For years, designing and developing applications inside of retail enterprises followed a fairly standard methodology.  I have represented this methodology in the image below.  To summarize:

• This methodology can best be dubbed "Corporate Centricity".
• LOB applications and corporate data stores represented the starting points for all application projects.
• The user experience (not purely the UI) was dependant on LOB application architectures and the limited array of services they provided.
• Each customer experience represented a physical and logical representation of the substructures extending out from the Corp LOB assets.  

Since the advent of the multi-channel context, retailers are coming to a view that designing a good, consistent user experience across channels is far more than a pretty picture, painted on a variety of devices.  True meaningful customer interaction is about form and function, with consistency at all points of interaction.  This view has caused retail architects to refocus their application design perspective, by building with the customer at the center of architectural design, as represented in the following image:

This conceptual approach takes a view that enterprise-class services must be available from all channels (including 'channel n'...the channel yet to be discovered/needed).  Architectures built from this perspective are more agile and more responsive to business constituencies like  marketing inside of retail organizations. 

While there is certainly a host of complexity beyond these very basic representations, a perspective whereby the customer drives application design is being leveraged as a competitive advantage inside of some very progressive retail IT organizations.

The industry is replete with "experts" who will try to convince you that their software or professional services (or a combination therein) will make you a successful eCommerce retailer.  To be fair, there are many true experts in this industry who come with a rich pedigree of big brand name sites to their credit.  More often than not however there are many so-called experts who can share with you what they did on their last job or can detail how you should use their software, but can't illuminate how your company's strategy, leveraging tools, best practices, and tailored marketing, can help your company acquire and grow a competitive advantage.  What is lacking in this industry is a blueprint for how retailers can leverage eCommerce as part of a broad multi-channel strategy instead of having their eCommerce systems dictate a strategy.   

Far from being that blueprint I referred to, I want to highlight what I believe are five core pillars to an effective eCommerce strategy.  Most of these will not be revolutionary ideas to most, but I would submit that re-affirming these principles in your organization may end up eliciting a very introspective process.  If you believe in and adhere to these principles, your technology, people, and process investments will represent a cohesive focus toward the end state that you desire.

1.  Invest in eCommerce like it is your biggest, most important store (while it may not be your biggest, it is probably growing much faster than your biggest).  Investments are not always capital investments.  Human capital and time are important here as well.  Putting your best people at the helm, complete with executive level sponsorship, will pay big dividends.       

2.  With a focus on integration, make your enterprise applications assets, not liabilities, in building your multi-channel ecosystem.

3.  Remember that the traditional 'Web' is an important channel, but it isn't the only channel.  Execute your channel strategies today but plan and build for the channels of tomorrow.

4.  Effective multi-channel retailing does not come in a box, so don't expect to find it in a box...no matter how much the box costs.

5.  Your customers will be able to tell how much you focused on a seamless cross-channel customer experience, and will reward you or punish you as appropriate. 

I have been discussing with a colleague an unmistakable trend that has begun to capture the attention and investment of retailers.  This trend is a logical extension and amalgamation of several trends that have found their way into strategies for major retailers over the last ten years.  While on the face of it this new trend is nothing beyond common sense, the ways in which retailers achieve success in this area can be quite innovative.  What I am talking about is a renewed focus on the consumer.  My colleague aptly refers to it as the "consumerization" of retail.  I like another term:  Customer Centricity 2.0. 

One needs to only survey the show floor at the National Retail Federation (NRF) Show in NYC this week.  Many entering the show floor had to check their Expo hall badges to make sure they had not just entered the Consumer Electronics Show (CES).  Retailers, with technology vendors in tight formation, are looking for innovative ways to deliver the types of experiences that consumers demand.  This new paradigm of consumer experience is an extension and combination of the customer centricity orientation that has been part of the retail lexicon for years and the multi-channel/cross-channel experience concept that has captured the attention of the industry.  The result is a focus by retailers to deliver rich user experiences to customers where they are, how they want it, and all the while taking into account that they are competing for a share of consumers' time and wallets. 

Think about the challenge of driving a relationship with a consumer in a universe of new consumer devices, online gaming, DVRs and Tivos, mobile phones with Web access, instant messaging, SMS, broadband access at home and more.  The basic premise of selling has taken on a new look.

