Evan Schuman

Like a counterintelligence officer or an anti-spyware company, some entities in life have the sole raison dêtre of countering something else. RFID (radio-frequency identification) today is an unstoppable supply chain force and even the most fervent privacy advocates concede that. But as retailers and manufacturers continue to toy with ways to use RFID in both […]

The ease of use of a gift card is making them popular, with e-commerce sites expecting a tidal wave of gift card redemptions next week. The question is whether they will be met with a similarly enthusiastic number of thieves hoping to use replicas of the cards in brick-and-mortars and the numbers themselves online. The […]

Betting that price comparison sites will play an increasingly prominent role in e-commerce, credit information vendor Experian will spend almost half a billion dollars to take over PriceGrabber.com, Experian announced Wednesday. Following on the heels of Junes purchases—just days apart—where E.W. Scripps paid $525 million for Shopzilla and eBay paid $620 million for Shopping.com, Experians […]

Trust and credibility—often associated with a brand—are arguably the most powerful assets of any e-commerce site. Without it, the Web is just an electronic version of the Wild West, with the shootouts won by the lowest-price site, until that site is shot down by another low-cost site. Consumers and B2B shoppers purchase from a branded […]

The Internet continues to take its toll—both pro and con—on the U.S. Postal Service, but the post office may be starting to win the fight. For the first time in several years, the USPS reported an increase in first-class shipments, albeit a nominal one of one-tenth of one percent. But thats the first time in […]

When two major food companies—select H.J. Heinz food operations and Del Monte—merged a few years ago under the Del Monte umbrella, it forced Del Monte CIO Marc Brown to do some radical consolidation. Almost 100 systems were eliminated and the combined company standardized on ERP, data warehouse and a very different approach to supply chain. […]

Major retailers were given a teaspoon of good news Monday that their sites fared well during what was expected to be a super-intense traffic day. But the real wave of intense traffic may hit in late December, so the strong Black Monday performance may prove to be a brief-lived cause for celebration. In the history […]

Old ways die hard, and theres no industry that is more resistant to change than retail. But the reality of big-time retail technology is that online and offline operations must be more than integrated; they must actively complement each other. Each must make the most of its own strengths, with online delivering unparalleled selection, speed, […]

As retailers and manufacturers start bridging the gap between passive and active RFID chips, one RFID consortium is cautioning vendors to watch their mouths when talking about sensors. The self-appointed sensor censor is the nonprofit SAL-C (Smart Active Label Consortium), which has about 20 members from the RFID manufacturing community. The only correct use of […]

E-mail is a wonderfully flexible and powerful application, but have corporate users bent it so far that its about to break? More to the point, have users forced e-mail to do so many things that its no longer any good at its core function? This is not an academic discussion. In 2006, e-commerce sites that […]