Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

But the chain's mobile move is missing most of the value of mobile, and this is especially disappointing given that the free Wi-Fi is part of a major in-store television rollout. The chain's 5,600 locations will have video throughout the store that will "feature engaging content such as music, lifestyle, entertainment and sports, and also free Wi-Fi to keep our consumers connected with their friends." That sounds fine, although it's supremely vague, even for a news release. ("Hmmmm. What type of engaging content will you offer?" "Entertainment." "You sold me.") But here's where it starts to get sad. Is that informational—as in "alert me if severe weather is suddenly predicted for the area I am in" or "message me if there's news on any of the following keywords"—or is it merely ads?Read more...

Indeed, the vendor—Card Activation Technologies (CAT)—probably knew that the 74-page ruling was going against it when the judge wrote on page 33 that "it takes some chutzpah" for CAT to have made some of its arguments. The fact that the judge's day job is serving as a member of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit probably made it sting all the more. Not that RadioShack, 7-Eleven, Nordstrom, Macy's, JCPenney, Sears, OfficeMax and the many other retailers that have been sued by CAT would take any pleasure in the ruling. The ruling also dealt with the specifics of the payment system. "CAT asserts that a general authorization code is disclosed by the terminal ID. CAT's argument boils down to its claim that the terminal ID is a general authorization code because 'it is a precondition for establishing communication with a host computer.' CAT confuses the ultimate effect of the terminal ID with the purpose of it."Read more...

PCI Columnist Walt Conway is not convinced that requiring every merchant to use SAQ D, with its 280-plus requirements, makes sense. It is just too daunting for a small or midsize merchant. On the other hand, we see increasing numbers of hacking attacks on these same merchants who use the shortened SAQs, so they need to be more secure. Maybe a better course is to upgrade the shortened SAQs or even change them into "guidance" documents. Read more...

Sources within both Kroger and Albertsons LLC cited the same self-checkout concern, which is that many customers perceive it to be less customer-service-oriented than staffed checkout lanes. Also, an increasing number of products require staff intervention, and that—coupled with consumers making errors in using the systems—can slow the self-checkout lines dramatically.Read more...

But E-tailers' legal dance to avoid paying the sales taxes that brick-and-mortar retailers collect and remit every day may be futile. Although their move might buy them a bit of time, in the end, death and (sales) taxes are inevitable. Allowing states to collect Internet taxes will literally require an act of Congress—and such a law could be introduced this month.Read more...

Apparently, the latest retail trend is walking out of a Walgreens with a cash register. That happened three times last month: First in Orlando on June 10, when a man was spotted on surveillance cameras only after he disconnected an unattended cash register and walked out, according to local news reports. Five days later, a man in Gary, Ind., disconnected an unattended cash register at a Walgreens cosmetics counter and walked away with it. Ten days after that, a man in a different Orlando Walgreens again walked off with an unattended cash register (this time he dropped it in the parking lot before driving away).

Many Walgreens stores have modular POS systems that include a separate (and unattached) cash drawer under the counter, and maybe that’s what newspaper reports called a “cash register.” But when a thief can walk in, duck behind a counter and spend three minutes unplugging any piece of a POS, then walk away unnoticed, maybe it’s time to start making it a little less easy to swap out those modular POS pieces—or maybe add an alarm when the cash drawer is removed. At least these thieves weren’t tampering with PIN pads. Er—has anyone seen the PIN pads lately?…

"Consideration was given to the possibility of providing separate XML interfaces. However, it was decided to provide a common XML interface embracing the requirements of all of the applications, because this was consistent with the historically common practice of integrating applications through POS transaction log files," the new standard said. "It is noted that audit, security, labor productivity and activity analysis applications are very demanding of detail content, [with] all driving the need for an all-encompassing XML schema."Read more...

A major Australian bank has declared its mobile-payments trial a failure. ANZ Banking Group and Visa launched the trial in March, with 50 bank employees in Sydney and Melbourne using mobile-phone covers that added near-field communication (NFC) by way of a MicroSD card. The trial ended in April, but on Monday (June 27) the bank delivered the verdict: “Our participants strongly supported contactless payment as a convenient way to pay, but the MicroSD technology did not meet all of our requirements. At this stage, we will not be progressing with MicroSD as a contactless payment technology platform,” the bank told ZDNet Australia.