What innovative retailers are realizing is that a focus on the consumer in the context of consumer experience is the new customer centricity.  The years spent on the supply chain was time well-spent for most.  Retailers who wisely spent investment dollars building flexibility into supply chain execution, multi-nodal distribution, assortment responsiveness, and demand-sensitive replenishment are in a good position to execute.  Now a new wave of innovation will take retailers to the next level.  The focus now shifts to user experience design to support compelling experiences, digital advertising strategy across channels, a single view of the customer, consumer device integration and driving social connections between retailers and consumers and among consumers in support of the brand. 

Reaching consumers where they are and how they live will be Customer Centricity 2.0 and we are poised to see some exciting things happen in 2008! 

Microsoft will again have a large presence at the National Retail Federation (NRF) Annual Convention and Expo January 13th-16th in New York City.  NRF is the largest retail trade association in the world.  If you are able to attend the show this year, please stop by booth 818 to see what Microsoft and its partners are doing in retail. 

Please visit http://www.microsoft.com/industry/retail/nrf.mspx for more information on Microsoft's presence at the show.

I would also like to extend a special invitation to the Multi-Channel Retailing area of the booth where we will be providing a glimpse of how Microsoft and its partners are driving the convergence of online retailing and Web 2.0. 

As we have observed, retailers are moving forward on ways to begin to monetize, or derive tangible brand value from, what is commonly referred to as Web 2.0.  There are a myriad of examples of these efforts in the marketplace, some compelling and some less than compelling. 

Whether retailers define Web 2.0 in its purely technical contexts, AJAX support, RSS feeds, RIAs, XML, etc or view the 'killer app' of Web 2.0 to be its more social aspects, many retailers are beginning to come to the understanding that Web 2.0 initiatives in isolation are not game-changing.  The social experiments and technology pilots, while interesting in that they confer some valuable experience in terms of what works and what does not, tend not to have the desired impacts.  Retailers on the cutting edge of Web 2.0 are those that have found very tangible (read: ROI) ways to connect Web 2.0 to Online Retail. 

While the convergence of Web 2.0 and Online Retail conceptually may seem quite simple, executing on a unified Web 2.0 and Online Retail strategy is complicated.  A big impediment to this approach is organizational.  Many retailers have virtual teams and or small subsets of their marketing organizations to Web 2.0 pet projects.  These teams typically do not have good operational or technical linkages to their counterparts from the "Dot Com" team.  Further, these teams typically are not marching toward the same goals as the Dot Com teams.

From a technical perspective, the primary impediment to good Web 2.0 and Online Retail convergence is flexibility.  This comes in a number of different forms.  The key pillar however is one of service orientation.  On the face of it, service orientation is a pedestrian concept for most retailers.  Many retailers have invested heavily in what they believe to be a service oriented multi-channel architecture.  The litmus test for this is for retailers to ask themselves how they would deliver on given certain Web 2.0 business initiatives.  A good example would be how to add integrated buying capabilities to a social networking venture.  Or how to enable social features into existing commerce environments.  A technical example would be how to implement an AJAX-centered microsite for a specific product category.  The answer for most retailers is either a complete re-platform of their eCommerce infrastructure or at a minimum, a huge development effort.   

Look for retailers pushing Web 2.0 efforts in some of the following areas as examples:

• Enhanced checkout flow (i.e. embedded AJAX cart, richer controls)
• Second generation product reviews (leveraging product reviews as affiliate marketing; adding rich media (audio and video))
• Linking social networking with commerce controls (playing off social sites and/or adding social aspects to existing commerce sites)
• Richer user experiences
• etc

For an interesting venture into Web 2.0 meets Online Retail, check out Amazon's Askville at www.askville.com.

While the supply chain is a functional area that has historically been on the tip of retailers' tongues, talking about the supply chain today, especially in the context of eCommerce and multi-channel, is passé.  It is much more in vogue to focus on things like AJAX, social networking, search engine optimization, rich Internet applications, product reviews, affiliate marketing, etc, etc.  While the front-end technologies (inasmuch as they impact user experience) are important, especially in the context of customer acquisition and retention, core functional aspects of a retail organization still have a tremendous impact on brand loyalty.  In that context, I contend that a retailer's supply chain planning and execution, comprised of both technology and business processes, should still be considered the biggest impact to customer satisfaction.      

To be fair, (most) retailers have worked very hard on their supply chains.  Retailers have spent many millions of dollars optimizing their supply chains.  This investment has produced (in many cases) very tangible results.  These results can be seen in the draw down of aging or expired inventory, increases in average inventory turns, reduction in stock-outs, and reduction in overall cost of goods sold.  Retailers have done a good job reducing the costs and increasing the efficiencies of their supply chains. 

