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Black Friday Twitter Project

black-friday-twitter-project

Intrigued by Web phenom Twitter, StorefrontBacktalk in November 2008 set out to see how well Twitter could function as a near-realtime news alert system. We decided to test it using the Web traffic focus of Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Partnering with more than half a dozen Web tracking services, including Gomez, Keynote, Pingdom, Sitemorse, Hitwise, Chase Paymentech and Brulant, StorefrontBacktalk’s Twitter alerts delivered the first reports of uptime hiccups from Walmart, Nordstrom, Sears, Barnes and Noble, Saks, Overstock, Amazon, Kohls, Target, Wegmans, Gap, Costco, Kmart, Bloomingdales, Staples, Jcrew, Victoria’s Secret, Williams-Sonoma and Home Depot, among many others.

The Twitter alerts didn’t go unnoticed, with front page coverage in USA Today as well stories in CNN, MSNBC, among others:

StorefrontBacktalk Black Friday Project Coverage
Click on the bulleted links below to read those stories.

StorefrontBacktalk.com will continue to use our Twitter feed to report on breaking news stories throughout the week, often hours—and sometimes more than a day—before we can finish reporting, editing and posting a full-blown story on it. Throughout the year, we’ll also be using the feed for various special retail tech and E-Commerce events around the globe. Hope to have you on board for some!

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Most Recent Comments

"Cards issued by European banks when used online cross border don't usually support AVS checks. So, when a European card is used with a billing address that's in the US, an ecom merchant wouldn't necessarily know that the shipping zip code doesn't match the billing code." -Marc

Will Warranty Enforcement Be Amazon Marketplace's Achilles' Heel?

Nathan
I buy most of my nerd toys on Amazon and I had never stopped to consider that I may be shooting myself in the foot in terms of warranties. I'll have to make a point of checking the seller's info to confirm they are authorized distributors (at least for high-ticket items). Thanks for the head's up! Read more...

When Replacing NFC, Tech Is Really Not The Issue

A reader
Folk wisdom on the net suggests that if you are given a "free" product, look carefully at the terms because you are no longer the consumer - you are the product. If Google offered free readers to merchants, what would they be getting from those merchants? Data. They would be able to close the loop on when and why customers who research on line buy from a bricks and mortar store. This would enable Google to know retailer price points, which searches are most effective to get those products in front of on line advertisers, and to be able to sell that advice to others. Not every retailer would want to provide such data to their competition. Read more...

Court To Fed: Keep The (Inter)Change

terry
This was an easy way for merchants to effectively directly remove money from a customer’s bank account. The risk of default was low, as was the cost of processing. Merchants had to install new PIN-based POS terminals, but many banks and acquirers helped to subsidize these costs by setting the interchange fees at “par” (no fee) or even reverse fees as a subsidy. Read more...

Walmart Sales Tax Snafu: How Did They Get This So Wrong?

Paula
I've been in the industry for a thousand years and didn't know about these "collection fees". Actually checked with my former boss, a COO of a major multichannel retailer, and neither he nor his CFO knew about it either, even though his company is taking advantage of it in a couple of states. Read more...

PCI's Not-So-Open Global Forum

Marc
I agree with your premise that the PCI SSC needs to do a better job of communicating with POs. I don't agree with your QSAs interpretation of PA-DSS requirements. 4.2.7 is not specific to user accounts with user databases. "4.2 Payment application must provide an audit trail to reconstruct the following events: 4.2.7 Creation and deletion of system-level objects within or by the application." The standard interpretation, in my experience, is that the application must provide an audit trail for system events. Read more...
Stephen Ames, CISA, CISSP
I received confirmation from the PCI Council's director of data security standards that my PA-QSA was not exacly spot on with his guidance. Without getting into too much detail, my application in question is compliant with PA-DSS 4.2 out-of-the-box. I'll be having a conversation with my PA-QSA about this. Read more...

Why Did Gonzales Hackers Like European Cards So Much Better?

David True
I am still unclear about the core point here-- why higher value of European cards. Supply and demand, yes, makes sense. But the fact that the cards were chip and pin (EMV) should make them less valuable because that demonstrably reduces the ability to use them fraudulently. Did the author mean that the chip and pin cards could be used in a country where EMV is not implemented--the US--and this mis-match make it easier to us them since the issuing banks may not have as robust anti-fraud controls as non-EMV banks because they assumed EMV would do the fraud prevention for them Read more...
Marc
Two possible reasons that I can think of and have seen in the past - 1) Cards issued by European banks when used online cross border don't usually support AVS checks. So, when a European card is used with a billing address that's in the US, an ecom merchant wouldn't necessarily know that the shipping zip code doesn't match the billing code. 2) Also, in offline chip countries the card determines whether or not a transaction is approved, not the issuer. In my experience, European issuers haven't developed the same checks on authorization requests as US issuers. So, these cards might be more valuable because they are more likely to get approved. Read more...
Biff Matthews
A smart card slot in terminals doesn't mean there is a reader or that the reader is activated. Then, activated reader or not, the U.S. processors don't have apps certified or ready to load into those terminals to accept and process smart card transactions just yet. Don't get your card(t) before the terminal (horse). Read more...
Mimi Hart
The marketplace does speak. More fraud capacity translates to higher value for the stolen data. Because nearly 100% of all US transactions are authorized online in real time, we have less fraud regardless of whether the card is Magstripe only or chip and PIn. Hence, $10 prices for US cards vs $25 for the European counterparts. Read more...
A reader
@David True. The European cards have both an EMV chip AND a mag stripe. Europeans may generally use the chip for their transactions, but the insecure stripe remains vulnerable to skimming, whether it be from a false front on an ATM or a dishonest waiter with a handheld skimmer. If their stripe is skimmed, the track data can still be cloned and used fraudulently in the United States. If European banks only detect fraud from 9-5 GMT, that might explain why American criminals prefer them over American bank issued cards, who have fraud detection in place 24x7. Read more...

Changing Terms of Service? Be Ready For A Class Action Lawsuit

Bernard Regier
Very enlightening article. In regards to policy statements/terms of service, why hasn't Craigslist been sued up the wahoo for not allowing users to cancel their memberships? Of their many uncouth business practices, including complete lack of accountability and doling out strange, arbitrary punishments to out-of-line members(see customerservicescoreboard.com for 8-9 hundred horror stories), disallowing individuals to terminate service seems the most unlawful. I don't know anything about contractual law or online regulations, but If I owned a store, I could refuse or restrict service to anyone or lock them out if necessary; what I CAN'T do is lock them in!Your thoughts? Read more...
StorefrontBacktalk
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