Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

The Nook was supposed to be merged-channel perfected: Buy anywhere, instant delivery, no DCs required. The physical stores were expected to be steamrolled by Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN). Instead, Amazon has crushed the Nook, while B&N's stores (with no more competition from Borders) are hanging on. Welcome to Merged Channel 2.0—or possibly Merged Channel II: The Showroom Strikes Back.Read more...

The debate surrounds the Seattle-based retailer's use of a vendor called Euclid, which captures information from the Wi-Fi signals of both customers and passersby. Is it legal? There is no specific U.S. law on whether MAC addresses are "personal information" entitled to legal protection. Moreover, U.S. law regarding things like access to cell phone records and cell phone usage probably don't apply to the Wi-Fi portion of the device. So although it may constitute an unlawful "trap and trace" or "pen register" to capture a cell phone number or IMEI of a cell phone, these laws likely don't apply to capturing the MAC address of a Wi-Fi-enabled device. Put simply, your iPad or Wi-Fi-enabled iPod isn't a phone, nor is the non-phone portion of your iPhone, Blackberry, Android or Windows mobile device.Read more...

But largely missing from the rumor mill is a blunt reality: Google isn't actually a retailer at all. It could probably put up a chain of good-looking stores and find things to put in them—Nexus phones and tablets, Chromebook computers, Google Glass electronic glasses, driverless cars. But what, exactly, would what is fundamentally a huge online advertising company get from opening its own chain? One possible answer: some actual payments.Read more...

Two very desirable—and potentially lucrative—sets of shopper data are being captured and saved here. But the retailers and the vendor involved are all pledging to not use it. The first is cross-retailer data, which is where the vendor will recognize a shopper's phone's MAC address when the shopper repeatedly walks into a Nordstrom and then detect that same shopper walking into a Nordstrom competitor. How much would that rival pay for such information? The second data set: Once one of those MAC addresses makes a purchase, the chain could connect that MAC address with the payment information. Voila, instant CRM-friendly data on whenever that customer walks into a store and, with enough sensors, every aisle he or she visits and how long the shopper lingers.Read more...

Short answer: apparently so. And with digital content a potential CRM goldmine, more chains may soon start selling digital books, movies, music and audio books—which could get very sticky, for both customers and retailers.Read more...

In the 1970s, California passed the Song-Beverly Act. It prohibited merchants (there were no online merchants back then) from requiring, as a condition for accepting a credit card, consumers to provide certain personal information. The legislature was worried about merchants using the pretext of accepting a credit card to mandate that consumers pony up their names, addresses and other personal information.Read more...

Such changes are especially likely because the court did not impose any restrictions on how retailers can use this newly permitted data, despite the ruling saying that data is solely to give online shops a better chance of fighting fraud. The ruling allows address and other information to be demanded from shoppers even when the goods are physical, but only if the product is being shipped to a different location. The rationale is that when a physical product is being delivered, the retailer has an obvious need to ask for the address to which it will be sent. But for fraud purposes, the court's Monday ruling now allows the site to demand the address of the customer, in addition to the delivery address.Read more...

That's the terrifying part: No other brick-and-mortar retailer comes remotely close to those numbers in mobile payments. The heartening part: It's possible. Despite all the wheel-spinning from PayPal, Google and Isis when it comes to getting customers to use mobile payments, it can be done. And it's not something unique to Starbucks customers.Read more...

The essence of the London case is that Google and Apple made privacy promises that are being broken. That fact may make it more of a contract law and a deceptive trade practices claim than a criminal case. And even that is dicey, because the news release from the first plaintiff to file a suit indicates it's less a matter of Google or Apple lying than it is about the companies being vague. But all of that is an issue for the lawyers at Google and maybe Apple. How does this make retailers' lives miserable? Quite easily.Read more...

Automating coupon-based offers is fine. But if you're going to Internet-up paper-style coupons, you really have to go all the way. And these pretty clearly were conceived as paper coupons. One clue comes in the boilerplate on the coupon, which had relatively few restrictions on products that could be bought (no Apple, Sony or Nikon) but also specified the coupon was good in-store only. It also sported classic paper-coupon language, including "No copies."Read more...

An unorthodox use of Bluetooth is being tested at a huge Russian shopping mall for both in-store customer location and payment transactions. The catch: It’s extremely nonstandard. Instead of pairing with customer smartphones the way Bluetooth devices usually would, individual devices throughout the store broadcast amped-up signals (range: 100 meters, rather than Bluetooth’s usual 30 to 50 meters) that tell a smartphone app about discounts and specials. If the signal from, say, the display of Bartlett pears is strongest (because it’s the nearest broadcaster) and if it meets various demographic criteria (send this one to only males, this one to shoppers older than 70, etc.), that’s the signal the app displays. Meanwhile, other Bluetooth signals with very low range (a few millimeters) are used for payments—no NFC required.

We saw this demonstrated at last week’s NRF show by vendor WiseSec, and it’s clever. But WiseSec says some retailers with especially large footprints may need as many as 50 or 60 Bluetooth beacons per store. With a 100-meter range, multiple stores in a mall will overlap, which is why the differentiation of signal makes sense. A potentially bigger problem: If you’re using high-powered, nonstandard Bluetooth signals, could they interfere with other Bluetooth devices (in-store that means everything from customer phone headsets to POS keyboards)? Not that we don’t trust the Muscovites, but we’ll like this a lot better once we see it not interfering with American or Western European customers and their toys.…

Like all innovative technologies (from credit cards to loss prevention devices), it's not clear yet whether consumers will embrace or reject the new technology, or how regulators will ultimately react.Read more...

