Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Cyberthief Extraordinaire Albert Gonzalez’s crew targeted at least one of the retail chain victims they hit partially because they didn’t like the chain. Forever 21 was targeted because “the clothes were poorly made and the employees were poorly paid,” Gonzalez Co-Conspirator Patrick Toey is quoted as saying in a profile of Gonzalez by The New York Times Magazine. In the Times piece, Toey described how the Forever 21 attack began with a flaw in the chain’s shopping cart software.

He also spoke about some of the other many retail victims of the Gonzalez crew. Another member of the gang walked into an Office Max near Los Angeles and simply “loosened a terminal at a checkout counter and walked out of the store with it” for intelligence gathering. Once in, Toey said, the system was foolproof: “Every time a card was swiped, it would be logged into our file. There was nothing anyone could do about it.” More intriguingly, Toey said the crew had attacked “major chains and [orchestrated] big hacks that would dwarf TJX,” none of which were ever the subject of the federal probe. “I’m just waiting for them to indict us for the rest of them,” he said. So, the saga isn’t over yet. As if it we didn’t already suspect that.…

Yes, it's just as illegal in New Zealand to display one price on the shelf and charge a higher price when it's time to check out. And it's the machines that customers will blame for the foul up—even if it turns out they're overcharged the same way at the regular checkout counters.Read more...

The 21-year-old operator is Carlo Frank Settecase, and he attempted to unload the merchandise on eBay. To be fair, it wasn't a strict Ninja outfit. Police described it as merely a black top with a grey hood, a ski mask over his face, black gloves, black shorts and black socks without shoes. It was more Johnny Cash than Bruce Lee.Read more...

Question: How can you take a virtually meaningless holiday and somehow drain the last remnant of meaning from it? Answer: Without shame, apparently, if Wal-Mart, Amazon, Sears and Toys”R”Us marketing have anything to say about it. Of course, we’re discussing the industry’s favorite non-holiday holiday—Black Friday. The origin of the term dates back almost 45 years, when the day after Thanksgiving was the time most retailers went into the black financially. But in recent years, that hasn’t typically been the case. And E-Commerce activity has shifted that date around anyway (and please don’t get me started on the silliness of Cyber Monday).

All of this said, one definition gives the holiday a raison d’etre, albeit a monumentally trivial one: Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving, and the sales are to pour more people into the stores. This year, Wal-Mart, Amazon, Sears, Toys”R”Us, True Value and various others started to promote their “Black Friday” sales in October. October? You’re offering Black Friday sales before Halloween? Let’s get a jump on this trend: Why not offer Fourth of July pricing at Thanksgiving? Or Election Day specials on New Year’s Eve? These fabricated holidays have little enough meaning without marketing distorting them anymore. …

Litan spoke of additional security measures being better than the alternative of "having the customer account drained." But that's just it. These thieves are not stupid enough to kill the goose that laid the golden mag-stripe. Just as the typical consumer needs to see enough fraud to make a phone call to a bank—and endure the inevitable series of hold music performances—worthwhile (for some, that's more than $5, and for others, it can be more than $20), the typical bank needs to see enough of its customers get hit to make a call to its fraud department worthwhile.Read more...

Even if nothing had gone wrong technically, it's worth remembering that every time you change what a user has to do, you're creating slowdowns and glitches. It's true of E-tailers dealing with processors, programmers with APIs and customers with E-Commerce sites (or even brick-and-mortar stores): Move things around or change the way things work and you may impress some users with your shiny new features—but you will confuse and irritate people whose highly productive habits have stopped working. And to Sage Pay's credit, it eventually found a temporary workaround for that problem.Read more...

The columnist took the vendor up on its offer and tried the machine, working with company owners. At the end of the process, the machine is supposed to cough up a list of jeans that will fit that consumer perfectly and where to get them. In this case, though, the machine found zero. Zilch. But this is not merely a case of a vendor proudly doing a demo before the technology is ready. It's the latest example of a vendor focusing on the majority of consumers, when the gold actually lies in the minority.Read more...

