QRNG Claims ‘Unbreakable’ Online Security

Creation of the world’s first practical quantum random-number generator (QRNG) could potentially render cyberattacks impossible, according to its developers at Lancaster University and Quantum Base Ltd., a company spun off from the university in 2013.

Random-number generation underpins the privacy and security of all electronic communications, as well as gaming, cryptocurrencies, smart appliances and vehicles, and much more in the digital world. Conventional “pseudo” RNGs don’t produce numbers that are as random as most consumers believe, leading to potential predictability, and existing quantum solutions are hindered by their size, speed, and pricetag.

Quantum Base, on the other hand, claims its product’s low power requirements and simple, highly scalable structure make it capable of revolutionizing online security. The nanoscale quantum device—only 1,000th the width of a human hair—can be embedded into any semiconductor chip—“with little or no incremental cost once volume production is achieved,” according to a release—and produces “pure random numbers.”

The company said that by overcoming weaknesses in current encryption solutions, its QRNG will "allow blockchain to be implemented with unbreakable quantum security, and will be vital in sensitive areas such as banking finance, defense, and social media."

Student Shoppers Mix Web and Store Visits

Since college students spend a great deal of time on their phones, does that mean they prefer to shop with their digits instead of heading to a physical store? Not necessarily.

According to the latest monthly student survey conducted by NACS OnCampus Research, students tend to blend their online and in-person shopping. For instance, the majority of students still buy most clothing during visits to bricks-and-mortar locations. However, 27% will go online first to look up information before they set off for the store.

Conversely, 21% of students said they browsed apparel in a physical store prior to actually placing their order online.

The same is true of technology products. While 41% of students said they bought tech merchandise online, another 43% researched tech products on the web before making the purchase at a store.

More than two-thirds of students do visit the websites of online-only retailers, such as eBay and Amazon, at least once a month, with about a quarter doing so every week. Whether they’re shopping online or in a physical store, price is still the most important facet in deciding what and where to buy. Free shipping was important to 56% of respondents. Convenience and product quality still matter to students, but not nearly as much as cost.

More Shoppers Consult Amazon First

When it comes to searching for products on the web, many consumers treat Amazon like a regular Internet search engine.

In a new Survata study of American consumers, a sizable 44% indicated they head straight for Amazon’s website when they want to shop for a particular product. That means other retailers—especially smaller, independent ones—don’t even get a chance to compete for those shoppers online, unless somehow Amazon doesn’t carry the item.

Amazon’s personalization technology received high marks from respondents, with 75% saying other online sellers don’t come close and 87% indicating they’d rather do business with a site capable of ascertaining their needs and guiding them to suggested products.

Retailers have a little more opportunity to snag a sale with 34% of the survey respondents who said they look for products first on the major search engines, notably Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Just 21% of survey-takers habitually begin their search for products at a specific retail merchant.

Of consumers who use their smartphone to shop, the biggest reason (given by 47%) was to obtain information on products and prices.

Newegg Joins Textbook Market

The newest player in the college textbook market is familiar to many college students. Electronics online retailer Newegg Inc. said it is “partnering with more than 1,000 colleges” and has already opened a student-only online store that offers special discounts and pricing options.

Newegg’s student-only section does require a login, but the company is offering students $20 off its annual Newegg Premier membership, which provides free shipping, members-only deals, and a dedicated customer-service line. The effort is part of Newegg’s effort to expand its business by tapping into the education market.

“Textbooks are pretty fundamental to the college student, and we wanted to offer a different solution that makes buying them more convenient and more economical,” James Wu, chief operating officer for Newegg North America, said in an article for Internet Retailer.

App Enables Location-Based E-Books

Rook Labs, based in London, plans to release an app that allows people to access e-books on their mobile devices at no charge while they’re in a defined location, such as a café, park, hospital, or subway car. When the person starts to move out of range, they’ll be invited to buy and download their own copy of the e-book right from the app.

