Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Google has been testing a same-day delivery service since last fall with several chains, limited to employees and a small number of other testers. The big problem is the one that all same-day efforts in the U.S. have faced: Even affluent customers won't pay more than $10 per delivery.Read more...

That good sign? As badly broken as its system may be, Isis is trying to fix what's actually broken.Read more...

The 1,100-store chain is also a few months away from going live with a new financial system from Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL, to be followed before the end of the year by merchandising, planning and allocation systems, all of which will replace legacy systems. That's presuming the board's patience with CEO Ron Johnson holds out—unlike most big chains, JCPenney's E-Commerce site isn't doing any better than in-store, and the chain lost $552 million during the last three months.Read more...

"Candidly, it's getting so hard to know what's a store sale and what's a mobile sale and what's Internet. It's getting harder to figure out the lines between them," Macy's CFO Karen Hoguet told analysts on Tuesday. When asked for some E-Commerce projections, she said: "I really can't give you that number. I mean, I don't know it. But clearly, the growth is continuing very aggressively. But sometimes, it's being bought on a mobile device sitting in a store. So I'm not sure how to define that."Read more...

The bigger the chain, the better the target, as Walmart (NYSE:WMT) knows only too well. Just last month, another judge in this same California county hit grocery chain Fresh & Easy with a bill for $833,136 for similar price-tag problems. How about drawing legal distinctions between intent to defraud and unintentional human error or computer glitch? Frustratingly, these weights-and-measures cases are usually painful enough to sting but not financially worth fighting. That cost-of-doing-business reality is something cash-strapped agencies rely on.Read more...

The Nook was supposed to be merged-channel perfected: Buy anywhere, instant delivery, no DCs required. The physical stores were expected to be steamrolled by Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN). Instead, Amazon has crushed the Nook, while B&N's stores (with no more competition from Borders) are hanging on. Welcome to Merged Channel 2.0—or possibly Merged Channel II: The Showroom Strikes Back.Read more...

The big announcement Visa (NYSE:V) made at the Mobile World Congress on Monday (Feb. 25) was a deal to put its mobile-payments app on Samsung’s NFC-equipped smartphones, and for

banks to easily install payment-card numbers in the phones’ NFC Secure Element. Analysts made the usual noises about how these moves will give NFC a much-needed boost. Are these people delusional? We hope not, but it remains true that there’s only one show-stopping problem facing pay-by-tap: Customers just don’t want it. Solve that one, and the other problems are trivial. Fail to solve it, and nothing else matters.

Actually, Visa probably isn’t delusional, just desperately optimistic, like it is when it reports contactless payments of all types (including NFC) have quadrupled in the past year, to 13 million per month. The missing context: VisaNet handles 130 million transactions per day. That means contactless is roughly one-third of 1 percent of the total. Visa knows that’s pathetic. It just doesn’t know how to convince chains to train cashiers to encourage customers to use contactless and mobile payments. Maybe Walmart (NYSE:WMT) will actually do that when its MCX finally arrives. After all, in retail, nothing cuts through the fog of optimism—or delusion—quite like hatred of interchange.…

That's a rather perplexing utterance. Given that the chain said data-capturing software was found in the POS systems of some 19 stores, it's pretty easy to declare the security of every card used in those machines during that timeframe was compromised. That's not to say that the thieves successfully captured that data in a usable form or that they have actually tried to use that data yet. But in terms of the data being compromised, that debate was pretty much over when the software was found.Read more...

To be blunt, the retail concern is whether Walmart and the like are losing more or fewer sales to Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) and the like, and this study simply didn't try to address that.Indeed, answering that question is the more likely next step for shoppers if these chains are losing the battle against so-called showrooming. After shoppers come into, let's say, Target repeatedly and then find that E-tailers repeatedly offer the same for less, those shoppers would simply stop bothering to even drive to Target and would go straight online. This study would interpret that outcome as a win for the physical stores—because the percentage of people who go into the store and then buy from the store would go up—when it's actually a clean loss.Read more...

