Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

It’s live in two cities, so they can officially use plural words when describing its deployment, but unless you live in Salt Lake City or Austin (and own particular handsets with NFC) you are SOL in being able to engage in the ISIS experience. According to Mike Abbott, ISIS CEO, at a presentation this past May, ISIS will expand past those cities when they are good and ready. And after all, what’s the rush, especially when you have Big Daddy Telebucks (AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon) bankrolling you? Let’s take a trip down memory lane now and refresh our collective memories on the ISIS Wallet evolution.Read more...

By looking at the different choices made by Walmart, Target, Home Depot, Nordstrom, Staples, Tesco, Wet Seal and Lowe's, Oracle categorizes three IT lab approaches. But how a lab is corporately structured will make little difference if senior management isn't willing to first learn (and to pay a lot for those lessons) and to be open to a future that they may not like. The job of a chain is to adapt to the reality in its market. The job of a dying chain is to cling to its current tactics if the future doesn't look like what it wants it to look like.Read more...

There are many factors behind those numbers, but it really comes down to the fact that Walmart's massive global supply chain needs to support more than 4,000 physical stores—a feat that Amazon need not worry about. Given that huge physical burden, Walmart's costs are quite impressive. But no one ever said that fighting against a pure play was particularly fair. Like all major chains, Walmart initially had two choices. Run the chain as one big happy merged channel family or separate and run online and offline as separate companies. Neither approach is perfect.Read more...

It works like this: A cyberthief phones the target claiming to be from a bank and saying there's been suspicious activity on the target's card. If the target doesn't trust the caller, the thief encourages the target to phone the bank using a number the target trusts. The target hangs up—but the thief doesn't. When the target picks up the phone again to dial, the thief plays a recording of a dial tone. The target dials, but it's the thief who fields the call. From that point, it's all Social Engineering 101.Read more...

As a practical matter, though, very few consumers would bother (or even know) to ask such a question. They hear their bank say that their card is being re-issued due to something fraud-like. If a survey asks whether they have personally experienced fraud, they're almost certainly going to say yes. For retailers, this is a very key problem.Read more...

These days, it's just as likely for shoppers to use the Best Buy site as a way to explore products before buying them at another physical store or a rival's Web site. In effect, the Best Buy site is becoming a showroom for other e-tailers.Read more...

High heels present some interesting LP challenges. Not only are they easily slipped on and off without the need for a monitored dressing room, but they need to be tried on in the store, which can make typical security tags counterproductive. At the NRF Loss Prevention Conference show in San Diego on Wednesday (June 12), Tyco Retail rolled out a new EAS approach.

Tyco’s heel-friendly approach? The tag connects to the back of the heel, with an adjustable knob for different shoe styles. In theory, this shouldn’t damage the product. Tyco argues that although many shoes “have buckles, eyelets, etc, that allow retailers to easily attach” an EAS tag, a “wide variety of women’s pumps and men’s loafers don’t have a convenient place to hook an EAS tag.” As long as the thief doesn’t have a high magnetic detacher, Tyco suggests it should be difficult to remove the tag. Then again, this is a thief, after all. Hopefully she doesn’t simply steal the store’s—or some other store’s—detacher.…

Osama Bedier, the former PalPal exec who took over Google Wallet (and is now about to become a former Google exec as well),

has confirmed what most suspected: that the fees Google had to agree to pay to the card brands meant that it lost money on every transaction. (Good news for Google: It didn’t make very many transactions.) “The company has dedicated hundreds of developers to Wallet and spent about $300 million to acquire digital payment startups to help develop the app. But consumers aren’t sold,” reported BusinessWeek. “Wallet has been downloaded fewer than 10 million times in the two years since its launch, according to Play, Google’s app store.”

