Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Todd Ablowitz, president of the Double Diamond Group and one of the more interesting payment experts in the U.S. (for us, "interesting" is someone who thinks a well-balanced presentation is where all audience members are pissed-off equally), has been sitting with lobbyists and studying the Durbin bill, currently scheduled to go before a House-Senate conference committee on Thursday (June 24). His conclusion, with a little bit of mildly tortured logic: The bill will strongly incentivize banks to accelerate their acceptance of Chip-and-PIN in the U.S.Read more...

As retailers move more aggressively with Mobile Commerce initiatives, one of the hesitancy points has been the relatively small number of smartphones in the market. Developers always like to program for the latest and most high-tech offering, and retailers need to ratchet them down to develop for what most consumers actually have. The latest smartphone figures from ABI Research—published Wednesday (June 23)—showed a distinct uptick in smartphone sales, with more than 55 million smartphones shipping in this year’s first quarter.

But ABI notes that many of these are smartphones, not brilliant phones, in that they are not nearly as fully featured as the latest Droid or iPhone. They are still considered smart, though. “These are not ‘iPhone-killers,'” said ABI Senior Analyst Michael Morgan. “They’re simpler, lower-end devices, not bleeding-edge top-of-the-line technologies. But they can still deliver satisfying social networking and other basic smartphone experiences.” Morgan added that “much of the fastest growth is being seen in markets previously little penetrated by expensive, cutting-edge smartphones. With new less-expensive models becoming available, the global market is becoming much more diverse.” That’s got to blast the ringtones for most retail M-Commerce advocates.…

The first allows consumers to easily impersonate other users—and thereby access their rewards, which means the stores are not attracting the consumer they wanted to attract—and the second defeats users' efforts to go into a confidential mod,e where their whereabouts are not supposed to be distributed.Read more...

The morning was spent providing horror stories about how the sophisticated Russian organized crime syndicates responsible for the lion-share of breaches operate. The afternoon, meanwhile, was spent talking--indirectly--about what role tokenization and encryption may or may not play in the future of card data protection. Retailers representing more than 50,000 domestic locations were all in the same room, and not once were they asked their thoughts and opinions on the matter. "What a wasted opportunity," Michaid wrote.Read more...

It turns out that Amazon bought a social-networking company of its own in 1998--five years before Mark Zuckerberg tells audiences he came up with the idea for Facebook.Read more...

On Monday (June 14), Tiffany announced its new mobile app, which sports a feature called Ring Sizer. Bypassing the tracing efforts done by other non-in-person ring sales, the app asks customers to place a current ring (hopefully one that fits) "directly on the screen and align it with the correct circle in the guide," according to a Tiffany statement. But what if Tiffany didn't leave it up to the customer to choose the right circle and line things up properly? What if the ring could be pressed on the screen and the app would take a precise measurement from that?Read more...

Starting this week, each StorefrontBacktalk article has two new features. First, in response to many reader requests, we have now added a print function for each article. Just click on the Print icon (right across from the article’s date) to generate a web page formatted for printing, without page breaks, sidebars or reader comments.

Second, we now automatically add a URL to any content that you copy and paste from an article. Yes, it’s a feature: Instead of copying an entire article to send to someone, now you can copy just the most relevant part and paste it into a message; the URL for the full article is included at no extra charge. Tipping, of course, is always encouraged.…

"I wonder when people will realize that mobile devices communicate via, ummm, radio?" asked the IT exec. "And that microwave radio signals (which GPS, mobile phones and microwave ovens all use) don‘t transit solid surfaces, especially conductive ones like metal mall roofs, all that well? And that carriers make no promises relative to in-building coverage (and virtually no promises relative to out-of-building coverage)? And the U.S. government makes no promises at all relative to GPS signal penetration or even availability?"Read more...

Most of the software packages on the Bad Apps list come from conventional commercial software vendors. If there's a problem with their applications--specifically, if those apps keep sensitive authentication data after a transaction has been authorized--the vendors are usually quick to create a new version or a patch that solves the problem. Result: Only older versions of the software contain the security problem that makes PCI unhappy. And next to the bad version of the app is a note listing the later versions that don't have the problem.Read more...

Visa routinely compiles a list of applications that, it believes, store sensitive authentication data after a payment has been authorized. Many app versions on this "Bad Apps" list are outdated and no longer being sold. But that doesn't mean they are not lying around in hidden corners of quite a few major—and some not-so-major—retail chains.Read more...

Outsourcing is a great way to get into a new technology, because someone else has already made the investment, built the infrastructure and collected the necessary expertise. As a retailer, you don't have to reinvent that particular wheel?just pick the right outsourcer for the job. But you can't assume that the outsourcing deal will last forever, or even that you can trust it just to keep doing what you need.Read more...

