application to use its own name is still being denied, while U.S. apparel chains...
View ArticlePCI’s Not-So-Open Global Forum
PCI's Global Forum is an open forum in name only, at least as long as it continues to force changes on members that they are not permitted to even know about until someone who has been briefed chooses...
View ArticleICANN’s Vanity Domains Will Break Some Of The Internet And We Won’t Help Fix...
From the Department of What’s The Worst That Can Happen?, Vanity Domains division: ICANN, the organization that’s selling do-it-yourself replacements for .com for $185,000 each, is meeting this week in...
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