Evan Schuman

As the holiday season approaches, we have good news and bad news on the major retail multichannel front. The good news is that some retailers are getting a lot better at handling the technology. The bad news is that their employees often dont know about it, making the advantages moot. Retail executives are optimistically projecting […]

Although it is almost universally accepted that a truly integrated multichannel retail approach is the ideal, few retailers have been able to get anywhere close, reports a recent Aberdeen Group research report. The report cites quite a few roadblocks, ranging from corporate attitudes and fears to difficult technology integration problems such as consistent order and […]

While many retailers are struggling to make multichannel operations work at all, Best Buy is taking a leadership position in making the retailer a single brand with multiple points of access. But Best Buy is an almost perfect example of the difficulties in making all channels appear as one to the customer, as it excels […]

With wireless uncertainty as its staunch ally, Vivotech on Monday will introduce a system to help retailers quickly convert existing POS units to accept wireless entries. The reason some retailers may find this an attractive option is, ironically, because their interest in contactless payment approaches is lukewarm. If the interest was nil, then there would […]

Its only fitting that the largest retailer should have the worlds largest database, but at more than one-half a petabyte, thats a lot of information, even for Wal-Mart. The vendor that is supporting those many bytes of data—NCRs Teradata division—begged for the extraordinary permission from the normally secretive Wal-Mart to announce this achievement Wednesday to […]

Claiming the wireless ability to read tags that are literally hundreds of meters away, a retired Boeing engineer thinks he can deliver item-level tagging years faster than can conventional RFID and with technology that is much more readily available. The claim is an appealing one for an industry that has fast-and-then-faster requirements for RFID deployment, […]

Leveraging the deep retail installed base of Teradata, SeeCommerce and Teradata announced on Monday an integrated package focusing on one of retails most troubling issues: out-of-stocks. The package—which starts at $150,000—doesnt necessarily promise better analytics, but it does say that the more deeply integrated approach will allow for much more timely updates of product status […]

When America Online recently announced its yawn-oriented shopping portal (“Gee,” asked executives from Microsoft and Yahoo simultaneously, “why didnt we think of that? Oh yeah. We did.”), it renewed the perennial offline/online e-commerce debate. Since shortly after the Web came into being and browsers became graphical, the Web was without form, and void and darkness […]

When Microsoft Corp. unveiled its embedded operating system for retailers on Monday, it stressed the mini-OS plug-and-play capability. But one key motivation for the company might have been the fear that retailers were considering upgrading without Microsoft. Late 2004 has retailers at a key IT management point, with aging POS (point of sale) systems pressuring […]

One problem that retailers have with the World Wide Web is that its so … well … worldwide. A group of newspaper publishers tried to address that issue Thursday with the launch of a Web site intended to match consumers looking for specific products with local retailers that have those products on special promotions. The […]