Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Making the hardware technology part work will be comparatively easy, compared with the task of getting retailers to buy in, along with getting the backing of Visa, MasterCard, AmericanExpress and other card brands. Heartland CEO Robert Carr discussed the details of his plan for the first time in a pair of StorefrontBacktalk podcasts, with the first of the podcast series focusing on the technology details of the plan and the second delving into the practical industry political realities of getting such a plan widely used.Read more...

"After dozens of failed projects in the last ten years, the time is ripe for payments by mobile phone at retailers' checkouts," said the report. "Powerful initiatives in France and the Netherlands, initiated by the likes of Carrefour, Ahold and Auchan, may be strong enough to set European, perhaps even global, standards for mobile phone payments."Read more...

"Most notably, the visitors were not in a country where we do business," said Ron DeFeo, Home Depot's director of corporate communications. But given that the overwhelming majority of the programming and design investment had already been paid, why pull the plug only six months after the site's November launch?Read more...

This goes far beyond the CVSes, Walgreens, Rite-Aids and Wal-Marts of the world. We often complain about the store-centric thinking that undermines merged channel strategies, where they see online, mobile and even the call center as the enemy. What about the myopic view that goes beyond "store versus online" and gets into "my wonderful store on Elm St. versus your horrible store on Maple Ave." We discuss intra-chain rivalries, often overlooking into-in-store rivalries.Read more...

A Pennsylvania-based RFID tag-maker is introducing what it says is the thinnest active RFID tag in the world. CenTrak CEO Ari Naim said the size of his company’s new 3mm-thick IT-740 Staff Badge makes it an ideal tool for keeping physical track of not only employees but also of expensive equipment that can be moved, such as notebook computers. “It is pretty thin, at 3mm, for an RTLS tag,” said ABI Research RFID analyst Michael Liard. “The advantage is that the tag does not need to be the badge itself. You can overlay the active tag on current badges — retrofitting them if you will.”

Asked about the new tag’s battery power, Naim would only say that battery life is one of his company’s “specialties” and that power specifications aren’t very informative. “That, honestly, doesn’t give you much information,” said the CEO. “What defines the life of the tag has to do with how the system works. Our system updates every three seconds. If we change it to update every six seconds the battery life would nearly double.” Naim said the IT-740 unit can be programmed to operate at varying intervals and has a motion-sensor that can be used to prevent activation if the unit remains stationary for certain periods of time, such as when it is not tracking product.…

On Tuesday (May 5) , the National Irish Bank (NIB) reported that “technology problems were behind the failure of its debit and credit cards at point-of-sale machines in shops and other businesses across the country” earlier that day. But while the unspecified glitch was resolved within a few hours, retail POS issues continued, prompting the bank to “apologize unreservedly,” according to The Irish Times.

Here’s where it gets interesting. The bank issued a statement that “as soon as the problem was identified, the network was switched to a back-up system and National Irish Bank customers are able to access their funds at the bank’s ATMs as normal now.” But what about Ireland’s retailers, whose transactions were halted? No emergent backup system for them? Another reminder that banks know ATMs and vaults, but POS is a new and lower priority concept. …

Typically, statements announcing such deals (which, in this case, included Subway's acquirer for its stores in Canada, Chase Paymentech) feature a canned quote from an executive with the chain, praising the vendor for its wisdom. In this case, the quote provided by Subway was anything but warm. Read more...

With the business clientele, the ability for self-service systems to award points for purchases is important, but not necessarily as important as allowing customized screens delivering different options for employees of different companies, said Jay Eisenberg, a senior marketing director for the $14.5 billion 1,713-store office supply chain. The trick was in how to identify the customer given that the printer was initially only outfitted with a magstripe reader.Read more...

Although IHL's projection of "strong growth" for POS units in China and India should not have an immediate impact on POS pricetags, a secondary effect just might.Read more...

But that may be precisely the point. With the economy still scraping bottom, many retailers and E-tailers are having to craft strategies that are designed to be very temporary and very emergent. There's a major E-Commerce vendor, for example, that is out there trying to convince retailers to halt efforts to bring in new sales, proposing that they instead force all efforts on the installed base. This forces us to consider three distinct issues.Read more...

But analysts were less than impressed, pointing out that the Motorola units were actually larger than many other major RFID readers today, despite being smaller than other Motorola RFID readers. "I definitely classify this as 'ho hum.' ThingMagic and Impinj as well as some others have much smaller form factors and more functions," said Pete Abell, a longtime RFID analyst (used to be with IDC) who today works as an independent consultant.Read more...

Starbucks is boasting of a 60 percent redemption rate on a mobile coupon trial being done in Mexico, where customers send SMS messages to access 2D barcode mobile coupons. That is an unusually—suspiciously?—high redemption rate, especially for a mobile program.

“Every time you present your coupon, the offer would be modified, such as get a venti for the price of a tall, to make people come more often to the store,” said this story from Mobile Marketer. “The call-to-action urged consumers to text keyword STARBUCKS to short code 80080 to get a WAP link to download a buy-one-get-one-free 2D barcode mobile coupon. Starbucks is equipped with 2D bar code recognition software, so employees can read the mobile coupon directly from consumers’ mobile phones at the point of sale.”…

J.C. Penney is the latest retailer to conclude that the deadly economy means that in-store must, for the moment, get unconditional IT priority. J.C. Penney CEO Myron Ullman was explicit about a change in tech priorities as he prepared for his shareholders meeting this week.