The debate surrounds the Seattle-based retailer's use of a vendor called Euclid, which captures information from the Wi-Fi signals of both customers and passersby. Is it legal? There is no specific U.S. law on whether MAC addresses are "personal information" entitled to legal protection. Moreover, U.S. law regarding things like access to cell phone records and cell phone usage probably don't apply to the Wi-Fi portion of the device. So although it may constitute an unlawful "trap and trace" or "pen register" to capture a cell phone number or IMEI of a cell phone, these laws likely don't apply to capturing the MAC address of a Wi-Fi-enabled device. Put simply, your iPad or Wi-Fi-enabled iPod isn't a phone, nor is the non-phone portion of your iPhone, Blackberry, Android or Windows mobile device.Read more...

But largely missing from the rumor mill is a blunt reality: Google isn't actually a retailer at all. It could probably put up a chain of good-looking stores and find things to put in them—Nexus phones and tablets, Chromebook computers, Google Glass electronic glasses, driverless cars. But what, exactly, would what is fundamentally a huge online advertising company get from opening its own chain? One possible answer: some actual payments.Read more...

Shoppers do the darnedest things, such as taking home packaging with attached EAS labels and then throwing it into the microwave oven. We’re not just talking about reheatable soups but about things like hamburger meat, complete with the styrofoam and ultra-meltable shrinkwrap plastic. Although the molten plastic is poisonous and smells awful, the EAS tag can catch fire. (Note: Fire, plastic chemicals, styrofoam and plenty of radiation is a recipe for a new microwave—and possibly a new kitchen.)

“Typically, people are trying to defrost beef, chicken, etc., in the original package after it is frozen and it’s difficult to remove the plastic,” said George Cohen, a spokesperson for EAS vendor Checkpoint. Checkpoint on Tuesday (Feb. 19) rolled out what it says is a microwave-safe EAS label. That may sound like a great idea, but when you’re faced with an EAS tag or label that refuses to stay deactivated, the idea of frying it in the breakroom’s microwave oven was always a nice failsafe.…

Is it a better program (other than the strange halving of the time for a return)? Absolutely. Will it likely reduce Best Buy sales lost to showrooming? Yes. Will it eliminate all showrooming losses? Of course not. And the fact that Best Buy is trying to argue it will is mind-boggling.Read more...

The recommendations, of course, also offer the generic list of best practices for mobile device security (such as strongly encouraging full-disk encryption), which is certainly a handy checklist for chains just starting to seriously explore mobile payments. One key point of the report is to acknowledge the very complex nature of mobile systems, which have far more players than traditional fixed POS systems. For example, the report speaks of the desirability of lab validation for mobile devices and why it's simply—and regrettably—not practical.Read more...

Electronic shelf tags have gone pretty much nowhere in recent years, but U.K. department store chain John Lewis is doing an interesting trial at one of its newest stores. The Exeter location, which the 39-store chain uses as a testbed for new technologies, has put in hundreds of e-paper shelf tags that will display both prices and QR codes that customers can scan to get offers and product information. John Lewis is calling this an omnichannel test, the idea being that if customers are going to have their phones out in the store, shelf tags are a good thing for them to scan.

True, there’s nothing in that part of the trial that couldn’t be done with paper tags, and that is part of what’s so interesting: Unlike a more traditional electronic shelf tag, customers won’t necessarily notice that these tags are electronic. That makes them less distracting and possibly less likely to be stolen, both of which have been problems with electronic tags in the past. In-store technology that all but hides the fact that it’s new technology sounds strange, but if it finally gets easy-to-update electronic tags on shelves—and maybe eventually into John Lewis’ 290-store Waitrose grocery chain—so much the better.…

Two very desirable—and potentially lucrative—sets of shopper data are being captured and saved here. But the retailers and the vendor involved are all pledging to not use it. The first is cross-retailer data, which is where the vendor will recognize a shopper's phone's MAC address when the shopper repeatedly walks into a Nordstrom and then detect that same shopper walking into a Nordstrom competitor. How much would that rival pay for such information? The second data set: Once one of those MAC addresses makes a purchase, the chain could connect that MAC address with the payment information. Voila, instant CRM-friendly data on whenever that customer walks into a store and, with enough sensors, every aisle he or she visits and how long the shopper lingers.Read more...