A bank admitting its NFC trial has failed—especially when it involves Visa’s pet project, MicroSD cards? That would have been unthinkable even six months ago. NFC-in-MicroSD was the way for Visa and the banks to keep interchange fees out of the hands of phone makers (which control NFC-in-the-phone) or mobile operators (with NFC-in-the-SIM). But now, a month into the Google Wallet era, that’s unnecessary: Visa and the banks will get interchange no matter where the NFC chip sits. Now maybe everyone can stop playing “hide the NFC” and focus on actually getting customers to use it.…

One retail IT line that is too cynical to not share: In an unrelated interview, a senior IT manager discussed working with certain internal clients—business unit heads who had, until recently, been just colleagues.

What’s the difference, he was asked, between a colleague and an internal client? “Simple,” he said. “An internal client is a colleague who’s had his reasonability removed.”…

The Harvard researchers focused their attention mainly on Groupon and its customers. For retailers, most of the risk appears to come from failing to treat vouchers correctly at the POS—usually those vouchers are like giftcards, but in some ways they're like coupons. Getting the treatment right is likely to require some under-the-covers work on POS software, which is nobody's idea of a comfortable project. The alternative, though, is to leave it for associates to handle them correctly ad hoc—and that's just asking for trouble.Read more...

In an impressively creative mobile-payment deployment in South Korea, Tesco has embedded QR codes in actual huge pictures of its shelves and then pasted those photos onto subway walls. Customers use their phones to scan and pay for the captured images, thereby selecting their groceries while waiting for their trains. The groceries are then delivered by the time they return home. In South Korea, Tesco markets itself as Homeplus.

This approach is brilliant on so many levels. Not only is it replacing the cost of putting up new stores, but it addresses the relative smallness of images on a mobile phone. The images exist in these beautiful—and gigantic—high-resolution full-color pictures. All the phone’s screen does is display the text and thumbnail of the purchased item. Signal repeaters guarantee excellent speed and connectivity. And Tesco, and its customers, is leveraging the dead time of waiting for a train and turning it into productive shopping time. True technology leaders merely deploy quickly. They think through how the technology could work. There’s no rule that says mobile images must appear on the mobile screen.…

But Kroger—a 2,449-store chain in 31 states—is always a fan of experimentation, so this change might be more about trialing a new checkout approach and the removal of self-checkout might simply be a matter of freeing up space in a tightly designed store in an urban Houston, Texas, location. More meaningfully, though, it also reflects a POS approach conflict, with grocers today ambivalent about not only self-checkout but (both old and new) express lanes. It's an age-old argument, but one that is still valid: Why not reward and incentivize your best customers, rather than those who buy the least?Read more...

That gives Zoosh instant appeal for retailers that have been showered with alternative payments wannabes, all of which seem to have brilliant business plans that contain just one hole: the part where a customer's payment-card number gets into a merchant's POS system with a minimum of fuss. That's the part Naratte has figured out at a time when anything more complicated than a magnetic strip appears to be beyond the reach of most customers—and many retailers, too.Read more...

The point-to-point advice "will talk about the ability to encrypt at one point and decrypt at another point and the transmission between those two points being completely out of compliance scope." That is the first time the council has been that publicly explicit about point-to-point applications being out-of-scope. Even more intriguing was when Leach tied it back to mobile devices: If a retailer associate "is swiping the card or dipping the card into a peripheral device that plugs into a mobile phone, now we're talking about devices and not applications. If they can do that and the mobile phone is simply a conduit for transmitting cardholder data that is encrypted," then PCI compliance could be had through standard means without waiting for the council's formal mobile guidance next year.Read more...

The actions of the vendor—TF Payments, a unit of ThoughtFocus Technologies, which is marketing the product as FocusPay—highlight some of the challenges involved when planning a retail mobile-payment strategy in an environment where the rules have yet to be established. And as a result, vendors are feeling pressured to promise capability with non-existent standards—and hoping no one notices. This time, however, someone did.Read more...

