Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Also, retailers are creating not-so-small teams to deal with social interactions, teams they plan on paying for by cutting back on call center group staffing. That is a sound plan, but few are giving it enough time. By late 2012 or so, such staff re-allocations may start making sense. But certainly for 2011, double-staffing (adding to social teams without significantly taking away from still-popular call centers) will be necessary. Have you budgeted for that?Read more...

Now the customer enters the store, tries on the shoes, opens a price-comparison app, scans the barcode on the shoebox, finds the same shoes for 20 percent less online with free overnight shipping, takes off the shoes and leaves the store looking a bit smug because she's just found a bargain—and another impulse purchase is dead.Read more...

Gartner Analyst Avivah Litan thinks that within five years, at least 15 percent of all payment-card transactions will be validated using mobile location. "After all, our mobile phone is practically tied to our umbilical cord—we rarely leave home without it. Visa knows it, and so do the rest of us. Why shouldn't it serve as a useful tool for preventing fraud against us?" she wrote in her Gartner blog. That's all true—as long as everyone keeps in mind that using a mobile phone to confirm cardholder location still isn't the panacea that every retailer would love to have.Read more...

MasterCard’s and Visa’s sites were partially knocked out Wednesday (Dec. 8), ostensibly by aggrieved supporters of WikiLeaks, which MasterCard recently cut off from its network. MasterCard made no reference to a denial-of-service attack, only indicating that it was “experiencing heavy traffic on its external corporate Web site—MasterCard.com. We are working to restore normal speed of service.” It then added: “There is no impact whatsoever on our cardholders’ ability to use their cards for secure transactions.” A later MasterCard statement said: “Our core processing capabilities have not been compromised and cardholder account data has not been placed at risk. While we have seen limited interruption in some Web-based services, cardholders can continue to use their cards for secure transactions globally.”

Hmmmm. “Limited interruption in some Web-based services?” When MasterCard said that its “core processing capabilities have not been compromised,” is that indicating other processing capabilities were affected? If neither MasterCard nor Visa can fully protect it site against a highly predictable consumer attack, how would the sites fare under a full-scale well-financed terrorist hit? Both brands make much of their highly robust systems. Although there’s no initial reason to suspect that the payment-processing network itself was impacted, this attack certainly doesn’t fill retailers with abundant confidence.…

The real question, though, is not whether this move makes sense for The Gap, but whether it's something that other chains should now seriously consider. There are plenty of mobile applications—and far more developers eager for work—that can deliver similar if not identical functionality. Will the convenience of using Apple's devices make that the way to go?Read more...

Borker figured out that any kind of comments from customers&38212;including really negative ones—would send his pageviews from Google soaring. Note: This didn't help him if a customer typed in his retail brand (Decormyeyes), but few prospects had a reason to do that. They'd be much more likely to type in major optical brands such as Ciba Visions, which Borker resold. Because of the Borker case, Google has changed its search mechanism. But that might be bad news for many legitimate retailers. Google is being cagey about the changes it made, but Google Fellow Amit Singhal did post a few comments on the Google blog.Read more...

Canadian consumers were promised price-matching on any U.S. Black Friday sale, but store associates took a far more limited view of things. There's no question that this issue illustrates a classic case of poor training and/or communication with store associates, which is hardly a Canadian-only problem. Such communication is difficult at any time of year, given the huge turnover of young associates. But when you add in thousands of temporary seasonal employees, the challenge becomes almost impossible. As much of an issue as employee communication is, however, that's not the key problem here. It's this phantom distinction some retail execs are trying to make between in-store and Web.Read more...

IT executives know in their hearts that they have lost the battle to control users. Ubiquitous personal smartphones (usually better than the ones companies provide for their employees), social networking, cloud applications and removable media are here to stay. Business requirements will trump security every time. That means we need to focus on the one thing we can still control: protecting the data. That is where PCI becomes increasingly valuable. Read more...

American Eagle Outfitters experienced a couple of major site slowdowns on Cyber Monday, according to AlertBot, a traffic monitoring firm. "American Eagle's problems began around 6:36 PM EST when the Web site began loading very slowly. It seemed like the problem was resolved 30 minutes later, when the Web site starting loading within is usual time period only to have the problem occur again beginning at 7:30 PM EST," said AlertBot's Justin Noll. "The second failure was much worse, lasting over two and a half hours. The issue was finally resolved around 10:08 PM EST."Read more...

Even though many chains for years have price-matched any legitimate rival offer—including, of course, online deals from their own chains—Wal-Mart's new program excludes all online offerings, even those from walmart.com. How is that the industry's best price-match program? More importantly, though, let's explore what this online-exclusion means.Read more...

In a standard Black Friday sale promotional news release, Borders on November 24 implored customers to join its Borders Rewards Plus program by November 30 and receive a $10 credit, which had to be used by Jan. 11, 2011. The good news is that customers listened and did what they were told. The bad news is that customers listened and did what they were told.Read more...

