Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

For example, Best Buy's new promise for the buy-online-pick-up-instore option is that the order will be ready "in as little as 45 minutes after placing it."

Despite one prominent retail media outlet reporting that the pledge was a guarantee of product availability in fewer than 45 minutes, Best Buy's pledge is actually the opposite. It promises that an order will not be ready in 44 or fewer minutes. Guaranteed! Might be as few as 45. Could be 3 hours. But it absolutely, positively, won't be fewer than 45 minutes.Read more...

To qualify for the money, a merchant doesn't have to be PCI compliant (although that's always nice). Indeed, it doesn't even have to experience a real breach, said SecureConnect Director of Marketing Kristyan Mjolsnes. For example, if the chain's bank or a card brand suspects a breach and insists the chain pay for a forensic probe, that would be covered, she said. If the chain gets nervous and wants to triple-check on its own, however, that would not be covered, Mjolsnes added, reasonably enough.Read more...

RadioShack and 7-Eleven are among seven new defendants in the latest round of retail chains accused of violating gift card process patents owned by Card Activation Technologies (CAT). Thus far, more than 30 chains have been sued, including Nordstrom, Macy’s and JCPenney, and a significant number of them—including Sears and OfficeMax—have settled, according to attorneys involved in the case.

The five other chains newly named were Giorgio Armani, Caché, Denny’s, Sunglass Hut Trading and the Brown Group Retail (doing business as Famous Footwear). Several of the chains were accused of not merely violating the patent but of doing so willfully because, CAT alleges in court filings, the chains continued to use the process even after they were told they were in Patent violation.…

This story begins with a Pennsylvania consumer's complaint that he was instructed to show identification to make a $100 payment card purchase at the Willow Grove, PA, Wal-Mart. The cashier told him it was Wal-Mart policy to require a photo ID for all plastic purchases of more than $100.Read more...

The next time you’re stuck on an airplane with just your Kindle and you want to know what other retailers are working on to make your life miserable when you land, fear not. StorefrontBacktalk is now available as native content on Kindle.

It goes beyond the headlines, and the Kindle supposedly updates this content when you’re near a connection so you can read it when you’re not. (I have to trust my Kindle-carrying colleagues to tell me how our content looks. Personally, if something can’t give me a paper cut while reading it, why bother?)…

The case involves the final litigation surrounding the 2007 data breach against the 165-store Hannaford grocery chain. That breach exposed some 4.2 million payment cards to the cyberthief gang run by Albert Gonzalez.Read more...

This incident, which police are still investigating, raises the issue of associate training. Preliminary information given to police by Wal-Mart did not indicate that the caller gave the associate any reason to believe he really was from Wal-Mart IT. Nor was any reason offered as to why an IT person would make such a request. Was the thief assuming the 1 AM crew might be more accommodating and less suspicious?Read more...

If retailers could do anything, what would be the top five things they’d change about PCI? What about mobile? Which mobile interactions will be deployed first and which will backburnered? And how far are merged channel (the last element of the multi-channel to cross-channel to merged-channel triumvirate) efforts going to be adopted by June of next year?

To try and get answers, StorefrontBacktalk and Forrester Research on Wednesday (Sept. 22) launched a research project on these issues and we’d love to have you share your views with us. Responses will be published anonymously, in aggregate only. Other topics in the survey include customer service techniques, global distribution, E-Commerce and store investment priorities, and CRM strategies. If you’d like to be included in this study, the survey is the best place to start. We’ll be publishing the results shortly before the holiday insanity begins. …

It could suggest that the site is proving less effective at bringing in new business and is instead being used as a convenience point for existing customers.Read more...

In Google's case, the employee reportedly abused his privileges to access confidential user information. In a payments context, a similarly trusted employee at one of your service providers could have access to your payment card transactions and maybe even your systems. But could PCI prevent a data compromise in such a case?Read more...

Last Wednesday (Sept. 15), a Pittsburgh-based vendor called Dynamics unveiled a battery-powered device in the shape of a credit card that is capable of mimicking multiple cards by reprogramming its own magnetic stripe on the fly when the user hits a button to change accounts. Instead of replacing all of the credit cards in a consumer's wallet, this device would instead sharply reduce their number.Read more...

It seems that those ducts—officially dubbed heating, ventilating and air-conditioning (HVAC) ducts—snaking through these old multi-level escalator-using buildings are natural signal boosters. "The HVAC ductwork is an excellent conduit for the radio transmissions because the ducts typically consist of hollow metal pipes," the university's report said. "Those pipes can be used to guide the radio waves, keeping the waves from dispersing, and helping to maintain a strong signal over a greater distance."Read more...

That finding has some very powerful implications for both in-store and online retail. Maybe the fact that touch matters shouldn't be a surprise, though it certainly surprise the Caltech researchers. Of course, the in-store experience is different from online or M-Commerce. Some retailers, like Nordstrom, work those high-touch elements of the brick-and-mortar store to the hilt. And even a utilitarian approach—think Wal-Mart or Costco—gives customers a far more sensual experience than a Web site. Shoppers can handle products. Smells, textures and sounds all matter.Read more...