Google’s initial plans were not about making revenue directly from transactions, but to instead collect data and then sell targeted ads, a very familiar Google model. But what got short shrift was finding a way to get shoppers to use its app. Unlike the Web where it had a very robust search engine to draw in consumers, its mobile wallet was entirely dependent on retailers and payment players to promote it to shoppers, something that no one (other than Google) had much of an incentive to do. And with losses as extreme as the ones Google was facing, adding a lot of marketing dollars …

Let's be clear: None of that uncertainty was Blum's fault. The decision to rip out 500 legacy systems and replace them with Oracle came from Johnson and former COO Michael Kramer. Kramer was the exec who ripped into the chain's culture and called its systems and IT infrastructure "a mess" last year. Blum's job was to retire systems, streamline processes and push forward into Oracle—and she reportedly managed to do that without creating nearly as many enemies as some of Johnson and Kramer's executive hires.Read more...

The interesting background to these trials is that Target—as its name implies—has always been precisely focused. These trials, as the CFO pointed out, are the chain admitting that many fundamental shopper assumptions may no longer be valid. "We spent 50 years honing, moving products one direction to our supply chain and ultimately to the back door of the store. Then through the front door and trying to do that as quickly as possible. Now we're moving product different directions depending on what our guest wants and for us, we need to learn how to operationalize that," Mulligan said.Read more...

In practical terms, that's not exactly falling off a cliff. But loyalty programs have been growing at a rate that means memberships would double every decade. If your CRM plans were based on needing the processing power to handle all those extra members' data, it's time to adjust those plans.Read more...

Even though nobody alleges that Walmart got the patron drunk, the idea is that Walmart was in a position to know about the potential harm and could have stopped it. Here’s where technology makes things messy. Once the drunk is tossed out of the Walmart, there’s a good argument that Walmart’s duty to third parties ends. Unfortunately, Walmart has installed and routinely monitors parking lot cameras. That's where data creates legal duty.Read more...

That goes far beyond the original lawsuit, which only covered default interchange rules, honor-all-cards rules and anti-steering rules. If the case went to trial and lost every claim, that would still just lock in the card brands' control of interchange and card-acceptance rules. But the proposed settlement would go far beyond that—extending to block any challenge to PCI and breach penalties.Read more...

What’s the big deal with a retailer asking for Zip Codes in states where such things are frowned upon? Walmart (NYSE:WMT) this week finalized a federal court settlement that will have it sending $25 giftcards to 519 shoppers who were asked for their Zip Codes. It will also be sending $3,500 checks to other shoppers who acted

as class representatives in a class-action lawsuit, not to mention about $369,000 to the Consumer Federation of California and about $369,000 to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. And don’t forget the $420,000 check to pay the legal fees and court costs of the attorneys for the shoppers.

And, yes, we do have to point out that out of all those fees, the lawyers get the biggest check and the shoppers get the smallest.…

But Saks, according to Citi, is only deploying one iPad for every three associates. That suggests some 66 percent of associates either won't have a tablet to help their customers or they will have to awkwardly borrow one from another associate. But one associate can't borrow a tablet from another associate who is working with a customer, so an idle associate will have to be located. On a busy Saturday afternoon, that could be almost impossible. Does Saks really want some of its associates to have tablet-powered capabilities while others do not? Will some shoppers be at a disadvantage? Wasn't the whole point of tablets that their pricepoint is such that it's economical for every floor associate to have one while they are actively working the floor?Read more...

Your friends here at StorefrontBacktalk editorial also now publish a daily retail site, called FierceRetail, and wanted to give you a sense of what you’re missing by not visiting or grabbing its free newsletter. Urban Outfitters discovers that it can get away with charging more online than in-store. See? Sometimes conventional wisdom is conventionally wrong.

A look into how federal judges are likely to force changes in how price anchors are set in-store plus some questions about whether Sears is thinking about becoming members-only. Was Best Buy’s Facebook promo a victim of its own great deal—and some we-should-have-seen-this-coming rip-off artists? We also threw in our take on Walmart’s $82 million hazardous waste settlement, where Walmart spoke of mouthwash and hairspray and the feds said they were pesticides. (You say tomato, I say Molotov cocktail…) All of that—and dozens more stories—and that was just this week. And Monday was a holiday! Drop by and check it out. It’s free and the snacks all have zero calories. (That may be because they don’t exist.)…