In the 1970s, California passed the Song-Beverly Act. It prohibited merchants (there were no online merchants back then) from requiring, as a condition for accepting a credit card, consumers to provide certain personal information. The legislature was worried about merchants using the pretext of accepting a credit card to mandate that consumers pony up their names, addresses and other personal information.Read more...

Such changes are especially likely because the court did not impose any restrictions on how retailers can use this newly permitted data, despite the ruling saying that data is solely to give online shops a better chance of fighting fraud. The ruling allows address and other information to be demanded from shoppers even when the goods are physical, but only if the product is being shipped to a different location. The rationale is that when a physical product is being delivered, the retailer has an obvious need to ask for the address to which it will be sent. But for fraud purposes, the court's Monday ruling now allows the site to demand the address of the customer, in addition to the delivery address.Read more...

The real payback for Duane Reade, owned by Walgreens, is about changing customer mobile behaviors. In English, that means getting shoppers comfortable with scanning barcodes and interacting with the resultant data. It will increase participation in more explicit mobile programs. This will mean more price comparisons—which Duane Reade is confident it will usually win—and, soon, it will soften resistance to mobile payments.Read more...

A ComScore survey released on Monday (Feb. 4) reminded us why we hate it when surveys don’t give us context. The topic was digital wallets, and among other not-very-surprising tidbits (48 percent of smartphone users surveyed have used PayPal, six times as many as runner-up Google Wallet) was something we’ve heard often enough: 47 percent say they’re concerned about “security/safety/theft/loss of phone” with digital wallets. To its credit, the ComScore report on the survey does point out that consumers don’t seem to understand the added security that digital wallets provide. (A real surprise: 29 percent say they have no mobile-wallet concerns.)

But we never see surveys that ask consumers “What concerns, if any, do you have about using a plastic credit or debit card to make purchases?” What percentage would say they’re worried about losing the card or having their wallet stolen? Without

that, we don’t know if a question about mobile wallets means anything at all. If most consumers do fret about the risk of a stolen magstripe card but use it anyway, that’s clearly not what’s holding back mobile payments. Our theory: Consumers don’t actually care about security at all. Now will somebody please deliver numbers to prove us wrong?…

This continues a trend of technology empowering consumers, observes Legal Columnist Mark D. Rasch. It's also a way for restaurants and other retailers to get themselves into real legal trouble if they're not very careful about how they identify their use of this type of social technology.Read more...

But of much greater significance is the digital domino effect. In this case, JCPenney was building its in-aisle checkout on the premise that it had item-level RFID fully in place. And if remodeled stores have dramatically scaled back the number of cashwraps (because customers would be doing in-aisle checkout), does that mean all those customers will have to line up for the limited number of cashwraps? That's not going to be pretty—presuming JCPenney can actually get enough returning customers to make it a problem.Read more...

That's the terrifying part: No other brick-and-mortar retailer comes remotely close to those numbers in mobile payments. The heartening part: It's possible. Despite all the wheel-spinning from PayPal, Google and Isis when it comes to getting customers to use mobile payments, it can be done. And it's not something unique to Starbucks customers.Read more...

This power consolidation happened when Thomas L. Cole retired as chief administrative officer following a 41-year career at Macy's (and companies that Macy's acquired). That gave Macy's the ability to promote Robert B. "RB" Harrison from EVP for omnichannel strategy to his new chief role. "Among his duties, Tom has been responsible for systems and logistics for many years. As Tom's duties were re-assigned, it was decided that systems and logistics fit best under R.B. Harrison, given the increasing omnichannel nature of our business," said Jim Sluzewski, Macy's SVP of corporate communications. "In that process, R.B. was promoted to a chief and he joined the company's executive committee. Tom's retirement was the trigger point."Read more...

The chain denied any fakery, but the real shock is that JCPenney bothered. Customers don't care about the Manufacturer's Spurious Retail Price. They care whether JCPenney's price is lower than Macy's or Kohl's, and they can get that information online. Why isn't JCPenney doing the same thing? Read more...