Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Some of these efforts are being artificially fueled by applications launched specifically for Apple's iPhone, while other retailers are getting their mobile acts together in time for this year's holiday season. J.C. Penny threw its hat in the ring by launching what it said was the first non-grocery system that can read 2D barcode coupons presented on mobile phones. The new imaging scanners were deployed at J.C. Penny store POS terminals in 16 Houston area stores.Read more...

But retailers pursuing such a strategy might quickly discover that, with payment, when one door closes another opens—and it's likely a trapdoor beneath your feet. For example, a secure route to bank accounts may indeed sidestep most—if not all—card fees for those mobile transactions. But it would also remove the liability shield that the brands' zero-liability programs offer.Read more...

In late September, Starbucks introduced two very different M-Commerce applications, both designed for the iPhone. One was for a very limited trial, impacting eight stores in Seattle and eight more in and around Silicon Valley (specifically Cupertino, Mountain View, Sunnyvale and San Jose).Read more...

The 792-store $32 billion chain said it is the first retailer in the U.K. to introduce a "coupons at the till" program, a multi-million-dollar project that will extensively use historical customer purchase information gleaned from its Nectar loyalty card database "to ensure that coupons are specifically targeted at what Sainsbury's Nectar card holders actually buy."Read more...

Citing research from retail consultancy Retail Banking Research (RBR), the Times report also said that the $30 million J. Sainsbury chain plans to install about 2,000 self-service checkouts in 250 stores by the end of this year, nearly quadrupling its 2008 number. The $23 million, 403-store Morrisons supermarket chain reportedly used self-checkouts for the first time in late 2008 and is planning to set up more than 1,000 in 270 of its stores before January 2010.Read more...

It's clear that Fortune 1000 merchants still enjoy their distaste for PCI DSS and their distrust of the process. And it’s fair to say that many merchants actually hate the PCI standards and their purveyors. Still, at last week’s meeting, the Standards Council and the card brands attempted to embrace their detractors via the oft-repeated “we want your feedback” refrain. The response? The merchants in attendance were generally well behaved in public (perhaps they fear reprisals), and there were no reported fistfights, as much fun as that would have been. And one of the reasons for this less-than-hostile response was the PWC report itself, which made it clear that the SSC (and, presumably, the card brands) were open to making some much-needed changes to the standards.Read more...

The 64-store grocery chain Bloom is trialing a GPS-based shopping cart device, one that uses satellite data to alert consumers to nearby price specials as they browse the aisles. The chain, part of the Food Lion group and a subsidiary of Brussels-based Delhaize Group, operates stores in North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland and Virginia.

The touchscreen devices, known as PAT for Personal Assistant Technology, are being tested in a Fort Mill, S.C., store, reported Supermarket News. …

These two rollouts—from very competitive interests—also happen to agree on something that signifies a maturation of the retail security space. They agree that PCI is likely to insist that retailers deploy some combination of some form of encryption and tokenization, a position that should end months of bickering between the end-to-end vendors and the tokenization vendors. The philosophical differences come down to how retailers want to—or, more precisely, decide that they need to—interact with payment card data. Read more...

Coville said the chain suspected the thermal-imaging system wasn't too hot when it came to accuracy and, convinced by a pilot project that compared the system's capabilities for truthfulness with those of new equipment that relies instead on analysis of video data, In his testing, video-based counting was 20 percent more accurate than its thermal predecessor. Oh, the CIO added, it's also a lot cheaper, which makes it a hard combo to ignore.Read more...

Macys.com brings in about $1 billion a year, which isn’t overwhelming for the $25 billion chain. But to have four percent of its global revenue coming from online is a continual surprise for CEO Terry Lundgren, according to a speech he gave Tuesday (September 22). Macys.com generated $30,000 in sales the first year it was launched–1996. As of Tuesday, Macy’s “has invested more than $300 million in online infrastructure” and is tracking online sales increases of 13 percent compared with a year ago. Lundgren said Macy’s internal figures show that “every dollar spent online influences $5.77 spent in the store over the next 10 days.

