Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

The move is part of a plan to move the state stores from IBM software over to an Oracle package and the contract anticipates--and prohibits--the kiosk company from making money from combining the payment card data and blood-alcohol levels and selling. (A little blackmail potential? If it weren't for that prohibition, it has all the potential for a nice business plan.)Read more...

Clearly, the nature of information-sharing with major retailers makes the erasure claim silly, generally because it's not practical—and sometimes not even possible—to get all partners to surrender the data. As the cliché says, it's impossible to get the data back into the toothpaste tube.Read more...

This was fueled by lawyer Mark Rasch's discovery when he was burned attempting to get a discount from Microsoft's new Bing search engine. When it didn't deliver, he realized that traditional retail procedures no longer apply.Read more...

The kiosk program raises key issues about data protection and ownership when the data-using firm goes out of business or even just modifies its business. There is also the semantic issue of the privacy value of wiping data in two places if it also exists in a third.Read more...

Consumers will go to the chain' site and use codes from their POS receipts to begin the process. "We have the demographic information and we've got the fact they bought, say, a cellphone and, more importantly, what we have is what they didn’t buy, such as a warranty or accessories."Read more...

Web coupon fraud "is rampant. All you need is a computer and Photoshop and you're ready to go," said Bob Olstead, the store manager of a Foodtown in Denville, NJ, who added that it is sometimes as long as three months after a coupon is honored that the store's coupon clearinghouse tells them it's bogus and therefore rejected. Would it make sense for manufacturers to get together and create an database to authenticate Web coupons and to allow chains to access the database as easily as they can verify a credit card?Read more...

The license plate/mobile situation is the latest example of a retail industry, pressured by an ailing economy that is sending household name chains into bankruptcy and forcing an ever-growing list of store closings and layoffs, trying to push the cash drawer envelope more and more on privacy issues. This effort is made all the easier because of improvements in technology, the ubiquitousness of smartphones and the fact that many younger consumers have an attitude toward privacy that is lightyears more flexible than preceding generations.Read more...

When the driver walks into the Nordstrom location, text alerts have told associates that he's the driver of a red 2009 S600. The scanner he walked by recognized his cell phone's unique identifier number as the same one that exited the Mercedes, which had its license plate number automatically logged as well. When he purchases a dress shirt 20 minutes later with his Visa card, the system can now attach a name (and the purchase of that shirt) to that license plate and that cell phone. If that customer happens to use a loyalty card, his complete purchase history is then associated with the car and his phone.Read more...

As e-tailers have learned the hard way from E-Commerce, customers don't care about tidy legal contracts assigning responsibility and quality-of-service obligations. If they go to a Wal-Mart or a Home Depot site and they have a bad experience—whether it's with uptime, a FedEx delivery hiccup, incorrect status reports, a video consumer comment that glitches or anything else that the retailer may or may not be directly handling—those customers are going to blame Wal-Mart or Home Depot and might take their business elsewhere. If M-Commerce is on your plate, you need to get used to living by the carrier's standards.Read more...

The FTC said the highly intrusive application would "monitor consumers’ online secure sessions–including sessions on third parties’ Web sites–and collect information transmitted in those sessions, such as the contents of shopping carts, online bank statements, drug prescription records, video rental records, library borrowing histories, and the sender, recipient, subject, and size for web-based E-mails. The software would also track some computer activities that were not related to the Internet."Read more...

An alliance between CBS Outdoor and Clustra is testing out such an approach using iPhones as the control devices. Will it deliver more eyeballs and ultimately better sales of whatever is being marketed? And could the same approach also work in a mall or department small, where the crowds are presumably much smaller?Read more...

The move has huge potential mostly because, from the consumer's perspective, it's so non-interruptive. Consumers are already in the habit of using self-service beverage machines at fast-food facilities, so it should encounter almost no resistance. All that will be visibly different is a much greater amount of beverage choice. As long as the machine's interface is clean, that shouldn't be a problem. But if the options look—even at a glance—overly complicated or time-consuming, things could turn ugly quickly.Read more...

Victoria's Secret's new mobile experiment is more of an adjunct to its catalogue (paper and online), with the mobile app needing a catalogue number before an item can be purchased and tracked.Read more...

But when those consumers return to that Dairy Queen with those tags stuck to their wallets, their watchbands or the back of their cellphones, identical those tags shall be no more. Given the differing purchase histories of each customer, the tags will deliver sharply different discounts and offers. In effect, the tags will serve as digital coupons as well as makeshift CRM/loyalty programs.Read more...

But the rollout Tuesday (May 26) from the Papa Johns global chain of 3,404 pizzerias takes it one step farther. Yes, it's generally just glitz and icing, but it integrates webcams that will literally interact with pizza boxes.Read more...

