Articles by Kelly Shermach

Online retailers more concerned about getting savvy shoppers to return to their sites versus winning new Web surfers are employing new technologies that enhance -- and differentiate -- their sites "2006 marked an important inflection point where the primary driver of online sales growth shifted from new customer acquisition to driving repeat busine...

Historically, a Web service has been understood to be a software piece that enabled machines to interact over a network. That network may have been a closed-loop enterprise system or the Internet However, in recent years the term has taken on new meaning. It is frequently applied to online business intelligence or measurement tools, for example. Th...

The Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI) launched in September as a joint venture between Visa International, MasterCard Worldwide, Discover Financial Services, JCB and American Express to continuously improve the data security standard The group couldn't have appeared at a better time. Media reports of credit card data storage br...

eBay business unit PayPal revolutionized the payments industry and catapulted e-commerce when it emerged as a credit card processor for person-to-person transactions on auction sites Today, about half of PayPal's payments volume is from credit cards, but the service also allows consumers to register deposit accounts rather than using credit card fi...

Overall holiday sales for 2006 -- including both online transactions and sales at brick-and-mortar stores -- showed an increase of 4.4 percent over 2005, according to theNational Retail Federation (NRF) Quarterly growth in 2006 online sales ran in the double digits, and Internet sales are expected to continue on a double-digit growth track througho...

With the holidays approaching, many traditional and e-only marketers hope that the Web tools and designs they developed during 2006 ring in record sales over the Internet. To summarize what improvements online sellers made over the past 12 months, the E-Commerce Times talked to Jim Wehmann, vice president of global marketing for Minneapolis-based Digital River...

Consumer loyalty has become such a ubiquitous goal for marketers that its definition is murky at best. Ten years ago, a loyal customer participated with a chosen brand more frequently than the average shopper For marketers, the term has evolved to encompass frequency, recency of interaction, and monetary value -- typically of the customer's transac...

There's an oft-heard slight in professional realms: "Those who can't do, teach." If taken seriously, this notion would leave marketers lost in their attempts to build consumer loyalty Loyalty-building efforts are far-reaching and far-roaming, having scaled a precipice of marketing interest in the late 1990s and answered to a well educated and often...

Fans of online banking can hardly imagine how they lived without the channel. Just as snail-mailed personal correspondence has gone out of fashion in favor of e-mail and text messaging, so have snail-mailed account statements and bills Consumers use online banking for its convenience and the control it lends them. They can push money from savings t...

As CRM solutions emerged, retailers with private-label credit cards and catalog operations adopted the technology with the clarity many other retailers lacked. They already had a wealth of information, and they understood that CRM provided a toolset for data analysis and optimization "They stressed the 'C' in CRM because they had customer data," sa...

As if the airlines haven't had enough challenges since Sept. 11, 2001, British authorities were compelled to introduce a new one at the beginning of August. In addition to weathering economic downturns, volatile bankruptcies and merger flirtations, airlines now must comply with new carry-on restrictions due to a foiled terrorist plot The U.S. Trans...

When a searcher types a word into Google or Yahoo, organic and paid results populate the return screen. Because competition for top rankings in search results is steadily increasing, business-to-business marketers are challenged to develop ever more sophisticated search strategies FedEx, for instance, is comprised of a worldwide network of operatin...

More than ever, knowingly or unknowingly, consumers disseminate personal data in daily activities. Credit and debit card transactions, ATM visits, website browsing and purchases -- even mobile phone use -- all generate data downloaded for analysis and customer profiling. Collectors may use this data to enhance customers' experience, but may also share information with marketers more focused on customer acquisition...

E-tail industry leaders are crowned -- and laggards exposed -- in a new Web site study conducted byKeynote Systems, a San Mateo, Calif.-based Web performance and measurement firm A large consumer panel ranked sites in three verticals -- electronics, apparel, and books and music -- according to customer experience and technical quality. Electronical...

Mark Wesker, president and CEO of Artifact Network, has been involved in the software industry for nearly 15 years. The co-founder, president and COO of Sequoia Software in 1992, he stayed on after Citrix Systems acquired the company in 2001. With a year as vice president of Internet strategy under his belt, Wesker left Citrix to co-found Artifact in Baltimore...

Three technology companies have joined together to propel radio frequency identification applications forward. OATSystems, ADT Security Systems and Intel are paying for technology implementation to win grocery retailers over to RFID investment Grocers suffer from slim profit margins. That means they're hesitant to pull a Wal-Mart and engage RFID te...

The recent reinvention of marketing has sent the discipline to measure its efforts. With new metrics, expressly communicated goals and number-gathering in ad campaign executions, product launches and channel sales, marketers expect to remake their art as science However, getting the beakers bubbling in marketing labs presents problems when data hol...

Global Positioning System technology exists in nearly all mobile phones, but is obscured from use on most except in emergency situations. Recently, however, the Walt Disney Internet Group announced that its new family-oriented Disney Mobile service will enable parents to tap into GPS location services to determine their children's whereabouts Disne...

Personal banking is called retail banking in the biz because traditionally consumer banking occurred in a building on Main Street, Anytown, U.S.A. The bank sat among department and hardware stores, coffee and flower shops. In the eyes of consumers, it was another downtown retailer But in the mid-1990s, banks began pushing customers out of the bank,...

According to a McKinsey & Co. survey conducted in June 2005, leading B-to-B companies that conduct collaborative projects with supply chain partners and end customers increase their revenues and profits by more than 20 percent on average. But joint projects are rare in B-to-B because process chain members worry about sharing internal secrets with others, even their partners and customers...