Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

In this trial program, called logically enough "the Receipt Comparison Tool," the idea is to showcase hopefully lower prices to consumers who don't want to walk into a Walmart store. It's sort of a Missouri approach, with the shopper in effect saying, "Show me. I like my store. But if you show me concretely how you'd charge me less for the same stuff, I'll drive over to your store quickly enough. But you show me first." The IT challenge is to accurately compare prices for a specific Walmart store at a specific time—no easy task, given that each store has its own prices and that those prices can change hourly.Read more...

Although the case before the panel—which ruled August 14—involved accused drug traffickers, the jurists made it clear that privacy was not waived simply because of criminal activity. "We do not mean to suggest that there was no reasonable expectation of privacy because (defendant's) phone was used in the commission of a crime, or that the cell phone was illegally possessed," the Sixth Circuit ruled in its written decision. "On the contrary, an innocent actor would similarly lack a reasonable expectation of privacy in the inherent external locatability of a tool that he or she bought." That's a crucial point for retailers, as was wording that people who could otherwise be seen by other people—such as when walking down an aisle at Costco or JCPenney or walking in a neighborhood near a Target or Walgreens—could not reasonably believe that their location is a Constitutionally protected secret.Read more...

Even the possibility that the French order-online-pick-up-in-store system is being tested for eventual U.S. launch looks like wishful thinking, considering how differently McDonald's uses customer-facing technology in France.Read more...

And at heart, it's about how much money chains are willing to spend to dislodge the card brands from their lock-in. Short answer: not very much.Read more...

That kind of data-sharing is exactly what many of the retail treasury sorts behind the MCX retail mobile payment alliance have feared. "Whatever the retailer is passing over the lines today, in this initial phase, we'll get that data. We believe the data is that of the retailers, and we would not use that information to share with other retailers," said Don Kingsborough, PayPal's VP of Retail and Prepaid Products. "But, at the same time, when you combine it with our online and mobile information, it becomes very powerful information that we can use—with the retailers."Read more...

Given that a thief can easily walk off with a device that costs hundreds of dollars to replace and is easy to sell, this could change the loss-prevention equation when it comes to tablets. The biggest challenges now may be making sure the POS app is locked down—and convincing police to call Apple. Exactly how easily and extensively can Apple track? Details shared with police are telling.Read more...

Is it time to insist that mobile devices have some type of authentication beyond PIN? The frightening scenario: A thief watches a shopper making a mobile purchase at the mall and shoulder surfs his 4-digit PIN. The thief steals the phone, walks into a store, buys a $5,000 necklace with that phone and that PIN and then dumps the phone into a trashcan.

That authentication might be biometrics (the phone can scan the buyer’s facial shape, match a voiceprint or do a retinal scan, although preferably not a fingerprint) or a onetime-password fob or even—for the ultimate simplicity—a rotating series of personal questions, so that shoulder-surfing wouldn’t work. Even Square and SMB PayPal trials are using customer photos for verification. But with in-store mobile purchases now going into widespread retail trials, it may be time for some real security. Or is the absurdity of signature verification not enough to motivate anymore? …

A report this week from vendor Monetate, for example, showed that desktop devices (laptops, PCs and Macs, primarily) in Q2 2012 typically converted at 3.34 percent, while tablets converted at 3.17 percent and smartphones came in at a measly 1.09 percent. The question is, though, what does it mean when a smartphone shopper doesn't close the deal? Could that shopper actually be inside the store at the time and close the deal by taking the item to a checkout lane? Or perhaps that customer is on the train coming home from work and chooses to do the research, browsing and deciding on his or her phone and then saving the winning product to a shopping cart, with the intent of purchasing that night from a laptop at home?Read more...

This comes on top of the usual political bickering when an organization includes such suspicious rivals as Walmart and Target. Indeed, participants also describe collisions between the group's treasury/finance people (who represent the bulk of the dues-paying members) and those same chains' marketing/mobile groups (who have very different objectives).Read more...

By not building out its delivery capabilities according to some grand plan, the 800-store chain has put itself in a position to do almost anything it wants. And because the CapEx is so low, the ROI is essentially instantaneous.Read more...

A key reason? The U.S. stores' systems were more secure and more sophisticated, which also slowed down operations more. The irony: Had the U.S. self-checkout systems been less secure, they might still be there.Read more...

Less power means shorter antenna range, which in turn means the payment card needs to be almost touching the antenna. "The read-rate is not what you need it to be, certainly not the 4 centimeters you expect it to be," said John Verdeschi, Senior Business Leader of Product Development at MasterCard. Read more...