A beta version of the location-based app, also dubbed Rook, will be unveiled at the London Book Fair this week. The company’s website claims users will be able to read “premium” e-books with the app and The Guardian reported Rook has two independent book publishers lined up to participate. It’s not clear how many titles are currently available.

“The biggest hurdle to overcome will be publisher suspicion about a great e-book giveaway,” The Guardian article commented, noting that readers are unlikely to pay for the book if there are enough Rook hotspots to finish it for free.

The beta version will be rolled out only in London and New York City.

P-Commerce Lets Local Stores Back in Game

Smartphones may prove to be an Achilles’ heel for Amazon, in the view of a columnist for The New York Times. At the same time, smartphones might be a lifeline for local retailers, including those on or near college campuses.

“Like many of the local and big-box retailers it has displaced over the last decade and a half, Amazon could itself become increasingly vulnerable to the threat of technological upheaval,” wrote Farhad Manjoo.

The “upheaval” is the rapidly rising trend of shopping by phone. Obviously, consumers have been able to shop online from their computers for a couple decades now, but the ubiquity of smartphones means a lot of people have fast, private access to e-commerce all the time, no matter where they are.

The thing is, Manjoo noted, all those phone shoppers aren’t necessarily going to Amazon. Physical retail chains, as well as local mom-and-pop stores, have ramped up their website features, added more merchandise, and trimmed their prices.

They’ve also plugged into ordering and courier services such as Postmates and Instacart. Consumers can just as easily browse and purchase from local merchants, often with same-day delivery or pickup, as they can with Amazon.

“None of these technologies pose an existential threat to Amazon, but by giving physical stores some of the conveniences that Amazon has long had, they may limit its potential reach,” Manjoo said.

Look to Lurkers for Fruitful 'Engagement'

“Engagement” is probably the buzziest buzzword these days. From schools to retailers to employers, all are admonished to engage their students, their customers, and their workers, or suffer abandonment.

Online engagement is often measured by the amount of two-way interaction—likes, posts, retweets, comments, and such. However, Sephora, the beauty-products retail chain, discovered that wasn’t such an effective indicator of true engagement.

According to a Fast Company article, Sephora analyzed user data for its online community site, which was launched in 2010. Visitors to the site, called Beauty Talk, could set up profiles, share tips, and ask questions. Before the analysis, the company assumed the users who actively participated the most often were also their best customers.

The data showed otherwise. Many posts were questions from new visitors seeking advice on specific beauty problems. Once they got an answer, they didn’t necessarily return to the site.

“Instead, it turns out that superfans can be predicted based on their lurking,” noted the article. “The more a user logs into a site day after day, week after week, month after month, the more likely they are to become an active superfan. Posting activity had relatively little to do with it.”

It seems superfans enjoy viewing posts and other content on Sephora’s community, but they don’t feel like chiming in. The upshot is that superfans shell out 10 times the amount spent by the typical Sephora customer.

YouTube Ads Bag the Sale

If a picture’s worth 1,000 words, then a video’s apparently worth 15 million clicks to buy.

Compared to other prominent social media, YouTube is the most effective at getting consumers interested in products as well as persuading them to make the purchase, according to a VentureBeat report.

The study, performed by AOL Platforms, analyzed the interaction of some 500 million clicks on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+, Tumblr, and YouTube. All that clicking resulted in 15 million purchases. The study looked at three stages of shopper interaction (introduction to products, re-exposure to products on other social media platforms, and searching out a product with intent to buy) as well as instances where consumers bought something right away via social media without encountering further marketing.

As it turns out, YouTube was tops at both calling consumers’ attention to products and at closing the sale at the third stage. YouTube also got more shoppers to purchase immediately. At the other end of the spectrum, Twitter didn’t have much impact at all in those areas but did have the most influence in the middle stage of shopping, by reinforcing advertising messages that consumers had already seen on other social media.

