Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

The decision by U.S. District Court Judge Alicemarie H. Stotler raises issues of how strictly retail laws should be interpreted when it comes to E-Commerce issues, many of which couldn't have been imagined when the laws were written.Read more...

In addition to monitoring--audio, video and even key logging--call center employees, call centers are sometimes classified as "sensitive areas" (per PCI 9.1.1), but GuestView PCI Columnist David Taylor argues that that has caused some companies to build walls and erect partitions to physically isolate the call center or those specific agents who have privileged access to card data or other confidential data, an approach that may cause as many problems as it fixes.Read more...

ABI Research Senior analyst Mark Beccue said North American mobile commerce totaled about $346 million last year and is expected to hit $577 million this year. "Then, you're going to get a big jump by year-end 2010, reaching $2.09 billion," Beccue said. The analyst pointed out that even if it doubles in size as predicted, mobile commerce will remain a drop in the bucket compared to all types of E-Commerce. He said E-Commerce in North America alone was a $204 billion industry last year.Read more...

She hit Walmart.com and found tons of different printer paper, all of which looked quite acceptable. But she tried one or two and searched if it was in-stock at her store. Nope. She simply wanted to ask the site, "Limiting your answer to this one store, what printer paper does it have in stock?" If she was only interested in one very specific brand and paper type, she could have searched that store. The generic searches made so easy on the site, though, wouldn't work when focused on one store.Read more...

Even more cynically, is it possible that those execs know that surveys like this tend to impact CEO/CFO expectations and, therefore, they'll give the answers they want their CFOs to believe? Even if the execs are being straight with the survey takers—and that the survey takers are being straight in reporting all of the collected data without sanitation—we have to wonder what was behind those answers.Read more...

Surveys show the public's lack of enthusiasm for mobile device-based shopping held steady between late 2007 and late 2008. "Consistent from year to year, a little over one-half of all respondents are not interested in using their mobile phones to make purchases," ABI Senior Analyst Jeff Orr said. "Transaction security was cited by 71 percent of mobile phone users as a major concern preventing wider uptake."Read more...

As GuestView PCI Columnist David Taylor points out, data security is mostly about FUD. The more you scare people about unknown risks (of breaches, fraud, data loss), the more they tend to spend to guard against these risks. But given the high level of fear that already exists in the SME environment about going out of business, even the loudest and most well justified pitches don't even make the radar screen.Read more...

The eMarketer gurus are predicting online sales will rebound next year and, in 2011, "return to the double-digit growth rates seen prior to 2008." Of course, companies need to stay in business long enough to see that sunny day. EMarketer says retail E-Commerce sales will drop by 0.4 percent in 2009, ending the year at $133.1 billion. 2008 online retail sales came in at $133.6 billion.Read more...

OK, maybe it's a reach, but not so much as one might think. A study published by Carnegie Mellon University Tuesday (March 3) found that "shopping online reduces environmental impact with 35 percent less energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions compared to the traditional retail shopping model."Read more...

In a Japan-only (for now) rollout, Sony is including a TV remote control with its new line of HDTVs, but this is no ordinary remote control. With a built-in RFID tag reader, it’s designed to talk with consumer’s cellphones and authorize purchases.

Initially, the devices are to be used to pay for very TV-related items such as video-on-demand, ringtones from a music show and other multimedia features. But the next phase could include any purchases, whether it’s a barbecue grill from the Home Shopping Network, a washing machine from Amazon (as seen through the TV’s Web connection, courtesy of a built-in Ethernet port) or groceries from the local Wal-Mart (to be picked up later). Of course, that’s in Japan. Here in New York metro, I’m happy if my Treo can actually connect two phonecalls in a row.…

Some of the state legislation doesn't even limit itself to dictating what retailers must do while operating in their states but are setting new rules protecting the residents of that state when they happen to be shopping out-of-state or online. Do they expect cashiers at Wal-Mart to ask what state a customer lives in and then, based on the answer, change the way they handle a credit card payment?Read more...

And both firms quickly retreated. The specifics here do not indicate a major inappropriate reaction, but the pattern is discomforting. For companies to lead the industry and stake out strong global positions--especially in a weak economy—requires bold action. That means being aggressive at times to see how far consumers and competitors will permit them to go.Read more...