Granted, these aren't the first thieves to be done in by those not-so-loyal cards—a Sears associate got zapped last year—but they are among the best. Seems that Michael Pollara of Florida was hitting quite a few Toys"R"Us stores using the ever-popular box stuffing trick (take a big box with a cheap item in it and replace the contents with something much more expensive).Read more...

The sites for Sears and KMart were down for about three hours on Wednesday (Aug. 15), starting around 9:00 AM New York time, in what the chain said was an intentional outage to prepare for an unspecified infrastructure upgrade for the fourth quarter. Planned weekday outages are becoming more common and, for some chains—such as Home Depot—it can be an ideal time to take the site down. One apparel chain has even been using outages as marketing opportunities.

And when Best Buy recently had its own planned outage, not only did the retailer reveal how dependent its physical stores and call centers have come to be on the site, but it also set itself up for an imminent move to the cloud. And it’s that type of infrastructure improvement that Sears had in mind. “It’s a longer term enhancement that we did want to get complete in advance of the holidays,” said one Sears manager. Outages—they’re not just for disasters anymore.…

In a blog post on Monday (Aug. 13), FTC Senior Attorney Lesley Fair said that following a published privacy policy isn't enough. The FTC could go after businesses that misrepresent privacy protections in their opt-out and customization instructions—or even just those that join an industry self-regulation group but then don't follow its code of conduct.Read more...

Unfortunately, not all acquirers are getting the right message out to merchants. One client recently related that an acquirer told the merchant there was no need to upgrade its devices to read chip cards.Read more...

"People like me, or the Girl Scouts, who use it one month a year selling a few hundred dollars worth of cookies," he wrote. "They are basically a next-generation ISO that is riding the wave of Apple-fandom to bring credit-card processing to the masses."Read more...

A recent survey report from the National Retail Federation (NRF) touted how much would be spent on school supplies, sometimes more generically referred to as back-to-school spending. Even with that encompassing umbrella term, the figures seemed to be quite a reach. We noticed this when American Express—citing the NRF data—talked about parents spending $83.8 billion in school supplies this year.

It seems the NRF has a return to classes for K–12 families costing $688.62, with estimates of $95.44 on actual school supplies, $129.20 on shoes, $246.10 on clothes and $217.88 on electronics. Families with college students will average $929.35, but that includes things like dorm furniture and college-branded apparel items. Also food, which was never something I thought of as a back-to-school item. Wouldn’t parents have to buy clothes, shoes and electronics for their K–12 kids even if they weren’t in school? And don’t college students eat pretty much continuously throughout the year? (About every hour, according to my recollection.) That said, food is being sent to school with students and many of these categories have some relevance. It’s a huge number, but retailers might want to rethink what they consider school supplies.…

Also, despite what various media reports implied, when Starbucks starts accepting Square payments right before the holiday sales rush it will not be the mobile phone stays in the pocket customer identified by first name and a POS-displayed photograph approach that Square has done with a handful of smaller merchants. No, the Starbucks approach will mirror the exact method it's been using for its own mobile payments for years: Customers will display a 2D barcode on their mobile phone, the Starbucks associate will scan that code, and then the store's existing POS system will handle it normally.Read more...

eBay's trial run seems to be deliberately low-cost and extra-fast delivery to truly see who would use such a service under the best of conditions. It's highly unlikely that a national rollout could continue such specs. eBay's approach isn't all good for retail partners; only the eBay brand is shown, which reduces the chains to unseen suppliers—albeit well-compensated unseen suppliers.Read more...

For example, what happens if a thief manages to scoop up that Wallet ID? Could that give him access to all a customer's payment cards? There's no current mechanism for shutting down all of a shopper's cards. That's the hole with today's fraud systems: Everything at the processor and card-brand level was designed to protect cards, not wallets.Read more...

Tesco's reaction—overreaction? Ludicrously counterproductive overreaction?—was fueled by the interaction of mobile and self-checkout. That mobile/self-checkout part is where barcodes can be fed into systems manually. But if you think this is no more dangerous than a shopper getting a $3 half-gallon of milk for 3 cents, think again. It goes way beyond fake product barcodes to include fraudulent coupons, forged giftcards and SQL injection attacks. Read more...

In that category, Shopkick blew everyone away with an average of 3 hours, 19 minutes and 11 seconds. So why did Shopkick blow everyone else away, average time spent wise? It has to do with the nature of that app, not that its users were so enraptured by the content.Read more...

That's a great idea for large chains. But smaller merchants will have to buy in, too—and they're the reason every attempt to improve payment cards so far has failed.Read more...

It's also another blow to the credibility of Google Wallet and ISIS (both signed up Vivotech as a POS partner) as well as PayPal's in-store payment system (Vivotech put a "Pay with PayPal" button on all those Home Depot PIN pads).Read more...