Overall, paid messaging on all social media platforms got more people to buy than “organic” messages shared by users, except for posts relating to food, beverages, apparel, and accessories. For those products, what users had to say influenced purchasers more than marketing.

Barriers Put Skids on Retail Apps

For a time, the retail industry was gung-ho for mobile apps. Every merchant had to develop an app for shoppers to download so that the store and customer could remain in constant touch.

Some retailers may be cooling on that idea, which is possibly good news for campus stores that didn’t have the budget to build a custom app anyway. According to Mobile Commerce Daily, many attendees at the eTail East 2014 conference in early August thought developing mobile websites made more sense.

While apps are able to provide greater functionality and are easier for customers to use once downloaded, they typically cost more to create, partly because each platform (iOS, iPhone, Android, Windows) calls for its own app. Retailers also have to constantly market the availability of the app and worry whether customers are using it successfully.

“Research has shown that approximately 70% of users lose faith in a brand if an app frustrates them, and one in five apps is only ever used one time,” Joel Evans, vice president of mobile enablement at Mobiquity, told Mobile Commerce Daily.

On the other hand, responsive design allows mobile websites to shapeshift to accommodate most devices. The investment to develop such sites is much lower, and a big bonus is that mobile sites will pop up in search results. Some retailers are opting to put their money into responsive design, at least until it’s easier and cheaper to create apps.

Tax Collection Dings Amazon Sales

Bricks-and-mortar retailers long complained that online merchants such as Amazon had a substantial advantage because they weren’t required to collect state sales tax. Researchers from The Ohio State University found that those retailers were right.

The “Amazon Tax”: Empirical Evidence from Amazon and Main Street Retailers, a study for the National Bureau of Economic Research, showed that households reduced spending on Amazon by about 10% in states where an online sales tax was collected, compared to those in states that don’t. It also found that sales fell 24% on purchases of more than $300.

“There is no ambiguity,” Brian Baugh, an author of the report, told Bloomberg. “It had been their competitive advantage.”

The study tracked the spending of 245,000 households that spent at least $100 on Amazon during the first six months of 2012. About a third of the respondents lived in states where new tax laws have gone into effect.

While the researchers found there is a benefit for e-tailers in not collecting sales tax, bricks-and-mortar stores didn’t get a huge rise in sales in states that did require Amazon to collect the tariff. The study found physical stores saw just a 2% bump in sales in states with online sales tax collection because shoppers turned to alternatives such as using Amazon Marketplace, which has products from merchants who pay a fee to Amazon but are not required to collect sales tax.

“If they make one extra click on Amazon, they can continue to realize these tax savings while still enjoying the whole Amazon ecosystem,” Baugh said.

Any dip due to online tax collection hasn’t kept Amazon from growing, at least not in the first quarter of 2014. On April 24, the online retailer reported growth of 23%, to $19.74 billion, in the first quarter, up more than $3 billion from 2013 and surpassing analysts’ estimates of $19.4 billion, according to a report in The New York Times.

Don't Track Me by Phone, Shoppers Say

Lots of people possess smartphones and use mobile apps for a variety of purposes, but that doesn’t mean they’re altogether comfortable with shopping apps that track their whereabouts and text promotional messages.

This type of app has been touted as the next big thing for retailers, as it allows them to follow customers while they shop and tempt them with offers if they’re nearby. However, a survey of 3,000 mobile app users indicates shoppers are a little creeped out by that prospect.

More than 71% of respondents said they don’t want merchants to track them via smartphone. They were a little more receptive to getting push notifications with special offers—only 56% overall were against such messages, although more Apple iOS users than others were willing to receive them. Even so, most of the survey takers didn’t know anything about Apple’s new iBeacon technology, which enables retailers to send notifications to customers while they’re in the physical store.

Despite considerable news coverage of near field communications technology, only 38% of respondents were familiar with it and fewer than 6% actually use it for contactless payments.