“I, for one, made zero money before 2000 on the Internet,” Lundgren told about 2,000 people in attendance at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center, according to this Las Vegas Review-Journal story. “I truly did not get it. There wasn’t a business model out there that made sense to me, but there was so much interest, it got my attention.” …

PCI Columnist David Taylor suggests that this almost guarantees PCI will have to address tokenization, end-to-end encryption and other “beyond PCI” issues. But it's also going to put severe pressure on payment processors and gateways, push retailers to demand portability answers and add a whole new layer of complexity to merged channel strategies.Read more...

It’s a compelling argument. There is a lot to be said for smaller companies that are hungry and constantly go the extra mile. But there's a reason why national chain CIOs do—and must—often resist.Read more...

The difference between wireless in a test lab and wireless in the field has again reared its ugly 802.11 head. The J.C. Penney trial began in December 2008 at the $18.5 billion 1,101-store chain's 103,000-square foot Ft. Worth, Texas, store. The goal was to test the system for a deployment at the chain's first Manhattan store (a much larger 153,000-square foot store), which opened this summer.Read more...

Among the complaints: No guidance, the standards are designed for a bygone era of technology, the standards are anything but standardized, why should banks have to not comply with PCI?, compliance gamemanship and "We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Credit Card Data."Read more...

When it comes to mobile investments, E-Commerce Director Dan Shelffo said "we're poking around" and that his group has made some "site modifications so that we can start to dabble" in mobile communications. But the spreadsheets do not look attractive. "I have to protect the billion-dollar brand. When I look at the dollars that I am going to invest, I look at the return. I know what my ROI is," Shelffo said. "When I look at mobile, I see a lot of investment."Read more...

But in recent years, PCI advocates—especially the card brand executives—have discouraged the practice, arguing that the safest process is to use payment card numbers to process a payment and to then delete it as quickly as possible. Having those numbers lying around—especially spread into marketing and sales departments—was simply increasing the chance that someone unauthorized could access the data. But the guidance is vague and subject to economic considerations.Read more...

Despite those heavy-weight retail brands, only a couple have borne the vast majority of the costs and headaches associated with a breach. Why? Because the first one or two chains have to go through the expense of identifying the breached numbers and having them shut down and reissued. That task's completion makes life so much easier on the others. It's also better for investigative costs, brand reputation and several other factors. Is this fair? Can and should something be done to make it more equitable?Read more...

Today, writes Franchisee Columnist Todd Michaud, his average restaurant has eight to 10 pieces of technology that are complex enough to house their own operating systems. These same restaurants now have five or more vendors providing technical support. With the high level of integration, when a problem occurs the store manager is often hit with the “It’s not us, it’s them” excuse. The store manager, who is typically not an IT administrator, is left trying to decipher cryptic error messages, leaning on a peer group and spending hours if not days on the phone with various support organizations trying to get to the root cause of the issue. Symptoms of this situation usually manifest themselves in screams from the back office: “I have already rebooted it 14 times. I am not doing it again!”Read more...

The perceived inaccuracy of online depictions of in-store inventory may be at the heart of a new excuse that one Best Buy employee is apparently using to avoid having to hunt up products, according to this wonderful report from Consumerist, a Consumer Reports-owned site with a nice dose of attitude. Seems that a consumer went to Best Buy to purchase a deeply-discounted hard drive after the site said the item was in stock. The shelf was empty, so he asked an employee to help him find it.