Once that suite is in place, retail CIOs should plan for a risk- and security-based assessment of their log management needs and allocate the resources to make the system work. Otherwise, retailers may centralize their logging but find themselves overwhelmed by the white noise of too much data. Or, IT could distribute log reviews down to the store level only to learn that the individual locations cannot achieve separation of duties, back-ups or daily log reviews conducted by people who know what they are doing. Read more...

This scenario isn't entirely science-fiction, although this particular mobile technology is in its earliest stages. An Israeli vendor called EyeSight Mobile Technologies announced last week (September 7) a set of what it calls Hand Gesture Interface packages, initially designed to control a phone's MPS player. What's important about EyeSight's effort is that it marks a critical new phase for mobile, where developers start trying to get creative with this descendant of Ma Bell. That's what mobile needs to truly take off in retail.Read more...

OK, maybe rational is a reach. But if you’d like to help mobile be closer to rational, you have your chance. The National Retail Federation’s (NRF) Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS) Council is trying to finalize feedback before its conference this week.

Officially, the comments are supposed to be for the Mobile Blueprint ARTS released in July, as the group prepares to release version 2 of that report. Unofficially, ARTS officials are hard at work trying to hammer out mobile specs for all of retail—from barcode scanning to in-store mobile payments to M-Commerce. Have a few thoughts on that topic? (Thought you might.) Executive Director Richard Mader would love to hear from you at maderr@nrf.com. But please keep it clean. Dick’s a classy guy.…

Many retailers have tried contactless systems where a customer's smartphone displays a barcode that a cashier scans to complete the transaction. But Cimbal flips that process: The retailer displays a barcode that the customer reads with his phone's camera. That switch means retailers don't need new barcode-reading hardware. It also means customers never show retailers their account information, so it can't be stored—or stolen. Read more...

After spending a lot of time in recent months contemplating and designing an Information Architecture for Focus Brands, he argues that IT systems should be designed from the ground up with an understanding of the information supply chain--as in "What groups/people will need access to the data entered into or created by this system?" Through this process, Michaud has concluded that one precursor to an Information Architecture is an Action Framework. Read more...

What if the actions were associated with the customer and the product so that the retailer could offer a lot more points if the customer purchased the incentivized product within XX days? The POS could note the customer ID and know to watch for specific products. When a match happened, the points would be automatically issued.Read more...

What is a realistic near-term goal? Is it to generate true additional revenue or is it acceptable--initially, at least--to simply shift purchases from Web to mobile? Moving from revenue to the much-beloved profit margin, is it possible to say whether mobile or Web has lower operational costs?Read more...

Retailers aren't usually hit with patent lawsuits. Those are usually reserved for manufacturers, although the ways retailers handle debit cards, gift cards, micropayments and site accessibility have attracted litigation in the past. This time, though, it's their Web sites that have the office stores under legal attack. But there's nothing special about these Web sites that make them dramatically different from other large E-tailers. That means if these retailers lose in court--or settle the case--every other major retailer will soon be looking down the barrel of the same legal gun.Read more...

Sometimes it's hard for IT to demonstrate cost and value to retailers in hard dollars. This isn't one of those times. A faulty scanner costs money when it's caught by a city inspector--as much as $700 per scanner. That's on top of fixing the scanner and whatever extra time is required when checkers have to key in prices by hand.Read more...

It's not often that people challenge our technical conclusions while simultaneously questioning the marital status of our mothers. The column suffered from one key technical error, questioning how easy it would be to extract clues to an encryption key from encrypting the short payment card expiration date field. Walt admitted that error--and explained the context--in his column this week. (By the way, if anyone else wants to yell us at, this week has a column from Frank Hayes that questions the very premise of security passwords. Gluttons for punishment we be, a rare breed of journalistic masochists.) But there's a bigger issue at play here, a long-standing technology frustration beneath the emotions.Read more...

Retailers looking to purchase a product rather than develop one in-house have to be equally thoughtful. They should make sure the software vendors providing their POS applications have experts on cryptography as part of their development teams. It's not enough to ask what algorithm or key length the POS uses or even to check that the application is on the PA-DSS list of Validated Payment Applications without understanding the operational implications of how that application handles cryptographic functions. Read more...

And here’s a passage that’s sure to capture the attention of privacy advocates everywhere: “The photograph can be taken without a flash, any noise or any indication that a picture is being taken to prevent the current user from knowing he is being photographed. As another example, a recording can be taken to capture the current user’s voice through, for example, the microphone. The recording can be taken when the current user makes a phone call with the electronic device. In some embodiments, the electronic device can record any voices or sounds that are detected, regardless of whether or not a phone call is being made.”Read more...