The survey was conducted by a company, Retale, that may have reason to be pleased by the results. Retale helps participating retailers get their traditional sales circulars—the kind typically inserted in print newspapers or mailed directly to homes—into shoppers’ hands by aggregating them online by geographical location.

Retail Coupons Find New Life Online

Brand manufacturers and bricks-and-mortar retailers used to run coupons in newspapers and other print media to entice customers with discounts and special offers. Some still do. However, since many people shop and read online now, the coupons have gone digital, too.

The first digital coupons that appeared on websites and in email resembled their newspaper predecessors, complete with dotted borders. The latest types of digital coupons have evolved quite a bit.

That’s Biz, a marketing solutions company that makes coupon apps for smartphones, just released a new system that enables restaurants and stores to post coupon offers on a Facebook page for customers to text to their smartphones. Customers just have to show the coupon on the phone screen when they visit the retailer. They can also share it with friends. The system allows the merchant to put time limits on the coupon or restrict the number of times an individual can use it, without having to involve the store’s main point-of-sale system.

There are many websites, such as FatWallet, that offer a wide variety of downloadable product coupons in cooperation with manufacturers and retail chains. Coupons.com recently began letting consumers “link” selected coupons to a registered credit or debit card with the discount automatically applied at the point of purchase in the store (although they can also be used for online shopping).

Some coupon sites are experimenting with gamification as a way to attract interest and give customers a means to earn additional discount points. No Kidding Coupons, a new site, says its members can earn coupons for online purchases up to 99% off by reviewing products and promoting ones they like. However, unless you register, the site is a little cagey about what brands are participating.

CAMEX Digs into Tech, Content, Commerce

College and university campuses are possibly the only places where consumer technologies, higher learning, new media, electronic and mobile commerce, libraries, retail technologies, and digital content intersect. Educational sessions coming up March 7-8 at the 2014 Campus Market Expo (CAMEX) in Dallas, TX, will address just about all of those areas.

Among the presenters for the Thought Leader series will be Charles Key, director of adoptions, grants, and the College Open Textbooks project for the Open DoorsGroup in San Jose, CA, a coalition of organizations working together to make education more accessible, and Mark Milliron, chancellor of the WesternGovernors University-Texas, a nonprofit institution providing online and blended degree programs.

Key will address Open Educational Resources and the Economies of Sale on Friday morning while Milliron’s Saturday session will discuss Technology, Education, and the Road Ahead.

Concurrent CAMEX educational sessions will explore new retail technologies for campus textbook sellers, how campus stores can work with other entities to support student retention and success, updates on the Higher Education Act and Department of Education regulations, how faculty and students are using technology for their studies, digital content pilots on college campuses, mobile commerce developments, connecting with students through social media, trends in higher education course materials, and integrating e-commerce and digital content platforms.

Flash Sessions (shorter takes on topics) will look at how campus stores can support student learning outcomes, helping students understand interactive digital homework solutions, selling textbooks online, using Google Analytics to track web traffic, what technology products students are buying, licensing course content, and where massive open online courses (MOOCs) could be headed.

Watch The CITE for reports from several of these sessions.

Following the session days, CAMEX will continue March 9-11 with its trade show for retailers serving students at higher education institutions and prep schools. CAMEX is owned and produced by the National Association of College Stores.

Bigger is Better, Say Mobile Shoppers

Given the choice, many people would rather view a full-sized e-commerce site on their smartphone or tablet than a mobile-optimized version scaled to the smaller screen.

Bill Siwicki, a managing editor at Internet Retailer, comments that he discovered this bit of counterintuitive intelligence by chance. He was browsing an e-commerce site on his phone when a pop-up offered to switch to the mobile site. His response: “Of course I want your mobile commerce web site on my iPhone. I don’t want to have to pinch and zoom and swipe like mad to try to make sense of the huge desktop site on my small smartphone screen. Are you crazy?”