” I’m saying IT isn’t the back door. It’s the front door,” Ullman said in an interview with the Dallas Morning News. The story continued: ” Penney has decided dot-com isn’t the hub anymore. It has put information technology at the same level with store operations, merchandising and marketing when planning the company’s future.”…

The neighborhood physical video rental business is in a very difficult position these days. Blockbuster is trying to survive with a kiosk strategy, courtesy of an NCR acquisition of a large operator of video rental kiosks.

But is this too little, ludicrously too late? A nice discussion happened Wednesday (April 23) at RetailWire about the Blockbuster strategy. My favorite comment comes from author Ryan Mathews from Black Monk Consulting: ” Blockbuster stumbled because the notion of physical access became less important in the video rental business. Does creating another physical solution change all that? I don’t think so.” The discussion is worth a read.…

GuestView PCI Columnist David Taylor said the problems crop up in easy-to-miss ways and he rattles off three of his favorites.Read more...

Washington State’s governor has signed into law one of three bills relating to RFID and privacy, a measure that prohibits, with a dozen exceptions, the scanning of RFID chips by anybody other than the company that attached them.

The signed bill includes a number of significant changes to the initially-proposed measure which was denounced in January by Dan Mullen, President of the Association for Automatic Identification and Mobility (AIM), as potentially being “traumatic” to retailers and consumers. Mullen, according to an RFID Journal report, believes the enacted version is “pretty reasonable” because it focuses on banning the surreptitious scanning and reading of RFID chips, as opposed to the devices directly.…

This is one of those end-of-an-era markers. A 31-store Colorado grocery chain with stores in Colorado, New Mexico, Texas and Utah is claiming—and it seems like a very plausible claim—that it is the first chain to go entirely bag free, insisting that customers use either reusable cloth bags or less convenient cardboard boxes. To be fair, the Natural Grocers chain is an all-natural chain, which borders on being a healthfood chain, so it’s rejection of paper and plastic bags certainly may not indicate a national trend.

Still, the cost-savings above and beyond environmental issues are fairly significant, not to mention that packing cloth bags is likely to be slightly faster as they are sturdier and can hold more. But it also discourages last-minute shopping, at least at that chain.…

This is one of these ideas that could work extremely well in a very limited set of circumstances. A whisky company opted to put up a billboard in a densely-populated and traveled urban area and wanted it to change–very significantly–with every person who saw it, tailoring to that person. The problem is that it can’t scale, requires workers on site (and workers who can craft ad copy on the fly, with literally seconds to create) and is likely quite expensive.

Still, as this video of Jameson’s truly interactive billboard illustrates, the marketing tactic can break through the clutter of a message-laden environment. And it’s hard to argue with the potential of a billboard that–as shown in the video–hailed a cab for a prospect. But could it be practical for in-store use? Maybe at a large mall? And what of the flip side: Are there consumers who would be alienated by having such a public message directed at them? And what if it was connected with CRM, allowing for personalization beyond that which can be observed? In this day of digital messages overflowing consumers’ cellphones, Web screens and shopping carts, it’s absolutely a concept not be dismissed too quickly.…

In this particular effort, the retailer has chosen to mask the individual consumer identities—for now—and is trying to draw general conclusions based on the actions of people in that Zip Code. But the technology was there for them to tie everything back to the individual consumer, raising quite a few data and privacy strategy issues.Read more...

At its core, the DataBar codes are today's barcodes but are much more tightly packed with much more information. But not all of this transition will be akin to scanning sugar and spice. Most chains will have to absorb non-trivial costs to support the upgrades, a tricky move at a time of store closings and massive layoffs. Most product scanners built since 2000 are capable of reading DataBars but investments need to be made beyond just the scanners.Read more...

This all raises the issue of "should retailers wait for the PCI SSC to 'bless' or integrate so called 'beyond PCI' technologies into the standards?" GuestView PCI Columnist David Taylor's answer is a profound "no." Read more...

Execs at Domino’s Pizza learned a painful lesson in the power of Web video and social networks this week. Although the chain already understood the power of those new channels to sell product and boost brand loyalty, it seemed to have been offguard how those channels could just as easily halt sales and hurt brand loyalty. It also seemed stunned that the powerful national chain could be undone by a 10-minute effort from two low-level employees.

The story—deliciously told here by The New York Times—involves two workers at one restaurant that posted a video of them doing some impressively unsanitary things to a pizza before he was sent. See the picture accompanying this story? All I can say is that that had better be cheese.…

After tracking that for an extended period and noting the ebbs and flows, he then ran a major campaign. But instead of looking at impressions, clickthrough, leads generated or any other typical Web metric, he simply repeated his study. The only test of a social site marketing campaign, he reasoned, is to see if it was changing the dialogue at all. Were his brands getting talked about more? And was it boosting his favorable and dropping his negatives?Read more...

Chains are just starting to see the business ROI potential of POS—especially when working with CRM—to fuel upsells and to legitimately increase loyalty. But few look at POS as a potential protector and a protector against some potentially very large expenses. Consider four items from the last few days.Read more...

The case raises many critical retail IT issues, including how private—or proprietary—the courts should consider data, including purchase histories from CRM/loyalty and POS payment files. Beyond privacy issues, such subpoenas could force retailers to publicly reveal that they are collecting and saving a lot more information than they want to disclose. There are also PCI implications, where a merchant could theoretically be shown to be saving prohibited payment card data.Read more...