The report comes from cloud networking vendor Meraki, but its methodology seems legitimate enough. How surprising is this result? It's certainly expected that tablets would suck in more data; their larger screens make them ideal for full-length streaming video, which is certainly one of the most data-hogging applications. But a five-fold increase in bandwidth? Couple that with projected soaring sales of tablets—lead by the iPad—and those bandwidth projections are going to need serious work.Read more...

In fact, the vast majority of our stories (often 80 percent or more) are deliberately not Premium. We are hoping that these colorful images will make it easier to tell which stories are Premium and which ones can be read in their entirety by non-Premium subscribers. We're hoping that this clarification cuts back on the frustration of non-Premium readers who click on stories that they can't read fully as well as encourages readers to click on a story, confident that it's entirely available to them. This is also a good time to explain how StorefrontBacktalk decides which stories are Premium.Read more...

Another scene shows them wandering through a restaurant kitchen and pouring a drink at the bar. That raises an obvious question: If they could help themselves to the beer, could they—or anyone else—help themselves to the POS?Read more...

One of the great things about mobile-marketing efforts today is that they can sometimes take the seemingly innocuous—something that always has been truly innocuous—and turn it into a little-noticed CRM bonanza. Consider a contest announcement made on Wednesday (June 15) by an American Eagle Outfitters brand (Aerie), where consumers were asked to use an app (Pose) on their phone to shoot pictures of people wearing that chain’s clothing.

The winning pictures would be displayed on the chain’s 25-story Times Square LED screen, and the photographer would get a $150 Aerie giftcard. The real prize goes to American Eagle, which can analyze and leverage the metatag data associated with each photo, revealing brand, store location, where the photo was shot and price. Shortly, such images could report back with much greater detail, including SKU, and, with near field communication, data could even include CRM history of both the photographer and the person being photographed. When they wrote that a picture’s worth a thousand words, they may have been frighteningly accurate. …

Verizon went out of its way to deny that this signals the telecom giant pulling back from its ISIS mobile-payment alliance with AT&T and T-Mobile. Indeed, it trumpeted its denial in the second paragraph of its own news release. Feels sort of like the guy who walks into house and his wife says, "Welcome home," and he shoots back, "I certainly wasn't cheating on you just now, in case you were thinking that." (Second paragraph, Verizon? The telco doth protest too much, methinks.) The denial didn't even—to be precise—refute that its affections for ISIS are cooling. "Our relationship with Payfone complements the part of the mobile-payments equation we're already working on with our ISIS joint venture," said Greg Haller, marketing vice president, Verizon Wireless.Read more...

The Safeway move required a POS system upgrade to accept the very successful Starbucks mobile card, which is not really true mobile payment at all, in that the phone merely displays the barcode of the Starbucks Card.Read more...

It's easy to knock Sears, with its long history of making customers unhappy with out-of-stock items, whether they were actually out of stock or not. (In a comment to The Consumerist post, a Sears representative blamed the associate for being unable to find the item in stock, then lied to cover his incompetence.) On the other hand, maybe the problem isn't as human-centric as that. It could be that Sears' dueling inventory systems are to blame.Read more...

This information is actually good news for retail IT for two reasons. By eliminating the possibility that mobile payment is imminent and by offering a "no sooner than" timetable, retailers are freed up to pursue various mobile-payment schemes without worrying about immediate change demands. The second reason this is good news is pragmatic.Read more...

The big difference between merchants and issuers is how they validate their compliance. Or, more accurately, whether they even need to validate their compliance. We should give Citigroup credit for going public to the extent it has fairly soon after the breach. But other than replacing the compromised cards, we have not read anything to indicate what Citi is doing internally to fix its system and network vulnerabilities.Read more...

There are two elements to mobile payment that need that standardization: payment card security and other payment data. The retail need for consistency of payment security will be handled cleanly by the PCI Security Council, whenever it gets around to it, most likely before the end of this year. The more critical area, though, is all of the data involved, whether it's CRM, giftcards, coupons or anything else. And a later stage of the data mess will be two-way near filed communication (NFC), which is when things will get both interesting and ludicrously complex. If there are multiple competing wallets—say from Google, Apple and ISIS—how easily will it be to deal with all of that data in a homogeneous fashion?Read more...