The idea, which Thomas made a passing reference to during a keynote speech at CTIA Wireless, was referenced this way: "The best shopping list is the one you don't have to create and that's what we're working on." (Technically, the best shopping list is the one that someone else has to shop and pay for, but I digress.) Presumably, this mobile app would be built atop the chain's experimental Scan & Go mobile app, which prepares in-aisle checkout leveraging existing self-checkout units. Given that Scan & Go—by its very nature—requires the shopper to register beforehand and to be associated with a verified payment method, it delivers an ideal CRM platform. This is a nice backdoor way to get into CRM for Walmart, which doesn't have a traditional CRM program and never has had one. That is a crucial element of Thomas' self-populating shopping list.Read more...

Like many reports, the statistics here do not strongly support the report's conclusions. The report found that "16 percent of Hispanic shoppers are using their mobile device to make purchases compared to 12 percent of general market shoppers" and the report had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points, making such a distinction razor-thin at best. But the group has done enough reports in this area and has found this distinction consistently shows up when doing head-to-head comparisons. Martin Ferro, a senior account planner for Integer and one of the researchers of the report, said the differences make sense given what he has seen in other reports about U.S. Hispanic shoppers. "They are for sure younger. It's really the new generation of (Hispanics) that are U.S.-born," Ferro said. "They tend to be the very early adopters of mobile technology. Besides the youth, the culture is a lot more comfortable with connectivity."Read more...

The most likely users of those devices: specialty retailers (both mall-based specialty chains and small independents), who are deploying about 45 percent of all tablets shipped to retail for POS, IHL said. But only 28 percent of U.S. retailers plan to roll out any mobile POS devices by the end of 2013, a drop from previous estimates. That suggests the reality of mobile POS is beginning to set in for early adopters, who are beginning to see some of the limits—and counterintuitive aspects—of the technology.Read more...

The trial was controversial for a reason other than consumers' fears that their privacy was somehow being invaded.The problem is that Euclid was able to see cross-retail activity. That means that it saw when, for example, a Nordstrom shopper left Nordstrom without visiting POS and then her mobile signal appeared 20 minutes later inside Macy's, where she ended her visit with that always-desired visit to POS. (Note: That was just an example. Other than Nordstrom, we're not identifying which retailers are using Euclid.) The fact that Nordstrom is only receiving anonymous data (or so it says) doesn't mean that its rivals all are similarly limited. This is a key industry problem with many forms of mobile information gathering. Read more...

The retailer recently rolled out contactless point-of-sale terminals to 644 U.K. stores and reportedly processes more than 230,000 contactless transactions every week. But several customers told the BBC that they had the experience of inserting a chip-and-PIN card in the PINpad's slot, but being issued a receipt for a contactless card that was nowhere near the PINpad. The contactless system isn't supposed to work at distances of more than about two inches.Read more...

The truth is that Victoria's Secret has been a longtime champion of cancer issues, having donated more than $1.6 million to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation and the American Cancer Society to fund breast cancer research, education, screening and treatment. It’s also donated some $10 million (over two years) to fund cancer research at the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center. But the company was in the awkward position of knowing that it couldn't do mastectomy bras in the proper way. Read more...

"In the back rooms, projects like MyGuide and OneTouch also enabled improvements in stocker productivity by helping to facilitate the process of moving merchandise from the truck to the shelf and prioritizing work for our associates," Simon said. "In the first quarter, these initiatives contributed to an increase of more than 3 percent cases handled per work hour."Read more...

Bizrate surveyed more than 9,000 shoppers (between April 24-30) who had just completed an online purchase at one of their e-tailers. The first—and arguably most meaningful—stat is an overwhelming 78.15 percent of those online purchasers had not looked at those products in any physical store. No surprise there, but it's a key number to remember the next time someone shouts about how showrooming is gutting brick-and-mortars. When they zeroed in on that remaining 21.85 percent of shoppers who had looked instore before buying online, most of them (54 percent) ended up buying from the same chain.Read more...

But to qualify for the promotion, merchants currently must be primarily using an old-fashioned system such as a cash register, and PayPal may send out employees to collect the register and verify the system upgrade.Read more...