That’s not the response most users give, however. Siwicki found that a new study conducted last October by Retail Systems Research shows more than half of consumers bypass mobile e-commerce sites to view the full site on their mobile device. The study didn’t specifically ask consumers why they do this, but an analyst with the research company told Siwicki that it’s probably because too many mobile sites have been overly simplified, leaving out too many features and content that visitors want to access.

Another reason may be that some consumers are more familiar with the full site and know just where to go with minimal zooming and swiping on a mobile device.

Either way, it indicates that many online retailers “who believe they have great mobile sites actually have more work to do to make shopping mobile-optimized sites on smartphones more appealing,” Siwicki writes.

Facebook Testing Mobile Payments

Facebook is testing a mobile payment platform that will let users pay for online purchases by logging in with their Facebook credentials. The platform is being developed as an in-house project for the social media giant.

The biggest obstacle facing the project is users’ distrust, Denee Carrington, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, told Information Week. Her research found that just 4% of U.S. consumers trust Facebook with a mobile digital wallet.

After it addresses privacy and security concerns, Facebook will need to focus on user experience, according to Jordan McKee of the research firm Yankee Group.

“Since Facebook profits from user data, the concept of offering payment credentials in addition to personal information may not sit well with many,” he said. “Facebook must also put tremendous emphasis on the user experience. If they don’t find Facebook’s offering to be intuitive, easy, and seamless, it will gain little traction and potentially dilute its brand.”

E-Tailers Try Out Same-Day Delivery

Some major retail companies are testing same-day delivery of online orders, according to the National Retail Federation’s Stores magazine. Even though consumers haven’t been clamoring for such a service yet, these companies apparently think it’s just a matter of time before they do.

That’s because free delivery is the main thing that induces shoppers to buy more online, even more than lower prices, or so says Baden Consulting Group’s 2012 consumer survey. Free delivery in two to 10 days has become so pervasive that some people won’t shop at sites without it. Before long, they might have the same attitude about same-day delivery.

Same-day service is most likely to be successful in urban areas where companies already have stores, warehouses, and/or suppliers in close proximity to a higher concentration of purchasers. From the consumer perspective, it should be fairly easy to process web orders, pull and pack the merchandise, and deliver the whole shebang to their door within a few hours, if not sooner.

Companies know there’s much more to the logistics than that, but consumer perception may prevail—especially since it’s the coveted millennials age group (18-34) that’s been using same-day delivery the most so far. Some 12.5% of millennials use same-day delivery “very frequently,” the Stores article noted, compared to only 4.2% of all consumers.

Colleges and universities should take notice. Like urban cities, campuses are packed with millennials. If Amazon and Walmart can manage same-day delivery, what’s to keep millennial students from fully expecting the same from the campus bookstore, food service, library, convenience store, tech shop, snack bar, or any other campus enterprise?

New Retail Site Harnesses Consumers' Likes

Building off the rocketing popularity of Pinterest, a new online recommendation site called Wisemarkit allows users to get a cut of the action when someone buys a product they endorsed. The site’s founders hope to drive sales through shopper-to-shopper buzz.

Wisemarkit, which launched July 2, has an interface reminiscent of Pinterest and even requires new users to request an invitation to set up an account, just as Pinterest does. Once an account is open, the user can recommend up to 10 items by pinning pictures and descriptions on a profile page. If somebody clicks through to purchase one of the items, Wisemarkit not only shares the revenue with the recommender but also awards points that can be redeemed to upgrade the profile page with additional features.

At present, Wisemarkit only sources merchandise through Amazon Affiliates and Shopsense programs, but intends to start signing up retail establishments soon, according to a Fast Company report. Retailers could also create accounts applauding their top sellers or hot, new arrivals. A ranking function will also show how many recommendations a product has garnered.

Why restrict accounts to just 10 recommendations at any given time and not an unlimited number? Wisemarkit thinks account-holders will only vouch for those products they really like, which in turn will generate more click-through sales.