Evan Schuman

An age-old CRM criticism is that its an expensive package that often delivers the information too late (long after the customer has left) and to the wrong people (back-office managers instead of salespeople on the floor). One CRM firm is introducing two packages that it claims avoids those problems. Epiphanys new customer relationship management products—Insight […]

When Kmart and Sears announced on Wednesday their plans to merge and create the nations third-largest retailer, it shook the retail technology world. Although it will take months for the two retail leaders to merge their almost 3,500 stores with a projected $55 billion in annual revenue, the combined operation will have the ability to […]

In the first year or two of e-commerce, one sign of sure trouble was seeing a high number of abandoned shopping carts. Ive always loved the term “abandoned shopping carts” because its one of the rare examples in technology where the term quite accurately—and explicitly—describes what it means to describe. It refers to a customer […]

The time-honored tradition of retail rebates assumes that many customers wont bother. Staples Inc. this week challenges that approach with an online campaign aimed at making rebates point-and-click easy. In the first phase of Staples Easy Rebates, Staples is partnering with Parago Inc. to provide an automated online approach to rebates. After making an in-store […]

Many large retailers are “ill-prepared” to handle the likely flood of data expected from RFID implementations, and many havent even mastered their current bar-code systems, according to a new report from analyst firm VDC (Venture Development Corp.). “OK, weve now got most of our suppliers finally on board with automatic identification and data capture technologies […]

In a move that is expected to slash one kind of retail installation project from nine months to three, a National Retail Federation division has unveiled the initial public release of its IXRetail Time Punch XML schema. The division—The Association for Retail Technology Standards, or ARTS—also introduced Customer 2.0, which is intended to aid the […]

In one corner of Microsoft Corp., the smaller the better is the order of the day for new customers. Microsofts latest retail push is focusing on the smallest of retailers, those with perhaps a single checkout lane and no more than nine stores. Microsofts pitch is a fully bundled $3,000 package with software and just […]

Shoppers this holiday season are going to run into a blizzard of next-generation kiosks, about three times as many of the devices as they saw last year, according to a new report from analyst firm Frost & Sullivan. The report comes as retailers learn that its better to give than to receive, especially when CRM […]

Forrester Research is projecting that online holiday sales this year will hit $13.2 billion, which represents a 20 percent increase compared with last year. Thats great when compared with a projected brick-and-mortar sales percentage increase of 4.5 percent for the same period, but much less so when compared with last years online retail growth of […]

In the clothing business, selling a suit that doesnt fit a customer makes little sense, even if its highly profitable. The same can be said for retail e-commerce strategies: There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all Web site. Casual Male, with more than 533 stores in the United States and Puerto Rico, dominates the […]