Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

The vulnerability that attack uses is easily fixed. What's really worrisome is what makes the attack practical: the new ability to target server weaknesses that have been known for years—but no one worried about.Read more...

A trial for the Publix grocery chain to allow buy online/pick up right outside the store—similar to what Hannafords has been trialing—has ended with the service being killed. “While our Curbside associates have created many loyal Curbside customers, the number of consistent customers who chose to use this service was considerably less than required to meet our predetermined expectations,” Publix spokeswoman Shannon Patten was quoted as saying.

There is something about grocery chains—unlike almost any other retail segment—where trust is minimalized. For some perishable items—think meats, fruits, eggs or vegetables—where a customer wants to personally inspect items, looking for unripe, moldy items or cracked eggshells. The suspicion that employee-chosen items might inadvertently—or even deliberately—be less picky exists. There’s also a carryover effect, where even boxed or canned goods can suffer from the psychological association with those more delicate items. Grocery shoppers are not averse to tech improvements—see mobile shopping devices, electronic shelf labels or even some instances of self-checkout—but they really don’t want their ability to select to be diminished. …

Almost all retail marketing efforts are based on the not-so-simple premise of getting people to purchase from them, either online or in person. The problem, pens Retail Columnist Todd Michaud, is likely a mesh of old-mentality thinking with a heavy dose of channel conflict.Read more...

The good vendors will be able to address all these questions. The not-so-good ones will hand you a carrier bag or a pen instead. Read more...

But it is clear that Amazon is drooling over its vast CRM files and trying to figure out how much money it can make off them.Read more...

Legal Columnist Mark Rasch wants to call it a bait-and-switch coupled with a breach of contract. The Uniform Commercial Code Article 2 for the sale of goods says that if there is an offer (PlayStation for $150!), an acceptance (click here!) and consideration (here's my credit card), then voila! A contract is formed. Read more...

Although Best Buy has yet to spell out how this happened, the most likely scenario is that it was the so-called perfect storm of bad timing and possibly a quantity typo. How much of a delay happened while employees desperately tried to find the—unknown to them at that point—non-existent merchandise? In a $50 billion chain, news can travel upstream very slowly. When the news is bad, it travels upstream even more slowly.Read more...

Age verification is something mail-order vendors have struggled with for years, and mostly given up on. But E-tailers can no longer use impossibility as an excuse. A recent federal law requires age-verification for tobacco sold online—and other age-controlled items can't be far behind.Read more...

What started this holiday dogfight was an Amazon promotion, where it was offering a tiny discount (5 percent, with a ceiling of $5) for people who scanned barcodes and then purchased the item on Amazon. eBay's response was what it billed as a $10 in-store coupon, with three retailers: Toys "R" Us, Dick's Sporting Goods and Aéropostale.Read more...

There is more to protecting sensitive areas than installing video cameras. The second, and possibly thornier, concern for small and midsize merchants is how effective the reminder is likely to be when many of them mistakenly think they won't need to follow the advice.Read more...

As obvious as that seems (after all, how can a gift recipient review a gift until it's actually opened?), there may be a few more subtleties in when retailers can expect reviews—and what type of reviews they can expect.Read more...

Booksellers were up in arms about Amazon encouraging people to go into their local stores to buy on Amazon, despite the fact that consumers have been doing the same thing for as long as Amazon has been around and the fact that—to be nitpicky—books were excluded from the program. U.S. Senator Olympia J. Snowe (R.-Me.) issued a statement that "incentivizing consumers to spy on local shops is a bridge too far." That may be true, but the price-sharing part—the spying the senator is referencing—was excluded from any incentives.Read more...

Why? Because although what it was doing to those physical stores was likely legal, had those stores tried doing the same to Amazon, it would have been illegal, thanks to Amazon's posted policies. That policy phrasing is not even universal—or even common— among major E-tailers, pens Legal Columnist Mark Rasch.Read more...

As is our tradition, StorefrontBacktalk shuts down for the last two weeks in December, due to the fact that y’all are far too busy (a) supporting the biggest selling weeks of the year until December 25th, (b) supporting the biggest returns-and-exchanges week of the year after December 25th and (c) closing the quarterly books until December 31st on what everyone hopes will be a bigger year than 2010.

That means our next regular weekly issue will arrive on January 5th, 2012. In the meantime, everything else will still be live (the Web sites, our Kindle version, our Twitter tweets, our mobile sites, etc.). And we’ll, as always, send out breaking news alerts if circumstances merit. …

By the way, after much effort, PCI Columnist Walt Conway thinks he has finally found a real-world example of what a high-value token should be. Let's say shoppers want to use a payment card at a merchant, but they do not want that merchant to have their PAN, for whatever reason.Read more...

A message from our beloved business side: As the NRF Big Show happens next month, StorefrontBacktalk has a couple of last-minute slots for anyone wanting to communicate with NRF attendees. In mid-January, as our readers leave their postmortem holiday shopping meetings with the list of everything that went wrong, every feature management wants to add and a wishlist of products to make it all, it’s a nice time message.

We will also be adding several content channels next year—including several new weekly podcast series, more monthlies, events in addition to our usual weekly and monthly newsletters, and Web sites—and if your marketing people have any interest in getting involved, we now have new opportunities. Some of these new channels were specifically created to enable smaller vendors, with much more limited resources, into our community. If your marketers want to get your brand in the middle of these discussions, please drop us a note.…

If enacted with enforcement teeth, this could be huge. Not only are the threatened amounts (at least the ceiling) orders of magnitude beyond what major U.S. chains have been threatened with by card brands and processors, but the threats are far more realistic.Read more...

Much of the concern may have little foundation, because Amazon has low-balled the incentives to such an extent that it's unclear if many consumers will even bother to try it.Read more...

The idea is indeed interesting, as the Wal-Mart algorithms have already done the work of predicting what would be desirable. Then again, does it factor in that something of strong interest to someone has likely already been purchased by—or for—them? One nice touch about Shopycat is that it doesn't technically limit its suggestions to walmart.com and Wal-Mart stores. But testing on the app certainly shows that the overwhelming majority of choices are—coincidentally—only on walmart.com.Read more...

The most likely reason it survived: Target.com deep-sixed its clever but ill-fated experiment in limiting the number of customers who could be on the site at the same time.Read more...

But with the revenue hype fest that has been going on the last few days, it's worth remembering that this year is simply projected to have the same kind of season-over-season growth that it's enjoyed the last couple of years.Read more...

It's hard enough defending against a botnet firing an endless stream of "show me your homepage" requests at an E-Commerce site. Retailers have already seen those attacks amped up to 50 times their previous level during a few days after Black Friday last year. But the new style of attack (so far aimed mainly at online gambling sites) is likely to require a lot more hardware to pick off nasty packets—and it's hardware that's only necessary until the attack ends, at which point it's very expensive bric-a-brac.Read more...

A MasterCard spokesman wouldn't commit to the card brand accepting such transactions as "card present," at least not at this point. It's early—MasterCard and Intel expect to get all the authentication issues nailed down by 2012, with actual payments by laptop-owning online shoppers starting shortly thereafter. But anything that uses built-in hardware to close the gulf between the retailer and the physical card should help push interchange rates down.Read more...

It never really made much sense that Wal-Mart would go all the way to Australia for a mobile-receipts startup—that's hardly a new idea. But a box that plugs into a POS, so it's easy to experiment on a store-by-store basis with everything from mobile receipts and coupons to plug-and-play CRM, inventory and analytics systems, sounds like it's worth the trip. And that could explain why Wal-Mart worked so hard to make most details about Grabble disappear.Read more...

That said, tablets are becoming quite popular, and a migration of sales from PCs and laptops down to tablets is inevitable. From the chain's perspective, though, that change may be barely felt, because the tablets will simply be accessing your regular Web site. At best, it might be a slightly tweaked version of your site. Most of the current tablets don't really need much—if any—tweaking to deliver an acceptable experience.Read more...