Evan Schuman

The best evidence of the great online-offline divide can be traced to the earliest days of the Web. As the Web was just creeping into prominence, if you had asked any hotshot market observer who would likely run the biggest online bookstore in the new medium, the answer would have been Barnes & Noble or […]

Few have argued that multichannel marketing isn’t attractive and most probably essential, and fewer still have questioned the maddening inefficiency of such a system. An upcoming report from the Retail Systems Alert Group predicts that those statements are about to collide as multichannel sales start to become quite significant. “Until now, consumers who shopped across […]

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 […]

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 […]

Two key e-commerce leaders—Wal-Mart and Macy’s—found themselves shut out of the online portion of the holiday sales rush for much of Friday, as their sites slowed to a crawl starting at about 4 a.m. EST. This was especially troubling as it happened on the so-called Black Friday, where major retailers hope to see their financial […]

Retailers for years have argued that their online and offline operations should be seen as one. A recent survey suggests customers are viewing them as one and that some retailers may regret it. The survey by Gomez, an Internet performance tracking company, shows that many consumers who have a bad online experience are avoiding the […]

A report due out Oct. 17 from the IHL Consulting Group sees grocers aggressively moving to upgrade to self-checkout systems, even before they replace or upgrade the aging point-of-sale systems they are based on. But another retail technology report—released Oct. 16 by the Aberdeen Group—has a very different self-checkout take, calling retail self-checkout “an absolute […]

One of retail’s most important IT executives—Circuit City CIO Mike Jones—has left the $11.6 billion chain, with the chief IT job going to his VP of business applications. Jones had a creative and visionary perspective for the chain and a company statement left unclear the circumstances of his departure, although the phrase “to pursue other […]

Early Tuesday morning, reports started circulating that German police had arrested a man they had accused of being Osama bin Laden’s webmaster. It was at that moment that I realized how different a war this is and how the Internet—and particularly its multimedia-friendly Web component—has truly changed all.Imagine if during World War II, French law […]

As retailers and consumer goods manufacturers struggle with achieving the supply-chain nirvana of complete item-level tagging, $60 billion aerospace giant Boeing has gotten item-level RFID to soar, with 2,000 high-memory passive tags in every plane of an upcoming line. Boeing’s item-level RFID efforts are intriguing because of their scope, but also because of the extreme […]