Before we declare retail supply chains "optimized" however....there is still some work to be done.  The first problem is that most supply chain optimization efforts have been based on a store fulfillment/replenishment model.  This model plans replenishments (either push or pull) assuming the store as the customer.  Pack sizes, truck building/load balancing, replenishment quantities, warehouse layouts and capacities, etc are all based on the concept of supplier-to-warehouse-to-store flow.  Even reverse logistics scenarios, like returns management, assume stores as the aggregators (or a third party) of returns. 

The second major issue centers around the concept of order management.  One has to remember that order management in the traditional retail enterprise context centers around Purchase Order, Replenishment Order (i.e. DC/Supplier to Store) and Internal Transfer order management.  This is a vastly different animal than "Customer Order" management.  The primary differences here are in the areas of order life cycle and customer service. 

Retailers have dealt with these differences in a number of different ways.  Some have spent millions modifying ERP systems to deal with customer order management.  They had to take the architectures, business flows and other system constraints of traditional order management systems that ERPs are known for and find a way to "make it work".  Others have built or bought so-called distributed order management applications, like those offered by Yantra (now Sterling Order Management).  The goal here was to build workflow and architecture oriented around a customer and not an order management system clearly architected to interact with the GL application. 

With all of these complications (and many more I have not even touched on) retailers struggle with this cross-functional and technical challenge:  how can we adapt our supply chain processes and technologies (while not sacrificing our efficiency standards) in a way that will allow us to capitalize off of our growing multi-channel revenue growth?

While I certainly do not have all of the answers, here are some tenets I have seen lead retailers toward success:

• Using the core enterprise order management system for B2C may be a challenging endeavor
• Adopting these systems will be costly and will produce diminishing returns.  These systems were not made for customer order fulfillment, customer service and B2C scenarios.
• New systems, built or bought, may be more appropriate for the flexibility required
• Data can still be made to roll up as it needs to, even in a near real-time fashion...integration is the real key
• Enabling an efficient supply chain in a multi-channel environment should be based on an architecture with the customer as the foundation
• This will more easily enable customer service, CRM and B2C order lifecycle scenarios
• Integration points that are critical to transact business like financials, inventory, content etc are not being forgotten, but they should be interacted with in a publish/subscribe model
• Adopting physical fulfillment models for multi-channel business is often worth the cost and complexity
• Whether it means DCs specifically tailored for B2C (specialized material handling equipment, modified storage layouts, specialized training, etc) or simply process flows built around the B2C model, architecting physical processes that align with a focus on the customer will pay dividends.

Like many industry terms, "Web 2.0" has become a proxy for a variety of concepts that shape our understanding of its meaning.  I liken the development of Web 2.0's tenets and popular definitions to the evolution we have seen with "Customer Centricity" over the last eight to ten years.  For those of you who do not remember, Customer Centricity became an extremely popular buzz phrase that marked a seismic shift from the retail industry's obsession with supply chain efficiency (i.e. driving costs out of their bottom lines) to an approach focused on delivering a satisfying experience to customers and building brand loyalty.  Many retailers used this realignment to begin very structured studies of their customers buying patterns and demographics.  The end result (for some retailers) was a better view of the needs of their customers and the mechanisms internally to act upon them in a more proactive fashion.  In a very tactical sense, this produced technologies capable of better store-level assortment, markdown optimization, advanced forecasting and demand planning, more robust customer loyalty programs, etc.

So against this backdrop enters Web 2.0.  First some additional context.  Retailers are experiencing some exceptional growth in their eCommerce business.  While competition is high, many retailers are growing at an exceptional clip, with 20% online growth commonplace.  Because of this growth, retailers are now addressing their multi-channel retailing businesses as core to their growth strategies. 

While there is great growth, there are challenges.  It is my opinion that there are two primary drivers of what we identify as Web 2.0 concepts.  First, customer acquisition.  With great competition and some saturation in certain retail segments (i.e. consumer electronics) some retailers are having trouble adding new customers.  This will begin to constrain growth if there is no significant ability to grow average basket size.  In addition, there are inherent differences between customer acquisition in the multi-channel world when compared to the legacy brick and mortar world.  Customer attraction, while always a focus, has taken on new meaning.  Retailers engage with potential customers differently than they did when the primary (only) buying avenue was the physical store.  Concepts like search, online advertising and affiliate marketing, email marketing have now all become very common methods of attracting customers.   

