Editor’s Note: After our coverage last week of the Macy’s internal probe over its December debit card over-charge fiasco, On-Line Strategies‘ Andy Orrock and his colleague, Dave Bergert, wrote a blog post about their thoughts. StorefrontBacktalk was impressed by their analysis and ...

Many major retailers have been criticized for being slow to adapt to industry—especially Web-based—changes. But it’s not hard to see why when we see how the industry treats e-tail pioneers such as Amazon and Facebook.To be fair, both Amazon and Facebook got spanked for going too far in res...

As a student of well-thought-out, creative E-Commerce initiatives, I was naturally excited to hear that as deep-pocketed and serious a chain as J.C. Penney was declaring an “innovative online experience” that was “one-of-a-kind” and demonstrated “leadership in the onlin...

Facebook officials learned a hard lesson this month when the social networking site snuck in a privacy policy change that could have allowed it to access users’ content—and use it forever for pretty much anything Facebook could think of—even after users had deleted it from their accounts. ...

As punishment for the careless disposal of items containing personal information, CVS Caremark must pay a $2.5 million fine and establish a “comprehensive information security program” to protect both paper and electronic documents containing sensitive data, according to a government set...

Reversing an 18-month trend, consumer satisfaction with in-store retail products and services ticked upward in the fourth quarter of 2008. But similar good news wasn’t on the menu for E-tailers. After a three-year period where consumer satisfaction with online-only retail companies steadily cl...

A propensity to rely on outdated technology developed in-house has caught up with many retailers that, struggling to eke out profits during a recession, now want to adopt complex price localization campaigns, according to a study of 85 retailers by Retail Systems Research (RSR). The researchers foun...

Some four months after Best Buy dropped $121 million in mid-September 2008 to take over downloadable music pioneer Napster, both companies quietly said that Napster’s privacy policy was changing to let Best Buy do a wide range of unannounced things with the newly obtained data riches. Napster&...

Image-conscious food retailers might be squeamish about using loyalty card information to telephone customers who bought recalled products, but a consumer advocacy lawyer argues that public safety should trump brand protection. Retailers have an obligation to follow the lead of Costco and use loyalt...

Recession notwithstanding, during the last three months of 2008, salaries increased for those with certifications in some vital retail IT segments, including systems architecture/project, networking management and database security, says a new report. Some of these increases were substantial: The &#...