The problem materialized because this year, for the first time, several E-tailers tried to re-create some of the excitement that surrounds brick-and-mortar Black Friday consumers-wait-at-2 AM-and-then-stampede-for-half-off-an-HDTV sales. The idea was to announce some very enticing deals and then to not offer them until midnight while stressing that only a limited number of each item was available. The retailers' campaigns were designed to force a huge number of consumers to hit their E-tail sites at the exact same moment and try to buy the exact same product. If you're looking to stress test your inventory systems, this is an ideal way to do it.Read more...

More than two years ago, Visa mandated—effective July 1, 2010—that "Acquirers must ensure their merchants, [VisaNet Processors] and agents use only PA-DSS compliant applications." With nearly 800 PA-DSS validated applications listed on the PCI Council's Web site, retailers have a wide choice. Unless, that is, they are looking for a mobile commerce application. Read more...

StorefrontBacktalk is moderating these two panels at the show, and we'd love for any readers to drop by. (If you don't boo, who will?) We actually have these wonderful IT giants discussing two of the most critical retail tech issues: Security and Mobile.Read more...

Many of the privacy arguments in Washington surround what advertisers can do online, but few focus on the data that retailers collect from site/mobile visitors. Does that mean that retailers are in the clear or merely that politicians have yet to figure out that loophole? In much the same way, Facebook's privacy restrictions focus on allowing others to access a member's information. But it says nothing about restricting what a user can do with his friends' info. In other words, consider the info that a Facebook user legitimately has about people on his/her friends list. Can they then share that with anyone else, without getting their friends' permission? And where do retailers fit in?Read more...

Really? We've seen lawmakers take their best shot at data security and privacy before. This time, it's a task force of bureaucrats trying to balance the demands of competing interests. But at this point, we don't need balance. We need clear rules for protecting customer data, and regulations with teeth so there's a meaningful penalty when data isn't kept safe. As it is, the Commerce task force has some nice ideas about voluntary privacy principles that won't go anywhere in Congress—and wouldn't help even if they did.Read more...

In the last few days, some have posted that this Patent is inherently rude and disrespectful and warned of the dangers of a computer glitch revealing that a gift was swapped. In this instance, those concerns are misplaced. Consumers have faced that risk for a millennium, when friends or relatives visit and ask where that sculpture of their dog—a birthday gift from last year—is hiding.Read more...

That's why new figures from Pingdom (based on raw data released by Akamai) offer an intriguing roadmap for global Web players. The countries with the fastest speeds are concentrated in Asia, which isn't surprising, but the specific order is, with South Korea blowing all other countries away. These are also all actual connection speeds, as opposed to what ISPs are marketing. This means that you should feel free to animate as much as you want for your South Korean prospects, while you might want to shrink the graphics when marketing to Australia.Read more...

That's great for PayPal users. For PayPal, it's a problem. The success of its iPhone app means there are millions of users at risk. And PayPal's promise to reimburse any fraud loss related to that risk means there's nothing to motivate users to upgrade from the old version that, to users, seems to be working just fine. Result: All the risk is on PayPal—and the only way to get out from under that risk is to irritate its customers.Read more...

In a settlement with Amazon, the anti-dog folk said that Amazon had ripped them off for about three years, from January 2006 through January 2009. The takeaway for retailers is clear, though. The Post Office is in a bad place these days, with E-mail attachments killing much revenue and FedEx and other carriers nibbling away at what's left. E-Commerce shipments are one of the last hopes, so the Postal Service wants to be explicit that it will enforce its rules strictly. But will it backfire?Read more...

In a look at how many of Visa's fraud reports came from its top five franchisee verticals (restaurants, apparel, direct marketing, sporting goods and lodging) over three years (2008 to 2010), the biggest short-term change was with restaurants, which plunged from 24 percent in 2008 to 9 percent in 2009.Read more...

Starbucks' up-and-down history on CRM, mobile and the Web makes these latest stats historically interesting. Whether it is up or down, this chain is hard to count out. That's especially true when a $10.7 billion coffee house is reporting a loyalty program growing at 20 percent.Read more...

That may seem unlikely. After all, who would want to disrupt customers just trying to buy a book, a pair of shoes or a gadget online? Probably not professional thieves—it's not easy to steal money through an E-tail site. But among the 700,000-plus people who have downloaded Firesheep, some are likely to have vendettas against certain retailers (and no, not just Wal-Mart). The clock may be ticking on how long E-tailers have before they either provide full-session security for all shoppers or risk losing business.Read more...

One issue hurting M-Commerce functionality is, ironically, that some execs may be taking early M-Commerce advice to heart. The initial advice had been to minimize functionality and images as much as possible, given the tiny screens and limited horsepower of mobile devices. But recent mobile improvements—especially in the Apple and Android arenas—could justify a slight liberalization of those rules.Read more...