Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

One answer: Nothing—in fact, TJX has been doing E-Commerce since 2009 in Europe. A different view: TJX really doesn't want to be the next Target.com.Read more...

The incident prompting the statement was Tesco's offering the new iPad (a version with 4G and 64 gigabytes) for £50 (which is about $80 in U.S. dollars). That is a tiny fraction of what the price was supposed to be, especially when considering that U.K. prices for U.S. consumer electronics are typically much higher.Read more...

It's more evidence that customers use apps and the mobile Web differently. And if you don't leverage that difference, you could lose a sizable portion of your M-Commerce customers.Read more...

The initial test used the shopper's physical location, but no other personal data (such as purchase history, other apps on the phone, Web search logs, personal demographics). However, personalization will likely be the subject of upcoming trials, said Dave Etherington, the SVP for marketing and mobile at Titan, the advertising firm that executed the Gap trial.Read more...

What if the customer could tag an item in the retail store so that it automatically was added to their online shopping cart for future purchase? This would enable people who like what they see to purchase it later. "Honey, I really like the looks of this new washing machine, but wanted to let you check it out before I purchased it."Read more...

That ability, plus new detailed maps to customers within Facebook, and Wal-Mart has bought itself quite a gift. The magic comes when those millions of gift-giving events—birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, graduations, baby showers, etc.—are merged with Wal-Mart's new social media files and its not-so-new customer purchase histories.Read more...

That's not a big surprise—POS hardware refreshes happen all the time. It's how the news came to light: a Wall Street analyst who took the opportunity of an earnings call on March 1 to complain that his breakfast at Wendy's took too long because it was freshly cooked.Read more...

Retailers have been trying to get that right for years, using a variety of technologies. But if Neiman Marcus' approach works, it may mean that associates and store managers will have to exercise much more discretion and discipline—and that chains will have to change they way they hire associates.Read more...

Being able to move data around your enterprise gives the most flexibility in using that data, and data portability also future-proofs your system by letting you bolt on new technology quickly instead of slowly and oh-so-carefully making changes to what you've already got.Read more...

Due to the (strange? pyschotic? drug-induced?) unusual policies at Amazon, publishers have no idea who their Kindle subscribers are. That puts us here at StorefrontBacktalk in the awkward position of having to make a plea to our Kindle subscribers: Please reveal yourselves, and tell us how you find the Kindle subscriptions. We’re considering some changes to the service and any customer feedback goes to Amazon—and it’s not sharing. Therefore, we’re begging for whatever feedback you want to share to please share it with us directly.

For you Kindle people who have not yet subscribed to our Kindle feed, it’s not bad for convenience when traveling, when you’d like the latest on retail tech and E-Commerce beamed into your Kindle when you’re not looking. …

But Visa is offering its new service for any issuing bank, mobile carrier and card brand. That means any payment card could go on a phone without the say-so of Google, ISIS or any other mobile-wallet vendor. At that point, will consumers see any reason for a mobile wallet other than the phone itself?Read more...

That suggests the fallout from all that lost learning during Target's Amazon years goes a lot deeper than it earlier appeared. And any advantage in Target's latecomer-to-E-tail status may have been lost in the struggle just to get the site working properly.Read more...

What if your system could look for hints about specific purchases that could be flagged for likely returns? Perhaps a customer who purchases three of the identical shoe, but each one in a slightly different size?Read more...

The problem, then, for retailers attempting to enter the social networking space is whether they plan their strategy and miss new opportunities or allow that strategy to be random and chaotic and to create a host of potential legal problems from copyright infringement to defamation and potential privacy law violations, pens Legal Columnist Mark Rasch. How so? Let's start with copyright infringement.Read more...

In our attempts to battle the never-ending assaults by Spammers, StorefrontBacktalk had to do something this week for which we need to apologize. Our direct discussion forum—Go Beyond The Story—was recently overrun by Spammers. To make the forum useful, we had to wipe out existing users. We then put in place much better security. Now, we are asking our readers who had signed up for accounts in the forum to please sign up again.

We have also cleaned up our discussion forum on LinkedIn. If you want to jump into a discussion on our LinkedIn page, you simply need to first join the StorefrontBacktalk group forum. For you Facebook fans, we have also reactivated the StorefrontBacktalk‘s Facebook page. We love when people comment on the stories, but we need to insist that only comments relating to a story be posted to that story. For comments that do not directly relate to a story or column, the Go Beyond The Story forum is home. And we want it to be a noisy home, with lots of loud arguments and shouting. That’s how retail discussions are supposed to be.…

The Level 3 figures are somewhat interesting, in that Visa only started to report those figures as of last summer. It's first report put Level 3 compliance at 60 percent (as of June 30, 2011), which dropped three months later (Sept. 30) to 57 percent. The latest Dec. 31 figures show a slight recovery to 58 percent. But given that even 60 percent was disappointing for PCI compliance, Level 3s clearly need more work.Read more...

That improves Macy’s revenue, but also sets it up to take on its most threatening rival—Amazon—where the online giant should be at its strongest.Read more...

Those Facebook sites died because they were based on a flawed understanding of what social media is all about. It's not about creating a storefront or a virtual watering hole where customers gather to sing your praises. Those retailers already have that: It's called a Web site.Read more...

California may have cut an Internet sales tax deal with Amazon that kicks in this year, but it’s still trying to collect last year’s taxes. On February 16, the state issued a table for taxpayers to use in estimating how much tax they owe for purchases from out-of-state E-tailers. The table, which assumes Californians spend about 1 percent of their adjusted gross income with Web merchants, is supposed to save taxpayers the trouble of adding up all their online receipts. Yeah, we’re sure that’s going to work.

Then again, maybe getting it to work isn’t the point. This may really just be an attempt to collect more ammunition for lobbying Congress or the courts. It’s a lot more convincing to argue that out-of-state E-tailers should be collecting sales taxes (or at least helping out a little) if a state can say, “We tried to get our taxpayers to pay the tax honestly—we even gave them a form and a simple table—and they still won’t pay up! But, see, we tried!”…

"This is one reason why the PCI SSC is spending a lot of time developing very detailed solution requirements for new technologies like Point-to-Point Encryption," said RSA spokesman Rob Sadowski. "It's not enough to have the best security tools if they are not implemented and deployed well."Read more...

With cookies already under tighter controls in the U.K. and the European Union, and the near-certainty of some sort of U.S. Congressional hearings, retailers should be making new customer-tracking plans—plans that don't include cookies.Read more...

Believe it or not, writes Retail Columnist Todd Michaud, that's where the money will come from. RIM had the BlackBerry on the market for years delivering E-Mail to business users around the world, but it wasn't until Apple launched the iPhone and that mobile access to E-Mail became ubiquitous.Read more...

Whether or not its methods go too far, it's in good company in the mobile early-stage convenience versus security argument, with both PayPal—and its phone-less and card-less purchases at Home Depot—and Visa, which is pushing PIN-less EMV transactions while MasterCard is taking the more secure and less convenient pro-PIN EMV position.Read more...

It turns out there was at least one more copy of the problem picture—this time on Sears' ShopYourWay.com Web site.Read more...

"The bigger concern is internal keys, ones they couldn't survey. Without their data of 'weak keys,' we can't be sure we aren't using any," the retail exec said. "All owners of certificates do not know today if their keys are weak or not, and have no way of finding out just by examining them."Read more...