With the Web now a big part of the way retailers and customers interact, customer experience has now moved to the forefront.  Customer experience in this context means a couple of things.  First, look and feel and overall usability.  This centers around a consumer's visual experience, ability to interact with and engage frustration-free with a retailer's site.  The big bet here centers around user experience technologies and design.  Some of the big resulting focus areas include:  AJAX technology, Rich Internet Applications (RIA), XML, etc. 

Second, retailers have begun to realize that they need to cater to how consumers communicate and network on the Web.  The new outlets available to consumers given the proliferation of broadband technology and the increased prevalence of Web-enabled devices (Wi-FI laptops, mobile devices, etc) have enabled consumers to make the Web a part of their social fabric.  Seeing the power of this new social manifestation of the Web, retailers have started to try to embrace social aspects of the Web in a variety of ways.  Some include: product reviews, blogs, Wikis, partnerships with social networking entities (MySpace, Facebook, Second Life, etc), RSS, etc.  To show you how much this concept has taken hold with some in the industry, I recently attended an industry event where a speaker said that retailers should no longer be brand managers but instead become "brand stewards".  The implication is that the social Web can be leveraged to communicate the value of a brand better than any retail marketing/merchandising department can.       

Clearly the concept of Web 2.0 is taking hold, regardless of the definition one subscribes to.  The key for retailers however will be in how to monetize these concepts.  For example, many big retailers have tried (unsuccessfully) to create a retail presence in virtual worlds like Second Life.  While the experience will hopefully lead to an improved understanding of how consumers interact with retailers in social settings, none have made any significant money in these environments.  For now, retailers will continue to invest in technologies that improve the user experience and will look for ways to acquire new customers. 

The key to being successful as some of these technologies take hold will be to have the agility to capitalize on new business initiatives.  Key tenets of good multi-channel infrastructures, including a single view of the customer, extraction of business from presentation layer(s), effective business tooling and a common and flexible development environment will all continue to drive Web 2.0.

For those of you not familiar with PIM, let me apologize in advance for pollinating your mind with yet another acronym.  Product Information Management, or PIM, refers to the systems, strategies and processes for managing product data.  While the concepts around PIM are certainly nothing new, retailers are now addressing their PIM needs in the context of their multi-channel strategy.  Because of the nature of what PIM provides, many retailers are seeing it as a precursor or dependency in their broader eCommerce solution initiatives.  If you have read one of my previous posts, you know that analysts are predicting a huge eCommerce platform refresh over the next 1-3 years.  If that information is accurate, I submit that there will also be a large PIM solution focus as well.

We need to deconstruct PIM a bit to understand why retailers are finding it so critical to their multi-channel capabilities.  PIM, as a concept, seeks to extract item management from the application environment.  Go back in time to the era of the merchandising system/ERP boom.  Retailers were buying or building big merchandising applications and/or ERPs focused on providing 'foundation data' to run their enterprises.  These enterprises were almost always focused on the store and warehouse environment.  Every merchandising application has some form of an 'item master'.  This data store typically comes with a big list of fields and in some cases some basic hierarchies.  Retailers typically use some basic editor screens to manage and manipulate this data along with any automated data feeds that they have.  The data in the item master is the core of a retailer's foundation data. 

As application environments became more complex, retailers needed to disseminate this item data to many other systems and tools.  Worse yet, the functional needs of each system often varied greatly.  For example, a supply chain execution system, like a WMS, needs a vast array of handling rules and dimensions that merchandising applications are often blind to.  So the retailer had to decide to build these new fields into the merchandising application (and the ability to maintenance them) or build application-specific item attributes that sit in the application that needed them.  Multiply this scenario exponentially across application environments and functional areas and retailers ended up with a mess. 

The final nail in the coffin of the application-centric item data store was the emergence of multi-channel retailing.  The ability of retailers to syndicate item information in a channel-specific manner was very low with core merchandising applications.  Each channel may require different versions of item information.  For example, the Web may require rich product descriptions and images, while the logistics applications require dimensions and other physical data.  A shopping affiliate partner may require an XML feed, limited to certain fields that they support. 

