Tag Archives | Shopping

Nümi Key Looks to Cure Loyalty Card Hell

Posted by Ed Oswald on June 24, 2010 at 12:10 pm

As a way to generate return visits, more and more retailers are developing loyalty card programs. There’s just one problem with this: after awhile, the consumer is carrying possibly dozens of the things, and they easily get lost. I know I frequently never have the right one when I need it, or just forget altogether to bring it in the first place.

Cupertino-based Mobeam saw a potential market here and has capitalized on it by creating the Nümi Key, a keychain device that includes a patented LED system which “beams” the loyalty card information into a checkout scanner in a readable format. Altogether, the device holds about 50 different barcodes.

Using the device is as simple as using the navigation buttons to find the store’s loyalty card, pointing the device at the barcode scanner, and pressing the red button in the center. As long as the store uses a laser checkout scanner, it will work, at least in theory.

Continue Reading →

6 comments

Greetings from the iLine

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 24, 2010 at 7:41 am

The first time I waited in line for an iPhone, it was sort of fun. Kind of. This my fourth go-round–fifth if you count the iPad–and it’s turned into mundane work. So I’ve been tweeting occasional updates but haven’t felt the urge to record the whole experience for posterity here. (In case you were wondering: It’s cold out here, and I’m typing this standing up.)

The good news is that I’m maybe thirty people from the front of the iLine. And quite an iLine it is–by 6am it wrapped around the Stonestown Galleria here in San Francisco…I assume it’s reached at least Marie Callender’s by now, if not Pet Food Express.

I’ll file further reports if events warrant. But I hope you won’t hear from me again until I’m basking in the warmth of my living room, iPhone 4 in hand.

5 comments

The iPhone 4 Arrives June 24th. Or June 23rd

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 22, 2010 at 7:47 am

Yesterday, i got a message from Apple confirming that the iPhone 4 I reserved will be ready on Thursday:

But as Engadget’s Ross Miller is reporting, at least some of the people who ordered iPhones 4 for delivery rather than reserved them for pickup are getting e-mails saying they’ll arrive tomorrow.

Unless those e-mails are a massive mistake (seems unlikely!) the mail-order iPhones will be in consumers’ hands before the retail ones will.

In the past, waking up at 3am so you could be in line at 4am at an Apple Store that opened at 7am was an onerous but effective way to get an iPhone a few hours before those who stayed home and waited for Fedex to knock on the door. This time, however, there seems to be no benefit to the retail route–unless you need help transferring contacts and setting up e-mail. Which I don’t.

More on the iPhone 4 on Thursday–unless there’s a second mysterious wave of e-mails telling us to show up tomorrow.

9 comments

Want an iPhone 4? Get in Line

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 17, 2010 at 7:30 am

With recent Apple blockbusters like all the iPhones and the iPad, there’s been a useful secret shopping tip: If you wanted a product pronto but had an inexplicable resistance to waiting in a bizarrely long line, you could wait until early evening on launch day and then stroll into an Apple Store. By then, the throngs had dispersed, and the shelves were still well-stocked with shiny new gadgets.

(You could also order online and avoid a shopping trip altogether, of course, but I’ve always been impressed by the retail buyers who could resist temptation for just a few hours in return for hassle-free buying…)

With the iPhone 4, apparently, it’s not going to be like that. The phone is debuting on June 24th, but the black model is sold out for weeks, and the white one still hasn’t gone on sale at all:

Of course, it says the phone will ship by July 14th, so there’s some chance Apple will catch up with demand more quickly than that. But I wonder if it’s going to feel like there’s a great worldwide iPhone shortage for awhile?

3 comments

AT&T Presses Pause on iPhone Presales

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 16, 2010 at 9:46 am

Despite yesterday’s iPhone preordering meltdown, a heck of a lot of people reserved phoness. AT&T statement:

iPhone 4 pre-order sales yesterday were 10-times higher than the first day of pre-ordering for the iPhone 3G S last year. Consumers are clearly excited about iPhone 4, AT&T’s more affordable data plans and our early upgrade pricing.

Given this unprecedented demand and our current expectations for our iPhone 4 inventory levels when the device is available June 24, we’re suspending pre-ordering today in order to fulfill the orders we’ve already received.

The availability of additional inventory will determine if we can resume taking pre-orders.

In addition to unprecedented pre-order sales, yesterday there were more than 13 million visits to AT&T’s website where customers can check to see if they are eligible to upgrade to a new phone; that number is about 3-times higher than the previous record for eligibility upgrade checks in one day.

We are working hard to bring iPhone 4 to as many of our customers as soon as possible.

