Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Wal-Mart isn't in the trucking business any more than its suppliers are, and just squeezing out a little savings in fuel costs would be a wasted opportunity. By stretching its supply-chain perimeter though, Wal-Mart will get much better control over the inventory coming in: when it arrives, how it arrives and how quickly it can be turned around. And that's all about IT.Read more...

Conway can imagine a few scenarios, but none seems to be the answer. This issue is important to every retail CIO, so we need to understand what Chip-and-PIN will and won't do, in addition to what the business case, if any, is for the U.S. and other markets to convert from magnetic stripe to Chip-and-PIN cards.Read more...

By early next year—and possibly by this year's holiday season—Wal-Mart will start accepting Chip-and-PIN cards at all U.S. locations, said Jamie Henry, Wal-Mart's director of payment services. Because of the global needs of world's largest retailer—its stores in much of the rest of the world already have Chip-and-PIN—Wal-Mart's POS hardware in the States has supported Chip-and-PIN for years.Read more...

As retailers evaluate practical ways to use mobile payments in-store, they have a new pioneer ally: Holiday Inn. The hotel chain is trialing a program at two Holiday Inns—in Chicago and Houston—where visitors are allowed to use their own smartphones to open their rooms. Hotel guests go to the Web and download an app the chain calls Open Ways. “Guests ultimately will call up the confirmation E-mail on their smartphone and hold it up to a sensor on the door to unlock it,” a USA Today story said.

The advantages are the elimination of going to the front desk to pick up and return the key, plus the convenience of not having to carry anything else. This trial could be key—pun not intended—to helping retailers eventually use the smartphones for authentication and payment. The more consumers get used to the idea of phones for authentication, but not necessarily for payment (door access at a hotel, to borrow books at the local library, to access a private gym, to pick up a package at the Post Office, etc.), the easier it will be to get them to use the phones for payment.…

One card reader vendor, MagTek, is taking that digital fingerprint approach and making it a little easier, using 2010 technology. But instead of grabbing the card at its birth—something that Fifth Third didn't even try to do—MagTek is simply capturing the card the first time the vendor sees it as one of its POS stations. But it waits three months to make up its mind if the card is legit. Read more...

In this week's PCI column, Walter Conway makes an eloquent argument that chains must take special care to protect their data when changing processors. But Walt only briefly touches on the responsibility issues involving those processors. In PCI Requirement 12.8, the PCI powers-that-be mandate that the retailer properly manage the service provider, but they don't say what happens if the service provider does something wrong anyway.Read more...

"As far as we are concerned, signature is a waste of time. It has to be PIN or nothing," Jamie Henry, Wal-Mart's director of payment services, told attendees of a panel discussion held Wednesday at a Smart Card Alliance event in Scottsdale, Ariz.Read more...

Are you still responsible under PCI Requirement 12.8 for managing a service provider when you no longer have a relationship with that provider but it still has your data? Aside from PCI considerations, if a service provider--think tokenization vendor or loyalty program manager—simply goes out of business, how will you get your data back? Read more...

Traditionally, in-store digital signage has been used for the mass-broadcast of commercials set by the chain and, sometimes, tweaked regionally. But why not make the content truly unique to a store, dictated by local weather, sporting events or near-time POS activity?, asks Michael Hiatt, who ran Wal-Mart's in-store media program until last year.Read more...

The trial is using Sprint CDMA for data connectivity, which made it easier for Wal-Mart to do the tests. Sprint CDMA didn't require any of the test systems to interact with the chain's LAN, thereby bypassing questions such as "Do I want to put in a separate WiFi network in the stores? With this, all we have to worry about is power," said one person involved in the trial.Read more...

The upshot: The search giant has now decided to end its entire WiFi survey. And that's exactly the wrong lesson to learn from an incident like this.Read more...

While the co-owner of this family-owned scoop shop said he likes the RFID technology, he's fonder of the push nature of his current flavor updater--where he tells his customers what he has--rather than the pull nature of a system in which his customers tell him what they want. When does customer feedback become too much?Read more...

"You never use the PAN on the handset. Never, never," said an official with the security company that discovered the hole.Read more...

Unless you are an L2 merchant who plans to self-assess, advises PCI Columnist Walt Conway, you could find yourself overpaying for a certification that you don't need.Read more...

He figured that being 60 pounds overweight and having absolutely no real experience in any of the three sports was a perfect metaphor for some of his IT projects. How different could a Triathlon possibly be, after all, from a global IT deployment that is ludicrously underbudgeted with ridiculously unrealistic goals, which the board somehow believes? Read more...

The law specifies that the post-breach game won't fly in the state of Washington: A retailer "will be considered compliant, if its payment card industry data security compliance was validated by an annual security assessment and if this assessment took place no more than one year prior to the time of the breach. For the purposes of this subsection, a [retailer's] security assessment of compliance is nonrevocable."Read more...

Last week, Todd Michaud’s column spoke of getting rid of paper receipts. It seems that suggestion struck a bit of a nerve with readers, many of whom had rather intense reactions, at least according to their posted comments.

Questions and comments about everything from the role of smartphones, proving warranties with dead-tree innards, letting customers leave the store confident they won’t be hassled by security and the loss of ad revenue from the back of receipts to handling expense reports that still demand original receipts flooded the comment box. We had some very interesting exchanges. Typically, readers don’t go back to the stories after they read them. So when especially interesting comments are posted on a story days later, this related story is the only way we can tell our readers about it. Please check ’em out, if you’re interested.…

The trend to use loyalty card data for product recalls is nothing new. Much of the motivation stems from a lawsuit against Kroger a half-dozen years ago, where a Kroger's customer ate beef contaminated with Mad Cow disease even though the chain supposedly had more than enough time to have alerted her before she consumed the tainted product.Read more...

Envision a customer walking up to a kiosk, looking into a mirror and smiling. The mirror digitally captures the customer's face. With the captured face on a screen, the customer chooses makeup options. Read more...

The value—and extreme value it is—comes from a search engine finding products that simply cannot be found otherwise. Read more...

But how is it that in today's world of technology and "going green," he asks, do we still manage to collect so many tiny pieces of paper? It's time to go electronic.Read more...

A post-conviction look at how Gonzalez was caught suggests a change in the type of retailers likely to be targeted and ways today's largest chains can protect themselves. But it also raises questions about whether the very nature of such a large-scale a cyber-attack could ever succeed, assuming success is defined as both getting the money and not getting caught. Retailers are worried about protecting against similar attacks, but it's not likely to be repeated—at least not in the same way.Read more...

On Friday (April 23), the 723-store Barnes & Noble book chain added yet another layer: A mobile device that acts very differently when it happens to be inside one of the book chain's stores.Read more...

All of these companies have quickly admitted their current—to be charitable—accuracy deficits. Milo executives, for example, agreed that their engine needs a lot of work. But they also stressed their efforts in improving inventory accuracy. Although that is certainly important, it should be a Phase Two goal. If someone is asking for a "green vest to wear" and the results are showing videos, books, a glow-in-the-dark safety light and a top response of "Nerf Dart Tag Fury Fire Blasters" (actual search target and results from Milo's engine), the fact that it may be accurate in knowing the number of Nerf Dart Tags a toy store has isn't very helpful.Read more...

InternetEvolution points out a legal quandary: many concerts prohibit cameras. Given that iPhones—along with other smartphones—include cameras, could they be banished?Read more...