What was different this time, though, is that members were more candid in explaining why they have the goals they do, even if they were not especially forthcoming in how they plan on achieving those goals. The group, for example, re-stressed its intent that data from one chain will not be shared with another chain. Jay Culotta, the treasurer at regional convenience chain Wawa, said many of the mobile vendors say they are not—today—planning on sharing data, but they refuse to say what will happen down the road. "It's not a forever situation," Culotta said, adding that the temptations for leveraging such data will likely be overwhelming. "It's unclear what their business case would be without monetizing that data."Read more...

Yes, the Albertsons logo is the same on both sides. But seven years later, everything from self-checkout to loyalty to POS to prescription systems is now different across the soon-to-be-unsplit chain. And everything will have to be merged—and fast.Read more...

Home Depot's use of the card-matching procedure is not that unusual among major chains, but the norm is for the effort to be kept internal, to help improve general marketing. It was Home Depot's reaching out to customers that made some of them realize what was going on. And therein lies the problem.Read more...

At an NRF panel on Monday (Jan. 14), a Macy’s E-Commerce exec said the chain wants to run quite a few small-scale analytics trials, something the exec said was “Amazon-like.” (Now there’s an adjective that strikes deep retail emotions.) “We want to build an Amazon-like testing environment, but a testing culture is not something people understand right away,” said Kerem Tomak, Macys.com VP of marketing analytics, according to our U.K. media partner, Retail Week. “We are educating others of the power of testing.”

Experimenting online to see what works best for collecting useful marketing and CRM data? Yes, that’s Amazonian, but it’s less of a culture change for Macy’s than it might seem. Remember, this is the chain that developed its shipping-from-stores system by starting with limited, low-cost experiments and then growing what worked and killing what didn’t. (Contrast that with JCPenney’s big-bang approach, where the chain locked into a grand plan and is now grimly marching into oblivion.) We’re pretty sure Tomak is wrong about Macy’s customers not understanding a “testing culture.” What they’ll hate is an “I found out somebody else was offered a lower price” culture. That’s when Macy’s will have trouble.…

Part of that may be a novelty factor—glossy printed material isn't so much a part of young consumers' lives today. But that only explains why catalogs might have some influence, not as-big-as-Facebook influence. Given that many chains completely dumped their catalog efforts in favor of social efforts in recent years, this is a genuinely annoying result.Read more...

Amazon isn't saying, but chances are good that such safeguards were in place—and that's why the victory E-mails went out hours before the game even started.Read more...

The data went to Bloomingdale's in aggregate, but the system could just as easily deliver CRM-friendly customer-specific data. The mirrors enable shoppers to try on far more outfits and combinations than time—or store inventory—would ever permit.Read more...

Our voice and approach—for good or for bad—will not change, and we have been told to continue delivering the same mix of breaking retail IT stories, analysis and opinion columns. (Yes, and some truly awful jokes. It's in the contract that those stay.) The bylines here will stay, as Frank Hayes, PCI Columnist Walt Conway, Legal Columnist Mark Rasch and the rest of the team will continue to do that which we do. Me, too.Read more...

The problem for retail chains is the vagueness of definitions for sites aimed at children. Is the toy section of Walmart.com such a site? What about games at McDonalds.com? Then there's the Catch-22 of asking ages online. If you ask, you'll be required to segregate the data from anyone in that age group and handle it—no pun intended—with kid gloves. (No pun intended. That was a play on words, not a pun.) And if you don't ask, you have the perfect defense that you didn't knowingly collect data from under-age shoppers without parental consent. Did the FTC really intend to encourage what Legal Columnist Mark Rasch calls the Sgt. Schultz Defense?Read more...

The last time these Wall Street guys almost accurately picked a vanishing retail brand was Borders. It turns out that E-Commerce makes even the most zombie-like retail names harder to kill. But that's not the only thing involved.Read more...

This new program is bizarrely ordinary, offering functionality that Amazon—and almost all of its rivals—have offered for years. Could this reflect Amazon's adapting to a new environment, where many of its longtime competitive advantages—such as sales-tax-free sales—are going away? Even its move into same-day delivery is not a differentiator anymore, with Walmart, Google, eBay and Macy's toying with the same program.Read more...

This puts retailers in an awkward position. As malls and stores track mobile device activity, retailers will likely have no idea the age of the shoppers associated with phones and tablets unless they ask—which is exactly what COPPA is intended to prevent.Read more...

The Web site, where a company "publicly" advertises its goods and services and shows its prices, is similar to the brick-and-mortar store. However, unlike the store, access to the Web site is granted subject to a "contract" between the merchant and the visitor, typically a "Terms of Use" agreement linked to on the bottom of the homepage. Visit the site, and you are agreeing to these terms. Violate the terms, and you are visiting the site unlawfully, exceeding the scope of your authorization to use the site. Or, in legal parlance, violating the computer hacking statute, 18 U.S.C. 1030.Read more...