Often we hear that the eCommerce technology selection process is broken from both sides of the fence. The businesses that are selecting and investing in the technologies, as well as the vendors themselves, face the frustration of this process.

Our objective is to gain insights into the lessons-learned and best practices around eCommerce technology selection. We want to unearth what makes this a trying process and the success factors behind successful product and services selections.

Target is now allowing gift cards to be loaded onto an online account that can be accessed from your cell phone. You can actually pay for stuff with your cell phone. Yay! See Target's press release.

I know they aren't the first. Many versions I've seen before, however, have been small scale pilots or in foreign countries. Many scenarios I've seen also are "closed" pilots among the 3-4 parties in an ecosystem that it took to string a trial together. Target has 1740 stores ... there's a bit of scale in this solution.

So, how does it work?

First, you buy a gift card. I bought the one with the cute Target dog.

Then you pull the sticker off of the back so you can see the codes. I purchased a $20 gift card.

Instructions for using mobile gift cards as well as promotions are on Target.com. Using their available media - Web site - to promote the new offer? Well done.

Interestingly though, this site ONLY had instructions for the mobile gift cards. I couldn't find a link on this site to regisiter my mobile gift card. This confusion for me is probably the only thing I could find to "ding" them on, so to speak. I'd expect that one of their next rounds of Web site updates would add this link.

I did find the link on their mobile Web site.

2010 marks my fifth year with Forrester Research. Over the last five years, I have had a chance to work with many, many financial service firms. While I will openly admit that I am biased towards the Web, the past year provided more evidence than ever about the  growing importance of the Web channel. 

Using consumer data to challenge assumptions about how consumer segments will respond to various online customer service touch points is always interesting to me.

I’ve recently had an opportunity to the seniors (age 65+) and online customer service and found some interesting characteristics of the segment: