Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

PayPal says it is acquiring Zong for online purchases of digital goods, which is what Zong is used for now. But Zong's approach is simple enough that it could be used for in-store payments, too—without NFC or smartphones, using existing POS hardware and without payment-card interchange or PCI requirements. Is that what PayPal has in mind?Read more...

As retailers try to master the new terrain of today—with mobile payments, item-level RFID, QR codes on subway walls or digital receipts—it’s good to know the largest insurance companies have their backs. It’s just that some of them seem to be holding knives.

At least that’s the sense one gets from The Hartford (Hartford Fire Insurance), which has now filed federal lawsuits in Illinois and New Jersey to tell two of its retail customers—Children’s Place and Crate & Barrel—that they’re on their own in defending against some POS lawsuits. The specific litigation involves consumers suing the chains because store associates asked for Zip codes at checkout. How prohibited such conduct is remains under debate, but not at Hartford, which has a fine-print exclusion for defending anything “arising out of the violation of a person’s right of privacy created by any state or federal act,” according to copies of both lawsuits. Whatever happened to the days when insurance companies saw their duty as defending their customers? (Answer: They were all April 1.)…

The European decision also points out the increasing legal split between U.S. and European E-Commerce requirements. For example, in the U.S., one-click checkout requires a license from Amazon, but cookies can be used routinely for customer tracking. In Europe, 1-Click is unpatented, but many cookies will soon require an opt-in in E.U. countries. The further the two markets drift apart legally, the more complicated cross-border E-tailing becomes.Read more...

The risk for Amazon isn't just that its referendum effort might fail. Long before the 2012 election, Amazon and California tax officials will be in court, and that could rule the law valid or not. But going after the tax through such a highly public political process is likely to put every brick-and-mortar competitor and disgruntled customer on the other side of the campaign—and to make this a referendum not just on the Amazon tax, but on Amazon itself.Read more...

On the one hand, we have a meticulously planned revenge plot of a soon-to-be-fired network admin, who the Manhattan District Attorney's office said prepared a year in advance for the assault by creating a fictitious employee and giving him high-level network access. On the other hand, would someone who had served as the Gucci network administrator for nine years create such a nefarious account using his own account name and password? Would he then access the account and E-mail repeatedly from his home, making no attempt to hide his IP address?Read more...

Every now and then, there’s a retail use of online that is actually likely to do good at the same as it helps retailers do well. The Retail Orphan Initiative on Tuesday (July 12) got quite close when it rolled out a charity-locator feature designed to deal with retail overstocks. One of the historic problems charities struggle with is the logical challenge of connecting companies and people with food, clothing or other items that they want to donate with entities in a position to accept and redistribute where they’re needed.

The Charity Locator is designed to help retailers get tax write-offs while dealing with some $65 billion of overstocked items every year. The locator features an interactive map of nearby charities from a RetailROI-developed database of 501c3 organizations across the country that focus on at-risk children, women in distress or families in need. The charity locator includes the top 125 cities and the top 300 largest malls in the U.S., with information on types of items each charity accepts, including clothing, food, furniture, building materials and educational materials. The system automatically recognizes the address of the retail store and suggests three to five local charities that will accept donations. It’s definitely worth considering.…

If a merchant rejects the transaction, the customer may be offended, confused or just go away. These are bad outcomes for the business, whether it is a retailer or a charity, pens PCI Columnist Walt Conway. On the other hand, processing the transaction means the particular communication system (and everything connected to it) is now transmitting cardholder data. This is the case even if the customer wasn't asked to provide the information. Processing the transaction can increase merchant's PCI scope, thereby leading to an even worse outcome with broad implications for the enterprise. Read more...

The first bill, introduced by Senator Al Franken (D-Minn.), is called The Location Privacy Protection Act of 2011. It is trying to force telcos and retailers to get the consumer's "express consent before collecting his or her location data and to get that customer's express consent before sharing his or her location with third parties." The second bill, introduced by Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), is called The Geolocational Privacy and Surveillance (GPS) Act. It is designed to restrict how government investigators can access mobile-location data. The key problem is that these bills are focused on location-based mobile services, and they tend to forget that the most common location-based mobile service is getting the phone to ring when receiving a call.Read more...

PCI Columnist Walt Conway is not convinced that requiring every merchant to use SAQ D, with its 280-plus requirements, makes sense. It is just too daunting for a small or midsize merchant. On the other hand, we see increasing numbers of hacking attacks on these same merchants who use the shortened SAQs, so they need to be more secure. Maybe a better course is to upgrade the shortened SAQs or even change them into "guidance" documents. Read more...

But E-tailers' legal dance to avoid paying the sales taxes that brick-and-mortar retailers collect and remit every day may be futile. Although their move might buy them a bit of time, in the end, death and (sales) taxes are inevitable. Allowing states to collect Internet taxes will literally require an act of Congress—and such a law could be introduced this month.Read more...

The curse of the Web site upgrade has struck again. But fortunately for Amazon, which Web-monitoring service Pingdom reported to be down for more than three days last week, the E-tailer’s site was working fine. The Amazon-is-down alert “referred to a problem we had getting to Amazon due to something they’d done with their system,” a Pingdom spokesman later explained. “Amazon started treating monitoring services [and most bots in general, if they presented themselves as such] slightly differently for a while. Most likely it wasn’t even intentional, just some side effect.”

This isn’t the first time E-tail updates have wrecked havoc with uptime tracking systems, as 1-800-Flowers discovered in February. Exactly what Amazon changed to confuse Pingdom’s bots isn’t clear; Amazon wouldn’t comment. And in fairness, it’s not an E-tailer’s job to play nice with monitoring services. But something at Amazon continues to drive monitoring sites a little crazy. On July 1, after the Pingdom problem was cleared up, there was a rash of Twitter reports that Amazon was down. They were based in part on the popular downforeveryoneorjustme.com site, which reported: “It’s not just you! http://amazon.com looks down from here.” As of tonight, that site still thinks Amazon is down.…

Fair enough—there was some type of upgrade, techs encountered unexpected problems and the job of getting everything working again far outlasted the scheduled maintenance window. That makes perfect sense, until you think about it for a moment. After all, why would Walgreens schedule an upgrade for a busy time like Monday afternoon? That's the sort of thing you do in the middle of the night over the weekend. And that's probably what Walgreens actually did.Read more...

"Consideration was given to the possibility of providing separate XML interfaces. However, it was decided to provide a common XML interface embracing the requirements of all of the applications, because this was consistent with the historically common practice of integrating applications through POS transaction log files," the new standard said. "It is noted that audit, security, labor productivity and activity analysis applications are very demanding of detail content, [with] all driving the need for an all-encompassing XML schema."Read more...

One retail IT line that is too cynical to not share: In an unrelated interview, a senior IT manager discussed working with certain internal clients—business unit heads who had, until recently, been just colleagues.

What’s the difference, he was asked, between a colleague and an internal client? “Simple,” he said. “An internal client is a colleague who’s had his reasonability removed.”…

In an impressively creative mobile-payment deployment in South Korea, Tesco has embedded QR codes in actual huge pictures of its shelves and then pasted those photos onto subway walls. Customers use their phones to scan and pay for the captured images, thereby selecting their groceries while waiting for their trains. The groceries are then delivered by the time they return home. In South Korea, Tesco markets itself as Homeplus.

This approach is brilliant on so many levels. Not only is it replacing the cost of putting up new stores, but it addresses the relative smallness of images on a mobile phone. The images exist in these beautiful—and gigantic—high-resolution full-color pictures. All the phone’s screen does is display the text and thumbnail of the purchased item. Signal repeaters guarantee excellent speed and connectivity. And Tesco, and its customers, is leveraging the dead time of waiting for a train and turning it into productive shopping time. True technology leaders merely deploy quickly. They think through how the technology could work. There’s no rule that says mobile images must appear on the mobile screen.…

Before downloading the Twitter Commerce app, a user must agree that the vendor can read the consumer's tweets (including private direct messages), "follow new people," "update your profile" and—my personal favorite—"post tweets for you." Yeah, what consumer would have any problem with any of that? A third-party wants to send tweets out under my name? No problem. "I don't think it's the best choice of words," said Harrison Lee, the Tweetalicious co-founder/chief marketing officer, who also dubbed the warnings "intimidating." But, he added, it's not his firm's fault; Twitter dictated that wording.Read more...

That may be an inevitable consequence of globe-spanning E-Commerce. Here's another: Those stricter, faster breach-notification requirements will also hit U.S. retailers that have handed off European order-handling to third parties and even retailers that don't officially serve European customers at all. The less connection a retailer thinks it has with European customers, the more of a mess it's likely to be.Read more...

The point-to-point advice "will talk about the ability to encrypt at one point and decrypt at another point and the transmission between those two points being completely out of compliance scope." That is the first time the council has been that publicly explicit about point-to-point applications being out-of-scope. Even more intriguing was when Leach tied it back to mobile devices: If a retailer associate "is swiping the card or dipping the card into a peripheral device that plugs into a mobile phone, now we're talking about devices and not applications. If they can do that and the mobile phone is simply a conduit for transmitting cardholder data that is encrypted," then PCI compliance could be had through standard means without waiting for the council's formal mobile guidance next year.Read more...

The actions of the vendor—TF Payments, a unit of ThoughtFocus Technologies, which is marketing the product as FocusPay—highlight some of the challenges involved when planning a retail mobile-payment strategy in an environment where the rules have yet to be established. And as a result, vendors are feeling pressured to promise capability with non-existent standards—and hoping no one notices. This time, however, someone did.Read more...

Industry shorthand is intended to be an efficient way to communicate frequently used phrases. Sometimes, however, retail tech drops its guard and ends up with multiple identical terms to refer to very different things. Some 15 years ago, “Web server” was the classic example, referring to both software and tower hardware. It was often impossible to tell which was being referenced, even in context. Today, M-Commerce is giving us a 2011 example.

If I reference Best Buy Mobile revenue, am I referring to the chain selling phones or what people buy using their phones looking at Best Buy’s site on those phones? The same can be said of just about every major chain that happens to sell phones, but Best Buy is an especially severe offender. It actually dubbed one of its divisions BestBuy Mobile—and it’s the chain’s M-Commerce group. Here’s a Merriam-Webster brain-tease: What do you call revenue that Best Buy earns from people accessing the chain’s M-Commerce site on their iPhone and then using that connection to purchase an Android phone? (Was going to ask for the name if those same people engaged in this M-Commerce Android effort while riding the LAN at a local Mobil gas station, but thought better of it.)…

In fact, the vast majority of our stories (often 80 percent or more) are deliberately not Premium. We are hoping that these colorful images will make it easier to tell which stories are Premium and which ones can be read in their entirety by non-Premium subscribers. We're hoping that this clarification cuts back on the frustration of non-Premium readers who click on stories that they can't read fully as well as encourages readers to click on a story, confident that it's entirely available to them. This is also a good time to explain how StorefrontBacktalk decides which stories are Premium.Read more...

Verizon went out of its way to deny that this signals the telecom giant pulling back from its ISIS mobile-payment alliance with AT&T and T-Mobile. Indeed, it trumpeted its denial in the second paragraph of its own news release. Feels sort of like the guy who walks into house and his wife says, "Welcome home," and he shoots back, "I certainly wasn't cheating on you just now, in case you were thinking that." (Second paragraph, Verizon? The telco doth protest too much, methinks.) The denial didn't even—to be precise—refute that its affections for ISIS are cooling. "Our relationship with Payfone complements the part of the mobile-payments equation we're already working on with our ISIS joint venture," said Greg Haller, marketing vice president, Verizon Wireless.Read more...

The idea is to create experience pages for products that are typically linked with a large number of related products, such as school supplies, a home entertainment system or a backyard grill. The details are still being fine-tuned, but the idea could be a page with a list of all recommended items, each with its own checkbox. One keystroke could purchase the whole package, or selected items could be removed or their quantities changed.Read more...

Her comments come on the heels of our report last week that the elimination of the Google AdWords badges for Google Checkout likely meant the beginning of the end for the alternative payment system. The executive shall remain nameless for the moment because, well, there's already too much unemployment in this country. Asked if Google Checkout will be killed or whether it will simply get a lot quieter, the exec laughed and said that, in recent years, "we've spent zero time on marketing [Google Checkout] and zero dollars on consumer awareness. I don't know how much quieter we can get."Read more...

It's easy to knock Sears, with its long history of making customers unhappy with out-of-stock items, whether they were actually out of stock or not. (In a comment to The Consumerist post, a Sears representative blamed the associate for being unable to find the item in stock, then lied to cover his incompetence.) On the other hand, maybe the problem isn't as human-centric as that. It could be that Sears' dueling inventory systems are to blame.Read more...