Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

To be clear, Verifone only acknowledged that one of three hacked PIN pads came from it. In addition, the secure electronic payment technologies vendor said it's already testing a fix. Great—that means other PIN pad vendors have similar security issues. We just don't know which ones.Read more...

This discussion, though, is really about a much more strategic and fundamental issue. With showrooming and reverse showrooming and everything in between, does the very nature of retail Web pricing have to be rethought? Once the price comes off the Web page, everything is up for discussion. Customized pricing? Pricing based on how generous shoppers have been with their last five purchases? Is this another way to ditch the bottom-feeder bargain hunters? Will chains offer deeper discounts to people who shop with a short list of their most direct rivals? Will Target.com charge a lower price to someone coming to its site from an Amazon visit as opposed to a Barnes & Noble visit? And could this flex pricing ever make the transition to in-store, leveraging mobile?Read more...

But we now know more about the breach, which involved physically replacing PIN pads in 84 stores across the country to capture at least 94,000 card numbers. And with those new details, chains have more reason than ever to be worried.Read more...

Sometime in mid-July, the machines were given a "routine update" via a blast from a Walmart server, said Walmart spokesperson Ashley Hardie.Read more...

When retailers bank so significantly on in-store connectivity to boost their customers' experience, considering both usability and the store's design is vital. Lee Broom, the interior designer responsible for the look of the recently launched Coast, said the integration of iPads as payment devices was integral to the new store's look. Read more...

The penalty, from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), was issued because the government said Burlington had deliberately and knowingly sold recalled children's clothing.Read more...

But the real problem—Visa's death-grip on payments—isn't one any lawsuit will solve. Big retailers abandoned their store cards because taking Visa was cheaper than maintaining their own credit infrastructure. Now Visa is holding all the cards, and chains are unenthusiastic about any of the alternatives.Read more...

If this approach works—it's already been tested with much smaller merchants—the potential is for payment cards to be associated with anything that the full-blown digital wallets have promised: giftcards, loyalty programs, stored value, etc. Read more...

Walmart was sued on Wednesday (July 25) by a California advocacy group for the disabled, who complained that the retail giant isn’t meeting federal or state laws because its PIN pads are too high for customers in wheelchairs to use. The complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, said Walmart has wheelchair-accessible PIN pads in some of its 200-plus California stores but hasn’t deployed them for the rest of its checkout lanes, forcing some customers to “stretch and strain”—or tell the cashier their PINs.

It’s not clear exactly what the solution would be—two PIN pads at each checkout lane? A swinging arm or mini-elevator that brings the PIN pad up from wheelchair height to a level where a six-foot-four customer can use it without a backache? But realistically, there’s a bigger problem: Most PIN pads are designed to be compact and secure, not easy to use for anyone. They’re hard to read, hard to use and miserable to sign for all customers, not just the wheelchair- and scooter-bound. If this lawsuit can force Walmart to find and deploy a truly usable PIN pad, it could actually make all its customers happier—wheeled and non-wheeled alike.…

That theory is crucial to the century-old chain's makeover, which Johnson said will also include all-RFID sales ticketing within six months, elimination of cashwraps by the end of 2013, and a plan to combat showrooming by making 75 percent of its inventory JCPenney-only products to make direct price comparisons impossible.Read more...

Behind this approach is a deal Shopkick cut with Mood Media, one of the largest retail in-store music providers. What this means is any chain that happens to use Mood for audio has a quick-and-easy way to offer mobile marketing. But there's a lot more to this. Those speakers can also offer in-store geolocation.Read more...

That means no signage telling customers about it, no references on the retailer's Web site (and certainly not its homepage), no marketing, no reference in E-mails to customers and no associate training so that at least they can tell customers. The mobile map app itself doesn't even have Walgreens' name, so if a customer using either an Apple or an Android smartphone went searching for Walgreens, he or she wouldn't find it. The only way to download the Walgreens map app is for a shopper to happen to know to search for the vendor's name.Read more...