His advice to retailers: If an application is not on the list, don't even include it in an RFP.Read more...

This payment might be made to the handset manufacturer, but more likely it would go toward a pre-arranged credit or debit card. Let's take this approach one step further. Why not buy from Wal-Mart a Wal-Mart phone—or from McDonald's a McDonald's phone—that allows one-click purchases for anything at all? The consumer would then receive a monthly bill with everything itemized. That's one way to get around interchange and to build some wonderfully deep CRM databases—with lots of your rivals' sales—at the same time.Read more...

Microsoft was rather vague about the reason it's backing off ("After a couple of years of trying, we did not see the broad adoption that we had hoped for," blogged Bing Senior VP Yusuf Mehdi), but there has been a compelling suggestion that the program was simply being gamed by clever consumers.Read more...

The Guitar Center offer is to give any poster a $10 gift credit for submitting a review that other site visitors vote as a top review. The site makes comment posters jump through quite a few hoops to get those $10 gift credits, and it has a ceiling of $50 in credits for any one person. Whether that lengthy list of hoops undermines the value of the program is a very fair question, but the more immediate concern is whether these $10 incentives will work at all.Read more...

This week, China's Alibaba Group opened up a two-way e-tail portal between mainland China and Japan. Alibaba's goal is to make cross-border sales to consumers easy enough for tiny retailers who can't afford all that cost and effort. But the China-Japan portal may also be a model for big retailers to do the same thing.Read more...

When someone sends someone else a gift card, why not first send an E-mail alerting the recipient to the card's imminent arrival and have that E-mail include a password to activate the card after it arrives?Read more...

But what Sam's Club discovered is that it quickly became its own direct revenue stream.Read more...

The new PTS specs become effective in one year (May 2011). Although you can buy currently validated equipment up until that time, why would you? If you are looking at a terminal (think kiosk, gasoline pump, vending machine) that combines several individual components, you'll want to check each component (including software) against the Council's list, noting version numbers. Walt also suggests getting something in writing from the seller that indicates every component associated with the PED has been assessed by a PCI PTS lab and is compliant.Read more...

The big challenge with trying to answer those questions is that the established social sites are moving targets. Facebook, for example, on Wednesday (May 26) announced it will be offering tighter controls over consumer information. Where will this option lead six months from now? Your operation may put in a huge amount of cash to develop a spectacular site on Facebook, only to later learn that the site won't permit you to track user activity--even in your page clicking on your products. Facebook might prohibit you from knowing anything someone does in your site short of making a purchase.Read more...

Then customers, who are used to the niceties of that sales associate interaction or the tactile feedback from inside a high-end clothing store, show no interest and developers are baffled. That's where a bunch of Amazon Kindle developers find themselves today.Read more...

On Tuesday (May 25), MasterCard announced it plans to release Open APIs so developers “will be able to create a new wave of E-Commerce and mobile payment applications.” The only problem: Why would it? MasterCard officials spoke of the power of M-Commerce and E-Commerce platforms, but failed to explain why an Open API approach would help. Unlike PayPal and Apple, where developers have expressed strong interest in creating their own apps to sit atop those platforms, there is little such enthusiasm surrounding Visa and, given its smaller marketshare, even less for MasterCard.

It’s hard to look at this MasterCard statement and not envision Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer whitewashing his fence by tricking every other kid in the neighborhood into doing the hard work for him, while he made the money. Tom gave them the tools and let them finish the job. To paraphrase MasterCard’s current tagline: There are some things money can’t buy. But custom apps and marketshare ain’t among them. Use that plastic and pay for your own development. Don’t see the development community whitewashing your fence for you this time.…

On his site's blog, Hsieh wrote that the current software—which is all homegrown by Zappos—was so complex it was difficult for non-programmers to feed it information. "Unfortunately, the way to input new rules into the current version of our pricing engine requires near-programmer skills to manipulate, and a few symbols were missed in the coding of a new rule, which resulted in items that were sold exclusively on (Zappos partner site) 6pm.com to have a maximum price of $49.95," he wrote.Read more...

The brand was having a somewhat good day in that it learned of the glitch, fixed it and republished the form in less than four hours. That's impressively fast, even in Web time.Read more...

The exact number of retailers in Level 1 was 360 chains in the figures released this week, which is the exact same number that Visa reported last month. Last month's report covered activity through Dec. 31, 2009, and this week's figures are current as of March 31, 2010. Those results suggest that four of last year’s compliant chains no longer are, bringing the number of non-PCI-compliant major chains up to about 18.Read more...