A PIM solution promises to extract processes around the aggregation, maintenance and syndication of product information from legacy applications, like ERP and core merchandising products.  The vision here is a nimble architecture that will enable interaction with product information in a manner that is not dependent on a specific application environment.  The PIM can be a single source of truth for item data and a clean separation from other business rules.  From a multi-channel perspective, PIM allows retailers to be able to maintenance and syndicate product information to their sales channels in a much more agile fashion, tailored to the needs of the channel.

I do need to mention that there are a couple of views of PIM that are prevalent across the software industry.  Some view PIM as a software application.  In other words, PIM functionality in a 'PIM solution' will address the challenges of item management.  Others view PIM as a strategy, that is solved with tools and processes to address item management.  While both have some validity, it is important for a retailer to take a good look at internal discipline and processes to understand which direction is best for the organization.    

Given the promises of PIM, many retailers are looking to get their "house in order" with a PIM implementation either as first step toward a refresh of their eCommerce platform or as part of that refresh.

Best Buy has taken a big step by aligning ownership of both store and Web operations to a single EVP.  This is a very telling announcement.  Many retailers are looking to align not only systems and technologies to deliver a multi-channel experience but also business ownership and accountability as well.

"Best Buy Co. has announced several executive changes, including hiring a new chief information officer for North America and giving the head of U.S. web sites oversight of the company’s 872 U.S. stores."

Internet Retailer, 2007

I just returned from the RIS News Cross-Channel Executive Summit in Scottsdale.  This was a tremendous event that brought out some top eCommerce and multi-channel executives in the retail industry.  The use of the term "Cross-Channel" was frequent, as this was an attempt to make a distinction between having a presence in multiple channels (i.e. multi-channel) and having a coordinated strategy across channels (i.e. cross-channel).,  While the distinction is a bit nuanced, the focus of these executives was truly on both technology and processes to align an organization to deliver a seamless shopping experience across channels.

Microsoft was a charter sponsor of this event that featured some top notch speakers.  To give you a flavor of the event, take a look at the list of topics:

• Multi-Channel Retailing 2.0: The Internet as a Hub
• Upgrading Your eCommerce Platform
• Dynamic Merchandising 
• Demystifying the Conversion Funnel: Acquiring, Engaging and Retaining Customers
• Customer Engagement via Word-of-Mouth Marketing
• Focus Group:  Understanding GenNet
• Key Findings From the 1st Annual RIS News/AMR Research Cross-Channel Technology Trends Study
• Creating Loyalty Across Channels
• Retail 2.0 Strategies in Action

A few key thoughts from the event:

• Retailers have recognized that a siloed approach to eCommerce can be a huge impediment to success.  That being said, many are still struggling with implementing a hub and spoke model that would allow for consistency across channels
• Many retailers are trying to cope with years of systems infrastructure and legacy business models impeding their support for growing business requirements.  More progressive retailers have implemented new business models to cope with the growing success of eCommerce/multi-channel.
• Simply providing commerce capability online is passé now for the most advanced multi-channel retailers.  Most now our focused on how their multi-channel capabilities can become a gateway or hub in their ongoing branding and relationship efforts.
• Several retailers talked about their eCommerce platform upgrade efforts.  Statements were made by many that they chose eCommerce pure-play solutions and were surprised by the high level of customization required to implement.
• Key differentiators in delivering customer centricity are real time analytics/BI and real time inventory visibility

Nearly every major retailer has started or is planning some type of CRM project.  Many retailers see a CRM solution as an important component of an eCommerce/multi-channel solution.  While I believe the business case for CRM is clear, as it works to deliver on the promise of a single view of the customer, the implementation of a CRM is not as simple. 

In my dealings with retailers, many see CRM from a pure systems (i.e. features and functions) perspective.  While the feature capability of a CRM solution is very important, the overall solution capability can be overshadowed in an organization without clear workflow, processes and strategy around the implementation and use of a CRM.  For these reasons (and others) many CRM implementations are falling short.  Take a look at some of the recent data from AMR on the topic:

• 29% of poll respondents experienced difficulties that kept their deployments from going live
• 25% of CRM licenses are undeployed     

Like any booming software space, CRM captured the hearts and minds of IT and LOB executives with the potential of what the solution could offer.  This exuberance lead many to rush to purchase and implement without a sound strategy or processes behind them. 

