Evan Schuman

A new Web gift card exchange could shake up the gift card space, with cards selling to consumers for less than face value and retailers getting the gift that keeps on giving: previously unavailable data on who is using these cards. Trying to address the hundreds of millions of dollars lost each year in gift […]

As the established large e-commerce sites pour millions of dollars into security and enterprise-league hardened point-of-sale systems, cyber-crooks have been giving more attention to much smaller and less well-protected merchants. Those smaller merchants can’t even necessarily protect themselves by opting to not have a Web site, as the thieves are grabbing credit card information as […]

When a federal judge in California agreed that a lawsuit from the National Federation for the Blind can proceed against Target, e-commerce executives should have breathed a collective sigh of relief. The lawsuit essentially argues that Target’s online operation violated the American with Disabilities Act because it is not designed to be easily accessible to […]

Think of it as a marriage between Amazon’s consumer review comments and YouTube’s homemade videos. But will anyone turn little movies into big money? Buy.com is trying to merge two of the Web’s most powerful sales tools—consumer-written reviews and homemade videos—into a sales tool that will both tap a younger demographic and theoretically add more […]

Two new reports show that retailers are getting better at answer customers’ e-mail, but this summer’s load handling statistics predict a very crashy Christmas. If these two new surveys are correct, top retailers have figured out how to communicate better with customers, but their servers are getting a lot worse at talking with other servers. […]

Even CIOs at billion-dollar retailers have to put their jeans on one upgrade at a time. But Guess CIO Michael Relich found himself in an especially difficult position when Web analytics told him that 60 percent of his e-commerce site’s search results were delivering “not found” responses to prospects. Guess’ site search was a legacy […]

More than a quarter of a million Hotels.com customers are now at high risk for identity theft after a password-protected laptop computer containing their credit card information was stolen from an Ernst & Young auditor’s locked car in what appears to be a “random petty theft,” a Hotels.com spokesperson was quoted as telling the Associated […]

Theory: The Web is the great equalizer and, given the opportunity to access comprehensive, accurate and unbiased information about products they want to buy, consumers will choose to buy the products that are best for them, given price, features and various other details. But is that really the case? It’s clear that the larger retailers […]

As retailers find dollars by having certain stores specialize in various ethnic or lifestyle segments, they are often neglecting to update their store data to match, so finds a new Forrester Research report. This is a matter of frustration among some consumer goods suppliers, who now need to know more about those customers. A product […]

Applied Digital CEO Scott Silverman was a guest the week of May 15 on a Fox News show called Fox & Friends First, and he was there to give the immigration debate a shot in the arm. Or to implant his company in the middle of the controversy. No matter which wordplay is used, he […]

When Wal-Mart moves into any new area, it spreads fear into the hearts of retailers, who see any move by the $312 billion store chain as inherently dangerous. But Wal-Mart’s recent effort to move more aggressively into the computer business is unlikely to merit panic. It will still cause a lot of it, but it […]

Like every major sales and communications advance that preceded it, e-commerce’s 12-year existence has moved along in phases, as it slowly abandoned earlier methods to accept the new reality. Offline and online brands were initially kept distinct, then they were awkwardly merged. Initial e-commerce efforts were flashy brochure sites, with rudimentary shopping carts and checkout […]