U.S. retailers have done nicely pushing kiosks to the edge, whether it’s making the rectangular wonders accept contactless payment, sell a consumer an iPhone or—our until-now favorite—sell consumers an ice cream cone only if their smile is wide enough. But some Chinese retailers have got us beat: vending machines dispensing live crabs.

In Nanjing, China, the machines keep the crustaceans at about 41 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s so the crabs are kept alive but also very sleepy. Two machines in train stations have been selling about 200 of the claw-centric Shanghai Hairy Crab creatures a day since early October, priced anywhere from $2 to $7, depending on the crab’s size. What if something goes wrong as the machine hawks its live animals? Not to worry. A sign on the kiosk promises that if the crab is dead, the consumer is awarded three free ones. OK. But if the crab is dead, want to bet the aroma will pretty much resolve long lines at the kiosk? Then again, if the dispenser mechanism gets stuck, it’s unlikely any consumer will try to reach in and grab it. (For the record, the crabs are sold in a Patent-Pending special little box/cage.)…

On the surface, the differences between the two versions do not appear significant. So why would you not want to validate using the latest and greatest? Looking deeper, however, shows that one change in Version 2.0 could have an impact on your decision. And that change, says PCI Columnist Walt Conway, is the new guidance on scoping.Read more...

Amazon has dressed up that court ruling as a big victory for customer privacy. But now Amazon will have to cough up the customer data, and North Carolina will begin to go after Amazon's North Carolina customers to collect the taxes due—and you can bet that the revenuers will mention Amazon's name when the tax bills go out. Amazon is already collecting sales taxes in five states where it has physical operations. Therefore, a few more court victories like this one, and Amazon might be better off just collecting all state sales taxes itself.Read more...

The story behind the numbers also gets into some definitional questions. Consider a 19-year-old who poses a question to a Facebook forum about which car to buy. Does that consumer think of such an inquiry as mobile research or merely talking with friends? Retailers are likely to see it as quintessential M-Commerce research, but the consumer—who is answering these survey questions—is more likely to see it as hanging with friends and say "no," said Pam Goodfellow, a senior analyst with Big Research, which managed the NRF survey.Read more...

The short version: You can expect to spend more time at the beginning of your assessment, and some of the approaches and technologies you may recently have put in place may no longer make the grade. Read more...

That's why the announcement from Kindle that it will, "later this year," introduce "lending for Kindle" is so potentially significant. The concept is a direct steal from the physical world. A person who purchases an e-book can loan someone a copy of that book, with restrictions. If a consumer today buys a book from a physical store, that consumer owns that book and is therefore free to sell it to someone else, for whatever price the market will bear. Instead of prohibiting that in the digital world, why not encourage it, albeit for a cut.Read more...

We're coming to an inflection point that will have some scary repercussions for the mobile industry. Until recently, criminals have had very little incentive to attack the mobile channel. But this is changing, and fast. There are three reasons for this shift.Read more...

Background in "store systems would also be interesting" for this position, said DSW CIO Carlos Cherubin. "This is a new position, born of the fact that our organization is growing," he said, referring to its current 210-person IT operation (internal IT staff of 170 plus about 40 IT contractors). "We're a 200-person shop day-to-day," Cherubin said.Read more...

Starbucks, which is one of the very few national retailers running any kind of a mobile payment trial, has sharply expanded its initial West Coast run, announcing this week a planned move into its almost 300 stores in New York City and parts of Long Island. (Target, another M-Commerce-interested retailer, has already been accepting the mobile payments at the Starbucks in their stores.)

One of the reasons for the urban move is a discovery from the 16-store test in Seattle and Northern California that “dense office building environments” worked out much better than “more neighborhoody environments,” said Chuck Davidson, the category manager for innovation on the Starbucks Card team. He theorized that word of mouth in those office parks was the cause (and the lunch crowd, as opposed to the suburban tendency to solely do morning coffee). And even though the barcode scans are taken directly from the mobile device screens, Davidson said testers found few problems with glare that other chains have experienced. He credited high-end 2D imagers and asking that customers turn their phones’ brightness to full. He added that the chain has yet to experience any fraud in the trial. True, but the Big Apple may test how long that will be the case.…

One of the most frustrating truths in retail security is that, by definition, it has no meaningful return on investment—at least not in the sense that CFOs and board members view ROI. There’s no chance at improving revenue or profit; at best, it’s risk avoidance. Even that’s dicey. If security is in place, how do you really know that you would have been breached otherwise?