Ten times as many preorders as for the 3GS? Amazing. I’m still not a believer in “AT&T is locking people in to deny them the option of a Verizon iPhone that will be announced any day now” conspiracy theories, but that’s a lot of folks who are planning to be on AT&T through 2012…

3 comments

iPhone 4 Ordering an Embarrassment for AT&T, Apple

Posted by Ed Oswald on June 15, 2010 at 10:31 am

If you are even attempting to pre-order an iPhone 4 today, our best advice is: don’t! Both Apple and AT&T are experiencing a multitude of problems just keeping the system up–and Gizmodo has even reported that AT&T’s online system is exposing upgraders’ accounts to others.

From what people are reporting, the problem  seems to be that both AT&T employees and at-home shoppers are using a similar web interface. Now, we can’t confirm that both are one and the same, but if they are it means thousands of orders every minute are dumping into the same application.

AT&T retail stores have resorted to using pen and paper to take down names, credit card numbers, and phone numbers as the entire online system has been taken down. Don’t expect to visit Apple’s site to complete your transaction either –it’s not working either.

Worst of all, it appears the mad rush for iPhone 4 has exposed a serious hole in AT&T’s servers. Gizmodo reports that it has received several reports of users logging into their own accounts (or I should say attempting to), and being greeted with the account information of somebody else.

So who’s to blame for this one? Let’s hear from our always opinionated Technologizer readers in the comments…

Update 1: Harry McCracken reports on Twitter that the Apple Store iPhone application reservation system is appearing to fail, which makes it hard to discern whether your reservation has actually been submitted. I’ve also received an unconfirmed report that neither AT&T nor Apple are accepting phone calls at this point.

Update 2: One of our regular readers Steven Fisher makes a very good point: “Thousands of queries per minute into the same application shouldn’t be a problem. Thousands of queries per SECOND shouldn’t be a problem. Perhaps the application or the database behind it performs like crap, but scalable web interfaces are not exactly an unattainable holy grail.”

14 comments

No More Bing Cashback

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 4, 2010 at 11:33 am

When Microsoft started offering sizable kickbacks to people who used its Windows Live shopping features to buy stuff–via a feature called Live Search Cashback which later turned into Bing Cashback–I was instinctively skeptical. It sounded kind of like bribery, and the process of finding deals and collecting your rebate involved jumping through multiple hoops.

And then I decided to invest a sizable chunk of change in a Nikon D90 SLR, a camera that tends to cost about the same no matter which (reputable) dealer you buy it from. I bought one using Bing Cashback and got a crazy-good Cashback deal that saved me $150. Boom–no more skepticism. A hundred and fifty bucks felt like more-than-adequate compensation for the effort involved.

But now Microsoft is saying that Cashback is going away:

In lots of ways, this was a great feature – we had over a thousand merchant partners delivering great offers to customers and seeing great ROI on their campaigns, and we were taking some of the advertising revenue and giving it back to customers. But after a couple of years of trying, we did not see the broad adoption that we had hoped for.

I’m sorry to see it go–and glad to see Microsoft being up-front about its rationale for shuttering it.

4 comments

Amazon Gets to Keep 1-Click

Posted by Harry McCracken on March 10, 2010 at 10:58 am

Amazon’s 1-Click e-commerce patent–everybody’s favorite poster child for overly-broad patents that don’t actually foster innovation–lives. After a four-year investigation, the U.S. Patent Office has concluded that the somewhat more limited version of the 1997 patent which Google Amazon refiled in 2007 is legitimate. When will other shopping sites be allowed to let you place an order with a single click? 2017, when Amazon’s patent expires.

6 comments

comScore: Blizzard a Boon to Online Shopping

Posted by Ed Oswald on December 22, 2009 at 2:16 pm

Research firm comScore said Tuesday that the blizzard that socked the Northeastern United States with one to three feet of snow did not prevent holiday shoppers from going about their business: they just did it online instead. Retailers pulled in some $767 million in sales on December 19 and 20, up 13 percent from last year.

The full week also proved to be profitable: a one week sales record was set with shoppers spending some $6.8 billion online, up six percent from a year ago. Good news for retailers, some of which expressed concern that the timing of the snowstorm could have put a serious damper on what is traditionally the biggest shopping weekend before Christmas.

“Consumers have clearly continued to spend online later into the season this year,” comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni said. “Retailers have been very aggressive with late season promotions while informing consumers that they could still get their purchases shipped in time for Christmas, and these tactics seem to be paying off.”

What also could be helping is anecdotal evidence that retailers are not panicking like they did last year, cutting prices early which in turn cuts into profits. I’ve heard quite a few shoppers complain that the deals “just aren’t as good as last year.” Well, this year retailers have gotten a lot smarter in managing inventories, thus meaning less overstock to get rid of at the end of the season.

So here’s a question for our Northeast US readers. Did you stay in and shop online?

3 comments