The retailer initially suspected that one of its third-party payment card processors caused the problem. But in mid-January, company officials said no outside entities were to blame. Instead, they attributed the incidents to a problem with a gateway. The lack of new details makes determining precisely what happened difficult, especially when dealing with a phrase as vague as "formatting flaw" somewhere within the POS. What role did the high holiday rush traffic play? Was the system so overloaded that response times were too slow? Or was it more of a programming error, such as assuming that when more than X number of transactions are processed during any one-hour period, presume it's an attack and suspend authorizations?Read more...

Imagine my disappointment when a rudimentary runway model demo was all that this experience amounted to. Barely two-dozen short videos of models walking. And yet, just down the E-Commerce corridor sit the ghosts of what J.C. Penney might have done had the company truly wanted to show E-Commerce leadership and innovation. Had it chosen to move from mediocre to meritorious, think of the customization potential in a runway show.Read more...

It’s been clear for a few weeks now that there has been another major credit card processor breach—above and beyond Heartland–lurking in the retail financial shadows. But the processor (along with co-conspirators Visa and MasterCard) has remained silent and, for the moment, unidentified. One report said that the breach appeared to be limited to “card not present” transactions, which certainly suggests an E-Commerce-only aspect.

StorefrontBacktalk has been in a quandary on this one for weeks, as it seemed pointless to run a story in which we couldn’t say who the processor was, how the breach happened, what the breach accessed or, well, pretty much anything else. But as more media outlets report that there has been another processor breach of some sort, staying silent started to seem ridiculous.…

To interpret motivation and real intent, sometimes a look at history can be useful. Do you remember another Facebook privacy incident back in December 2007? In that case, Facebook tried sharing—without permission—customers' purchases with people on their friends list. Is this a pattern? Is Facebook trying things, and if it's caught and there's a loud enough protest, the site pulls back? In short, is Facebook trying the permission versus forgiveness approach? Indeed, it seems to have tried both options. For a company that is trying to solidify a brand and build as much trust as possible, these tactical approaches seem odd.Read more...

But in an attempt to give users a more consistent and professional experience—professional as in free shipping, 24-hour customer service and instant purchases—is eBay abandoning everything that made it work, everything that made it the world's largest and best garage sale?Read more...

The orders between the chain, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the U.S. Department of Human Services followed a probe that found workers at the company's pharmacies tossed into open garbage dumpsters many items containing highly sensitive consumer medical information.Read more...

Overall, the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) climbed 0.9 percent to 75.7 on the 100-point scale during the quarter, compared with the same period in 2007. "Very few economic indicators show positive signs these days," said Claes Fornell, who heads the ACSI. "The American Customer Satisfaction (for in-store) is one of them."Read more...

FTC Commissioner Pamela Jones Harbourn's comment was in the context of a new FTC staff report that says E-tailers need to start taking privacy much more seriously if they do not want the government to start imposing new rules.Read more...

The payment application data security standards (PA-DSS) are actually tougher in some respects than PCI DSS. As a result, some ERP vendors and users of packaged enterprise applications are considering tokenization as a strategy to modularize and centralize all payment processing by these applications. It's either that or partner with payment processing specialists (which provide payment processing functionality) to remove the overall ERP software from PCI scope.Read more...

Customers of E-tailer Zappos.com will soon be able to personalize the content of the Zappos Web pages they see. The company, using its own technology and developers, will enable shoppers to arrange content by category and style, said a report in the Internet Retailer. Zappos also plans to include more social networking tools on its product pages. This effort will make for easy sharing of information over Twitter, Facebook and other social sites.

Zappos, which began selling only shoes but has widely expanded its product offerings, is also suggesting that its employees create their own product videos to present to Zappos customers over the Web site, a move almost identical to Best Buy’s.…

Web sites where consumers can find money-saving coupons enjoyed a 32 percent increase in traffic between October and November 2008, the largest month-to-month increase of 10 measured site categories. Coupon site visitations jumped from 27,101 in October to 35,649 in November, said an eMarketer report, based on a new study by ComScore.

Next on the list, in terms of visitation growth, were retail sites selling jewelry, luxury goods and accessories. They saw a 25 percent change, increasing from 15,362 in October to 19,210 in November. At the bottom of the list were retail sites selling food. They experienced visitation growth of 10 percent.…

Even though no retailers were involved in that particular incident, the implications of this attack technique must be thought through. What the thieves did was to take the fundamental security of time and flip it around.Read more...