One way to squeeze out ROI: Flip an unsexy security expense like PCI by upgrading to a POS system that also moves lines faster or displays ads while customers are waiting. Or what about training cashiers to encourage debit-card users to key in their PIN—thus improving security and reducing the cost of card transactions at the same time? We explore these and other ideas in the latest StorefrontBacktalk podcast on security. To listen to the podcast, please click here.…

In a recent financial statement (it involved declaring a quarterly dividend), Visa CEO Joseph Saunders made an interesting comment. Well, it should prove interesting to retailers who are steaming about their latest interchange fight. Said the CEO: “This is the second consecutive year that the board has authorized a meaningful increase in Visa’s dividend, demonstrating confidence in our business and our commitment to returning excess cash to shareholders.”

Excess cash? Yeah, that’s exactly the phrase you want to publicly use with retailers who are already screaming about charges that they see as profiteering. If you feel the need to return excess cash, why not return it to the customers you overcharged in the first place? Just a thought.…

Like most media outlets these days, we here at StorefrontBacktalk get deluged with PR people pitching stories about their clients. But also like most media outlets, very few of those pitches are appropriate for us.

To help, we have crafted a page with our best-kept secrets about how to successfully pitch a story to us. It starts with understanding our audience and how we try and differentiate our stories. (Note: This particular blurb is a horrible example of what our typical stories are like, but it’s a pretty good example of an irony, so at least we have that.) So for PR professionals only: Please check out our PR tip cheat sheet, and your chances of getting a story placed will soar.…

It seems that a short time before the "my water broke" incident, that same store had a shoplifter who was almost caught, so he ran off and hid in a trash dumpster. It would have been a good move, had the collection truck not arrived and dumped the container's contents—including our intrepid shoplifter—into its compressing machinery. Yep, he was repeatedly squashed until he phoned a friend and then used his cell phone to call police and confess, begging that they somehow find and release him. Read more...

On Wednesday (Oct. 20), Starbucks launched another campaign to get customers into its stores and, again, it has nothing to do with coffee. Called the Starbucks Digital Network, the program provides free access to a wide range of entertainment and news content that requires a fee elsewhere. The catch: Content can only be seen when customers are within the wireless LAN range of a Starbucks store. It gets better. The plan is to soon integrate the Starbucks Digital Network with loyalty cards, which opens a whole new world of customer data. With Yahoo as its partner, that information could find its way almost anywhere. They'll know not only customers' latte preference, but their preferences in news and entertainment, too.Read more...

That poses a problem. With those rich interactive features, it's simply a way to get additional information about a product. But it doesn't meaningfully go beyond 2D barcodes and NFC efforts. Some chains are frightened to even experiment with systems that are not only IT intrusive (they need to integrate deeply into many back-office programs) but may raise privacy issues. Without such trials, though, retailers have no way of assessing whether the privacy concerns are real or simply imagined. Consumers might love the advantages, if given a chance to try them.Read more...

It's always a challenge to get employees to correctly use a computer system that stops them from selling—even when it's enforcing the law. That's the kind of conflict retailers increasingly face in cases where, for example, loyalty programs clash with privacy concerns. No manager is going to get a bonus for pushing customers away. As such, it may fall to IT to make sure employees don't cut corners, especially when those shortcuts could result in an expensive legal bill. Trouble is, that can be an impossible task.Read more...

The purpose of the questions often is to locate the "unknown unknowns" or to make sure contingencies are addressed. As such, the questions may sound obvious or even silly at first—at least until they succeed in actually uncovering a problem you didn't know you had. Read more...

It doesn't take a brain surgeon to see that the now-defunct new logo was pretty dowdy; it looked like a subway sign that someone defaced with a square blue sticker. But Gap made use of one very good E-tail practice: It launched the logo on its Web site a month before it was scheduled to appear in stores or marketing materials. And when it turned out to be a catastrophe with customers, Gap was able to delete it so completely that we couldn't find a sample anywhere on Gap's site to show you what it looked like.Read more...