The problem with this needle match is that what sticks in the minds of consumers is a PIN pad playing Pong—and with that image, who can take payment security seriously?Read more...

Apple's billion-dollar third-party payments business takes a larger than Visa cut, sets less flexible than Visa operating rules, and then offers less help than Visa in securing transactions. And this is the company that's supposed to rescue retail from Visa's interchange rates?Read more...

A company called QThru, for example, is making waves with a mobile app that handles product identification and completes mobile payment through scanning an old-fashioned barcode. Its claim to fame: that the app identifies the product within two seconds even when the hand holding the phone (which is taking the picture of the barcode) and the hand holding the product with its barcode are both shaking and when the barcode is incorrectly positioned.Read more...

The purge also sets the stage for the chain's "new technology platform" that CEO Ron Johnson said will be announced in August. From all indications, the focus will be on mobile and in-store, not the datacenter.Read more...

But dig deeper into the vague statements and it's unclear if any of those happy conclusions are warranted. It might be that the only meaningful bonus involved here is the one Best Buy had hoped Wall Street would give it for even talking about customer-service score bonuses.Read more...

The home-delivery problem for E-Commerce is hardly only a British issue; it is an apartment and city issue. But the fact is that a huge percentage of the E-Commerce decision-makers in this country do not live in apartments or urban areas.Read more...

Maybe Apple can’t dominate every in-store device niche after all. A blog discussion at KioskMarketplace this week has kiosk developers debating whether the iPad’s lack of wireless-only connections, relative screen fragility and regular need to be reset makes it a poor choice for kiosk conversion. (The original July 2 post is headlined “iPad kiosks: The cheap, unreliable kiosk solution.”)

As commenters to the post point out, there are workarounds to some of the technical problems (though not to the persistent problem of Apple’s lack of enterprise support). But with a burgeoning crowd of iPad-to-kiosk vendors and given the fact that lots of chains are looking hard at such as approach, it’s worth asking how much of the vaunted Apple experience customers will get from an iPad buried in a kiosk. Customers won’t get to handle it or switch between apps—from their point of view, it’s just another touchscreen running a single kiosk application. Which may make iPad conversions just not worth the trouble for retail chains. But who knows? Maybe Apple has finally found a retail use for the Macintosh: as an oversized iPad emulator.…

Although the original 34,000 First Phone devices (which will still be used in stores) can be hooked up to a portable printer to serve as mobile POS, the 25,000 new stripped-down First Phone Junior units will do price scans and inventory checks but not POS, under the theory that it's not a feature most associates need.Read more...

Not only can online retailers charge different prices to different consumers, they may also be able to prevent one consumer from telling others how much they were charged. First off, is this approach likely? asks Legal Columnist Mark Rasch. Answer: Yes, because it's the next logical step.Read more...

Drilling into the details of the plan raises questions about how different the site will truly feel, and that speaks to how the data is used and to how aggressive the customization is. For example, the more decisions are made—or, more precisely, perceived by customers to be made—about spend levels and then displaying higher-priced items, the more resistance might be encountered.Read more...

The good news: no Google-style POS changes required, at least not to meet Microsoft specs. The bad news: no help from Microsoft, either. Unless you build your own in-store shopping app, the Microsoft Wallet will basically do contactless card emulation—and not much more.Read more...

Here's how that magic works: A couple of MPOS-armed associates approach some of the overflowing lines and announce that if anyone has a payment card and would like to be checked out with a mobile device to please say so.Read more...

When automated, do such tools facilitate good interactions and help customers encourage each other's purchases (such as saying whether an outfit looks sharp with those shoes or if that drillbit is the proper one for a particular fix-it job) or will it just freak shoppers out when it helps strangers approach them? In New Jersey, for example, a stranger approaching while smiling is legal justification for using deadly force.Read more...