Click on the link below or scroll down for this month’s top headlines and tekservePOS analysis and tips.
• Bridging the Multichannel Gap
• Hungry for Deals
• Payment Card Industry Releases Latest Standards
Bridging the Multichannel Gap
By Deena M. Amato-McCoy
Circuit City’s new mobile selling devices are designed to assist the chain’sassociates in providing a more knowledgeable shopping experience. Butthe units are also becoming the gateway to an integrated multichannelexperience.
Circuit City's assisted selling device has been athree-year evolution. What started out as a PC-based tablet that merelydelivered canned, static merchandise information and specs has morphedinto a Web-based, interactive tool that helps expand the user’s knowledge base, enhances the shopping experience and drives sales.
The new unit, called Enhanced Digital GuideExperience, or EDGE, features a custom Windows-based application thatgives partners (as Circuit City employees are called) access to thechain’s available merchandise acrossstores, online and in the warehouse. It also provides productrecommendations, Flash-based demos, product-usage questions,competitive pricing and schedules appointments for firedog, Circuit City’s tech-support service. EDGE also enables Circuit City to create a seamless, multichannel selling environment.
Fifty percent to 60 percent of shoppers research merchandise prior to visiting a Circuit City store. “But they still expect our associates to be experts on these products and help them make an educated buying decision,” said Matt M. Johnson, manager, Circuit City’s concept development/store experience.
After using one or many of the tablet's features tohelp shoppers make an educated purchase, Circuit City employees canconnect the tablets to color laser printers to print out merchandisespecs or an order proposal. The units also enable partners to continuethe shopping experience on Circuit City’s Web site via wish lists.
“Similar to setting up a wish list on our Web site, shoppers can create one in-store,” said Brian Leach, Circuit City’s VP, new concepts.
“Partners can enter shoppers’ wish lists directly into EDGE. Then they post it directly to www.circuitcity.com and simultaneously e-mail it to the shopper,” he explained.
This process gives shoppers a starting point to manage their profiles online.
“The key is to give shoppers the tools they need to leverage one consistent experience across our various channels,” Leach said.
Shoppers can experience EDGE at 11 Circuit City stores and all 50 "The City" format stores. -- TechTalk Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2008
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tekservePOS is observing anincreased number of requests from retailers that need tablet PCs aswell as various manufacturers wanting us to represent their hardware inour portfolio. Thus far, hardware options and written applications arelimited while pricing remains very high, making ROI challenging. Itwill be intriguing to watch these types of rollouts for truebottom-line impact. |
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Hungry for Deals
By Samantha Murphy
Mindful that consumers are penny-pinching amid the struggling economy, Grand Rapids, Mich.-based Meijer is using an innovative online strategy to help shoppers save extra dollars at its stores.
As Web 2.0 applications heat up the e-commerce landscape, retailers are tapping robust new solutions to entertain and serve shoppers in innovative ways. For Meijer, widgets are the newest Web 2.0 tools used to entice consumers to spend -- and save -- at its stores versus competitors.
Widgets are small, interactive applications often embedded within a Web page, and their content is used to engage the viewer. These interactive plug-ins, which are commonly found on sites such as Facebook and iGoogle, can feature games and news alerts.
Meijer launched its interactive widget, MealBox, in hopes of giving its Web-savvy, budget-conscious consumers an interactive way to leverage ad specials and coupons.
“Besides delivering discounts and specials, our widget ties these to recipes, useful meal-planning tools and automatically generates a shopping list based on their choices,” said Dawn Bronkema, director of e-commerce marketing at Meijer.
The widget resides with other icons found on www.Meijer.com. It, however, can be downloaded onto a user’s iGoogle page, dropped on a blog or sent to a friend. It can also be downloaded onto user desktops as a Yahoo Widget so users can have even easier access to the application.
Since launching the widget in May, Meijer is reporting approximately 20,000 unique visitors per week. “About a third of the users spend 20 minutes or more using the widget per session. And we have had nearly 5,000 installations of the widget since our launch,” Bronkema noted.
“People are becoming increasingly interested in the MealBox widget as a method to lower their grocery bills,” she said. “It helps them more carefully plan their weekly meals, track what is on sale and, of course, use coupons. And all of these tools help them stay on budget.”
In fact, hundreds of thousands of widget-generated shopping lists have been created. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Menu Plans have been created and are being maintained, and several hundred thousand MealBox coupons have been redeemed in Meijer stores, she added.
“Statistics prove that people have been eager to use the widget,” Bronkema said.
“While many of our visitors are early adopters of this sort of technology, we hope that these people will help spread the word to their friends and show them how to use the widget,” she said. “It’s a great topic of conversation for an otherwise everyday subject.”
-- TechTalk Tuesday, Sept. 9, 2008
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Along the same lines, Pizza Hut just unveiled a new application forFacebook that allows users to order a pizza without ever leaving thesite. Probably a smart move considering Facebook is currently thefourth most-trafficked Web site in the world.
The new reality is that consumers are spending time onlinesocializing, researching products and shopping, and retailers need tofind creative ways to interact with them. According to ForresterResearch, 58 percent of consumers start their product research on theWeb and 25 percent of all purchases -- whether made online, in storesor via other channels -- begin with a visit to the manufacturer’s Website.
The bottom line: if you are not engaging and interacting with your customers online, you are missing out.
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Payment Card Industry Releases Latest Standards
WAKEFIELD, MASS. -- On Oct. 1, the Payment CardIndustry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC), formally publishedversion 1.2 of the PCI Data Security Standard (DSS). Effectiveimmediately, version 1.2 replaces version 1.1, which had been in effectsince December of 2006. However, version 1.1 officially “sunsets” onDec. 31, 2008.
Earlier this year, PCISSC released a summary of proposed changes that would be included inversion 1.2, although the primary objective of the updated DSS was toclarify the existing requirements of version 1.1.
The updates contained in 1.2 do not implement anysignificant new requirements but further define the 1.1 requirements byreplacing ambiguous deadlines with specific dates and by articulating aclear June 2010 deadline for the end of any transactions processedthrough Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP).
The updated standard and supporting documentation is available on the Council’s Web site. -- ChainStoreAge E-Newsletter, Oct. 3, 2008
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