Evan Schuman

NEW YORK—The retail technology world is in transition, and nowhere is that as clear as at the industrys largest gathering, the National Retail Federations tradeshow and conference here. There are primarily two transitions taking place. The first is an in-store transition, from a world where technology was virtually all behind the scenes as far as […]

Mercado Software is set to introduce software that will—without human intervention—add and remove products based on inventory and item profit margins. The company plans to launch the new software package, called Mercado 4, the week of Jan. 15. While various vendors have offered integration between Web analytics and e-commerce platforms, Mercados new offering is significant […]

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 isnt 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 […]

Amazon.com the week of Dec. 25 announced sales figures that make the 2006 holiday season its best thus far, including one day (Dec. 11, for those who track such trivia) on which it rang up more than 4 million items sold. The company also boasted of some impressive speed sales, such as selling 1,000 Xbox […]

Securities regulators on Dec. 19 filed a disciplinary complaint against one of the nations largest investment firms because, at best, it wasnt sure what e-mail was backed up. The worst-case scenario has Morgan Stanley telling investors that their e-mail records were destroyed in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York City, while knowing that […]

As retail RFID mandates promise to force more small- and midsize manufacturers into the radio-frequency identification business, NCR has put together an IT Cliffs Notes for RFID, featuring basic software, an RFID printer, a bar-code scanner and “a startup supply” of Gen2 RFID labels. The NCR RFID Retail Compliance package will sell for about $12,000 […]

As a species, human beings are very good at self-preservation, but were not exactly at the top of the class for doing what we should be doing if we dont have to. This is nothing new. Leaders of various organized religions thousands of years ago figured out that doing good acts because its the right […]

When it comes to the meat-and-potatoes of the RFID retail business—the tagging of pallets and cases—2006 is going to go down as a very disappointing year. A new report from Cambridge, England-based IDTechEx paints a sad but realistic portrait of frustrated suppliers and very isolated pockets of ROI examples. It does, however, hold out hope […]