Evan Schuman

The very last thing that an e-commerce customer sees when hes shopping online is the checkout process, and the ease (or difficulty) of that process often determines whether the customer clicks on the final purchase button. The checkout process happens to be the most challenging for IT. Beyond the listing of the intended purchases, it […]

The average time it takes a consumer to make an e-commerce purchase decision has jumped from about 19 hours in 2005 to 34 hours and 19 minutes this year, according to a report that is slated to be published next week. The report, created by a security service called ScanAlert and based on about 128 […]

When Fidelity National Information Services this week announced that about 2.3 million customer records had been illegally sold to a group of direct marketers, most media overlooked the most interesting part: The story behind Fidelitys weakest link. Some quick background. The Fidelity National were talking about is a Jacksonville, Fla., firm that owns a company […]

When red-hot startups grow quickly, they tend to grow until they hit their head on the ceiling. This is that awkward stage where the company starts making inexplicable decisions. This isnt Burn Rate, that ability to go through tons of money very quickly. Rather, lets call this the Burn Up and Implode Rate. The pattern […]

A senior executive at the $81 billion European retail giant Metro Group says the efficiencies the chain saw in RFID trials were so compelling they just had to deploy. The chain, based in Germany, has informed all of its suppliers that they need to ship all RFID pallets to Metro fully RFID tagged by Oct. […]

I have to confess a certain fondness for Google, an admiration that has grown out of frequent innovation and creativity. And its frequent luck in the form of success. Then again, my livelihood doesnt overwhelmingly depend on the whims of Google, so the idiosyncrasies of its search and other services is professionally interesting and not […]

Summer is so strenuous on travel Web sites this year that at least one major site had 2-and-a-half hours of downtime, according to an uptime monitoring service. The report, issued by Pingdom, looked at 16 major travel sites—including Orbitz, Travelocity, Yahoo and Priceline. The worst performer: OneTravel, which was down for 150 minutes. Popular site […]

A key division of the Albertsons grocery chain officially abandoned its loyalty card program on Wednesday, officially saying that it wanted customers to be relieved of the burden of having to show a card to get discounts. Unofficially, the program got pulled because grocery managers werent bothering to use the data. To be fair, the […]

Electronic payment vendor CyberSource is buying fellow e-payment player Authorize.Net for $565 million in cash and stock, the companies announced June 18. Steve Rowen, a research analyst at Retail System Research, said the merger of these two players is not in itself surprising, but the size of the deal reveals a lot about retail interests. […]

In Sundays The New York Times, theres this intriguing piece talking about how e-commerce sales are quickly running out of steam. Perhaps “intriguing” is the wrong word for it. A more apt term might be “dangerous.” The piece is not dangerous because it reveals some deep, dark secret. It doesnt, nor does it claim to. […]