An example of a company that has done CRM well is Best Buy with their Geek Squad business unit.  They were looking for a solution and not a product.  Because of this their implementation is delivering real results.  More on their case study can be found here:

http://www.microsoft.com/dynamics/crm/product/bestbuy.mspx

In the array of eCommerce solutions that retailers can choose from, one sticks out as more of a business model than a solution.  For this reason (and others) many retailers were, and still are, drawn to this approach as it addresses many of the challenges they were (or are) not ready to face.  These are the types of challenges that software doesn't necessarily solve. 

I am talking about the outsourced eCommerce model.  Note that I didn't use the term "hosted".  I make this distinction for good reason.  In my definition, the outsourced model takes many (if not all) of the business processes associated to eCommerce and shifts them to a third party.  In some examples, the "outsourcer" even takes on supply chain and fulfillment responsibilities. 

A hosted model is more of a technical relationship, where a retailer moves much of the Web infrastructure off premises but may still have a good level of interaction with their Web properties.  This interaction typically enables business users to perform limited marketing and merchandising functions using hosted, Web-based tools. 

What makes the outsourced model attractive?  There are a number of things.  From a technical perspective, much if not all of the technology required to transact business on the Web can be handled by a third party.  This includes software, network infrastructure, etc.  From a people and process perspective, the outsourced model promises to run a retailers eCommerce business and tailor itself to the needs of the retailer. 

What are some challenges with the outsourced model?

• Cost
• While many outsourcers present creative cost models, the long-term costs of these solutions are significant.  Many outsourcers take a percentage of top-line eCommerce revenue to fund the model.  This ranges from 3-10% on average.  This was particularly attractive to retailers several years ago, when the true business value of the Web was unpredictable and the barriers to entry and maintenance were high.  With eCommerce revenues skyrocketing for many retailers, the impact to top-line revenue has now become a significant dollar value.  Also, with many retailers growing eCommerce revenues 15-30% per year, the level of investment to support an eCommerce presence has become exorbitant.  Outsourcers also typically lock retailers down to contracts of significant length (several years) and make the terms of the contracts very clear:  all eCommerce should run through their services (thus be subject to the % of revenue cost model). 
• A somewhat hidden cost of the outsourced model is the "change request".  That is to say, the need to periodically modify the online capability in terms of features, approaches, content, etc.  This is an additive cost for the retailer and typically not covered by the top-line percentage.   
• Agility/Flexibility
• For a retailer where eCommerce was not part of their core strategy, allowing a third party to deliver an eCommerce presence was very attractive.  This strategy had minimal impact to core operations: the store.  Because many retailers have since seen the value to revenue growth and customer relationships that can be found with a Web strategy, most have now evangelized the impact of a multi-channel approach to retailing.  Delivering a multi-channel experience for a customer however requires control of all channels.  With the Web channel outsourced, it becomes very difficult to align core systems and processes to deliver a seamless experience across channels. 
• If the Web is now a part of core retail strategy - key to driving revenue growth and building lasting brand loyalty and customer relationships - what opportunity costs might also be incurred in this model? 
• Imagine a new campaign that seeks to drive foot traffic to the store leveraging a single view of the customer.  In an outsourced eCommerce model, modifications to site capabilities, collection and use of multi-channel data is now very much dependent on the 3rd party.  To execute this in a 3rd party model, changes will need to be written up and paid for.  Worse, if the campaign or approach needs to be modified, it will be time for new change request write-ups and new dollars for the modifications.  That assumes of course that the outsourcer is willing and capable to perform the work.

Make no mistake, the outsourced model can be a good choice for certain retailers.  However, in an era where retailers are working hard to deliver multi-channel experiences to their customers, the outsourced model presents a host of challenges.  

We continue to hear studies regarding consumers' focus on the security of their online transactions.  Probably once a month a well-known entity has to publicly announce that they have had some type of security breach that may impact the integrity of the personal data of their customers.  TJX is probably the most well-known case in retail of this type of issue.  The impact to their brand has been very clear. 

This can be disastrous for retailers.  This type of event keeps retailers up at night. Add to this fear the compliance standards known as PCI and retailers are tasked with a growing list of requirements to secure their online presence. 

I recently contributed to an article that skims the surface of this topic.  The article can be found here:

http://www.microsoft.com/midsizebusiness/industries/retaildefense.mspx

Microsoft recently hosted a PCI conference in Redmond that was very well attended.

A primer on PCI can be found here: 

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480484.aspx

Finally, a good whitepaper on PCI planning can be found here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=D8320DF1-D0D0-469F-A6FC-B53987BD74C2&displaylang=en