The initial version of the kiosks collect payment card information as well as drivers license data. Even setting aside the potential future POS/CRM access, the payment and highly-sensitive driver's license data will force some of that debate right away. How secure are the kiosks? Who is ultimately responsible in the event of a security breach, both from a legal and PCI perspective?Read more...

According to officials involved in the case, Macy's is saying that it has only been able to locate about 40 percent of the data involving some 2,900 tainted necklaces sold. Let's set aside for the moment the possibility that Macy's officials are being less than candid with the L.A. officials because they simply don't want to reveal the data. If we assume that they are being absolutely candid, what does it say about their data management?Read more...

Given that prior judges have ruled that a benefit to consumers is helpful in establishing the need for a subpoena to overcome retail privacy policies, Wright told Superior Court Judge Fred Rotenberg that "it is hard to imagine more of a benefit than allowing Macy's customers to take a toxic substance away from their children. (Macy's) is playing a dangerous game of hide the ball and the only one who loses are the children it puts at risk." The case is important because it raises many critical retail IT issues, including how private--or proprietary--the courts should consider data, including purchase histories from CRM/loyalty and POS payment files.Read more...

Sure, we can do news stories and columns on these documents but we thought some some readers might want a database of all of these documents as they evaluate new issues. We're not sure if we have the right answer, but today we're launching our best shot: StorefrontBackground. StorefrontBacktalk and StorefrontBackground are linked and share many of the same resources (such as our image library, some of the editors, shared servers, etc.) but are, editorially, polar opposites.Read more...

"After dozens of failed projects in the last ten years, the time is ripe for payments by mobile phone at retailers' checkouts," said the report. "Powerful initiatives in France and the Netherlands, initiated by the likes of Carrefour, Ahold and Auchan, may be strong enough to set European, perhaps even global, standards for mobile phone payments."Read more...

Sears.com is quietly getting into the social networking space. Well, not quite. Sears’ effort, done under the MySears.com banner and claiming more than 200,000 registered users, is more of a combo FAQ, suggestion box and interactive customer service site. This is a critical distinction because of a social site is one where the consumers dictate the topics and the exchanges. A retail giant landlord can quietly observe and follow where customers go or it can try and lead.

This BrandWeek piece details the Sears effort and it also brings up the teen-focused Wal-Mart effort from a few years ago, called The Hub. Bentonville pulled the plug on that site in barely 10 weeks. But it was only last year that Starbucks launched its own customer site, although it was pretty much limited to “telling Starbucks what it can do to get more of your money.” It’s sort of like a death row program, where condemned inmates can ride lifecycle machines to generate enough power to run the electric chair.…

This goes far beyond the CVSes, Walgreens, Rite-Aids and Wal-Marts of the world. We often complain about the store-centric thinking that undermines merged channel strategies, where they see online, mobile and even the call center as the enemy. What about the myopic view that goes beyond "store versus online" and gets into "my wonderful store on Elm St. versus your horrible store on Maple Ave." We discuss intra-chain rivalries, often overlooking into-in-store rivalries.Read more...

With the business clientele, the ability for self-service systems to award points for purchases is important, but not necessarily as important as allowing customized screens delivering different options for employees of different companies, said Jay Eisenberg, a senior marketing director for the $14.5 billion 1,713-store office supply chain. The trick was in how to identify the customer given that the printer was initially only outfitted with a magstripe reader.Read more...

Most of the products that are likely to be at play in the merger talks—including Java, MySQL, Sun servers and workstations and Oracle's Retail suite—will either be unchanged (Oracle Retail seems to have no redundancy and is likely to be not impacted at all) or the changes will be irrelevant (MySQL operates so far below the database size and needs of most major chains that it is likely to be irrelevant). Although Java has attracted a lot of attention and debate, it's unlikely that Oracle would handle it much differently than did Sun. But if one looks a bit further down the road, things could get a lot more interesting for the typical retail chain CIO.Read more...

This is one of these ideas that could work extremely well in a very limited set of circumstances. A whisky company opted to put up a billboard in a densely-populated and traveled urban area and wanted it to change–very significantly–with every person who saw it, tailoring to that person. The problem is that it can’t scale, requires workers on site (and workers who can craft ad copy on the fly, with literally seconds to create) and is likely quite expensive.

Still, as this video of Jameson’s truly interactive billboard illustrates, the marketing tactic can break through the clutter of a message-laden environment. And it’s hard to argue with the potential of a billboard that–as shown in the video–hailed a cab for a prospect. But could it be practical for in-store use? Maybe at a large mall? And what of the flip side: Are there consumers who would be alienated by having such a public message directed at them? And what if it was connected with CRM, allowing for personalization beyond that which can be observed? In this day of digital messages overflowing consumers’ cellphones, Web screens and shopping carts, it’s absolutely a concept not be dismissed too quickly.…