“He informed me that they were all out of stock and that the Web site takes about 6 hours to update the inventory, and that that was the reason for the discrepancy,” the customer said, according to the story. “I didn’t trust him, however, so when I got home I logged back onto the Best Buy site and ordered the HDD for in-store pick-up at the same location and about a half an hour later, there was a message in my inbox letting me know that my order was ready to be picked up” and he indeed drove to the store and was given the hard-disk. Added the story’s author: “You have to admit, however, that his ‘the Web site is wrong’ line did effectively get you to go away, albeit temporarily, which we can only assume was its intended function.”…

Ikea, one of the few non-food retailers in Europe to install self-checkout kiosks, "refuses to invest in weigh scales like other stationary self-checkouts have," said Planet Retail's Research Director Retail Technology Bjorn Weber. Weber said he took note of Ikea's minimalist approach because it doesn't seem logical, given the capabilities of today's technology. "It makes sense for retailers to deploy systems that have built-in theft control that is actually part of the scanning and payment process and to avoid the situation where they have to re-scan or double-check customers who've already completed their checkout process, as you have with all these guys doing self-scanning with mobile devices," he said. "Someone has to scan at least some of the products or the whole trolley and that's annoying for the customer, because he's under suspicion and because he was promised to save time by using the self-checkout and now he's not saving time."Read more...

Second Life-like efforts to make 3-D E-Commerce effective–and profitable–have not gone very far. The Tweeter electronics chain was thinking about it–shortly before the chain had to liquidate–and Brookstone actually launched a small project using it.

But Gen Buy, a surprisingly insightful new book about Gen Y purchasing trends, has a line that sounds intriguing: Wii shopping. Unlike the Web, Wii game systems already exist within 3-D and are quite popular with Gen Y consumers (and those who shall soon become Gen Y consumers). Could the concept work if the device and the format are different? …

In Friday's hearing, the government for the first time put a number next to the DSW breach, saying that the $1.5 billion apparel chain operating 300 stores in 37 states (in addition to supplying footwear to 367 leased locations) lost more than one million card numbers in the breach. The government also said that OfficeMax—the $8.3 billion office supplies chain with 939 stores in the United States and 83 in Mexico—played a crucial role, with Assistant Boston U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann saying that OfficeMax's "then vulnerable encryption of PINs enabled Gonzalez (and a colleague) to sell the conspirators' bounty for particularly large profits." The only new data morsel about TJX to emerge was a Heymann estimate that TJX alone "suffered close to $200 million in losses and associated expenses."Read more...

Franchisee Columnist Todd Michaud can’t tell you how many times he had heard some version of this over the years. On the surface, this seems like a pretty straightforward argument . But with most things in life, it’s not quite that simple. I also have franchisees who pepper me with questions like: “Why is the system so expensive? Why can’t I have a single phone number to call for all of my problems? Why are these upgrades so expensive and why on earth do they take so long to complete? Why can’t I get access to better data faster? Who is holding this vendor accountable?” Not always, but sometimes, the answers to these questions are found by limiting the franchisees choices.Read more...

About three years ago, new IT strategy at Macy’s pushed the number of servers they needed to manage from five to 60 and that forced IT to explore outsourcing and they chose a San Francisco company called Splunk, according to a Wall Street Journal story than ran Tuesday (Sept. 8). The story quoted Ratnakar Lavu, Macy’s group vice president of technology, as saying the service was used to identify a Web problem last year involving a feature to help customers find product availability for a specific store.

“To figure out what was behind the glitch, his IT team could have gone through the time-consuming process of checking each server for the flaw. Instead, Mr. Lavu entered in a query to Splunk’s software. Within minutes, the technology scanned the indexed information from all 60 servers and highlighted how there had been a pattern of errors across some servers. In two days, the problem was resolved, says Mr. Lavu,” the story said. “‘It would’ve taken us quite a while without Splunk because it was a very complex problem to solve,’ said Lavu. ‘It’s Google-like and identifies patterns though search.'” He added that he had “some concerns that the technologies won’t be as effective if the amount of data and machines they have to scan keeps growing.” An interesting read.…

This is the latest in a series of high-tech blunders from the 123-year-old $47 billion 3,900-store chain. Is this because of the chain's size or, more likely, because it has been pushing the envelope on what it's trying to do technologically, perhaps beyond its testing limits.Read more...