Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Amazon insists that it doesn’t do differential pricing, but on October 18 a high-profile tech blogger went ballistic because the E-tail giant apparently did just that. Tim Bray, who also happens to be a Google engineer, fumed that amazon.com had a $9.48 price on an e-book he wanted, but when he logged in to buy it, the price immediately jumped by more than $5—to $15.17. “Maybe there’s an explanation,” Bray wrote. “I don’t care what it is, it’s not good enough and it’s not reasonable

and I’m not paying that price and maybe you shouldn’t be either.” Whew!

The likely problem: Bray, a Canadian, was visiting Amazon’s U.S. site, where Amazon sets its own e-book prices under terms of a price-fixing settlement. Once Bray logged in, Amazon spotted him as Canadian and gave him Amazon Canada’s price, which is set by the publisher. (The fact that publishers also run their own sale prices may be why e-book prices also seemed to drop for Bray as soon as he bought books.) But it’s still aggravating to customers. And that cross-border quirk means Amazon does differential pricing after all—no matter how much it tries not to.…

How about the fact that those mobile stores will also be pushing customers to buy a new phone as long as they're already in the store? And yes, we're sure that will make retail chains feel warm and fuzzy about Isis, too.Read more...

In each case, PIN pads were physically compromised, one per store, in dozens of stores clustered in specific geographic areas. The PIN pads were apparently tampered with during the spring and summer months, and tampering was limited to the countertop devices. How likely is all this to be coincidental? Not very.Read more...

But the six-month French trial that has just started is taking the efficiency goal one step further, by marrying a contactless smartcard—which holds the biometric data—with the POS-affixed biometric scanner. The retailers estimate that the contactless card's transmission will be intercepted by the POS authentication element from two meters away, which is about 79 inches or about 6.6 feet.Read more...

Shoppers who tried finding the details on target.com were locked into an endless loop. Clicking on the link provided on the chain's news page took shoppers (and us) to a "More reasons to love Target" page, which had a link taking us to an "Our low price promise" page, which looped back to the "More reasons" page. As of Wednesday (Oct. 24), Target had finally inserted an updated price-match page, complete with details, into that loop. The details, though, paint a very different picture than Target's announcement did. For example, the program has a "limit quantity of 1 online price match, per identical item, per guest." So if a shopper has two children and wants to get them the identical toy, and if that toy is being offered at Amazon for less, Target will only grant the lower price on one of them? Read more...

Most relationships between retailers and shoppers are dictated by some form of contract, typically online, pens Legal Columnist Mark Rasch. This may be true even for purchases made in brick-and-mortar stores, as courts increasingly look to the online contract to determine the rights and responsibilities of parties even if the consumer never went online. But online contracts present a problem for merchants: How do you change them?Read more...

As more chains struggle with fully embracing merged-channel operations, we have a delicious contradiction. The benefits of such a merged-channel approach are definite and intense. However, the risk of damage being inflicted by a less than precise execution is equally certain. Hence, it’s a path that needs to be traveled—but oh so carefully.

StorefrontBacktalk and ChainLink Research have collaborated on a report that looks at some of the less-covered pitfalls and opportunities of this approach. Take a peek.…

On October 19, as expected, the settlement was formally submitted to U.S. District Court Judge John Gleeson. But many of the retailers behind the settlement have now changed their mind and are actively opposing it. Those reversals, though, won't necessarily have a direct impact on the settlement's status, because Gleeson now has to decide for himself whether the settlement advances the interests of consumers, retailers and the industry.Read more...

Yes, Apple sells a $30 adapter for plugging old-style peripherals into the Lightning port. But such adapters won't work well with card sleds, so stores could end up needing two types of iPads and two types of sleds. And that's the type of thing that drives central IT support crazy, because the sled that just broke is always the one you're out of.Read more...

Tesco, you'll recall, put billboards full of products on South Korean subway platforms, so consumers could use their phones to click on QR codes and order groceries for delivery while they waited. Nothing so small-minded for Yihaodianmdash;it plans to create 1,000 "augmented reality" supermarkets (you'll have to use a smartphone to see them) along streets in four Chinese cities, and each store will cover 1,200 square meters (more than 12,000 square feet) of wall or fence space.Read more...

Shopkick didn't say how it is interacting with the inventories of its retail partners. However, given that the catalogues from each retail partner are relatively small, there's little need to grant access to the full inventory. All a chain would need to do is broadcast to the Shopkick app the inventory status of the couple dozen SKUs it is currently pushing in its mobile catalogue. This would be a relatively easy task. And although security is always a concern, the tiny number of products being shared would make that information of trivial value to rivals.Read more...

Unfortunately, with those so-called "low and slow" attacks—which require a lot less firepower from attackers but can still crash your site—brute-force DDoS defenses won't work. Your E-Commerce and network security teams may need to take a lesson from associates and loss prevention in thinking about online defense.Read more...

As the owner of brands Kraft, Maxwell House, Oscar Mayer, Nabisco, Planters and JELL-O discovered, NFC was the winner. NFC's engagement level was a dozen times greater than QR codes, and engagement time was 48 seconds for NFC compared with 5–10 seconds for QR. But NFC excludes many older phones and—crucially—all Apple iPhones and iPads. For many reasons, that's a dangerous segment to ignore.Read more...

Yeah, that's the type of motivational shopper message Best Buy wants to send out: "Come on over to Best Buy for the holidays. And if our sales reps feel like matching your Amazon.com price, they will. Trust us." The motivational value of price matching is rooted in its certainty. You can have as many published limits as you'd like (and, yes, both chains have certainly done their lawyers proud with impressive limits of every type). But the point is that a customer who brings in a rival's price that meets those limits will absolutely get that price.Read more...

Had the court found him not guilty, it would have sent a message that shoplifting requires some proof of illegal intent. NYC sees a huge number of shoplifting charges every year. The city can now expect a lot more, unless retail loss prevention operations suddenly get a lot smarter. This is far from solely an LP issue, though. News of this arrest can seriously reduce consumer willingness to try mobile payment at any retailer. Certainly the consumers we've mentioned this situation to had the reaction, "Well, I think I'll be whipping out Mr. MasterCard for any of my Apple purchases from now on. It's slower, but it sure beats jail if I happen to hit the wrong button or forget to hit the right button."Read more...

And it can't be created the same way Visa and MasterCard were, because that's now illegal. If the MCX retailers' alliance wants to beat the card brands, that's going to require some seriously new thinking—and it should probably start with loyalty.Read more...

Given that the PCI Council's guidance is final in all matters related to PCI scoping, pens PCI Columnist Walter Conway, it is time to shift the discussion to helping merchants that qualify to use a self-assessment questionnaire (SAQ) and pick the right one. We can do this by posing a question: When is a merchant that has just validated its PCI DSS compliance not compliant?Read more...

Don't be so quick to conclude that your people aren't doing this, though, as it extends way beyond rent-to-own. Many current—and many more future—devices will have technology that enables post-purchase information capture. For example, RFID tags that aren't disabled before the customer leaves the store might enable retailers, marketers or others to capture data from those devices without the consumer's knowledge or effective consent. And don't get Legal Columnist Mark Rasch started on mobile.Read more...

That's way outside the traditional scope of an E-Commerce president. Then again, Durchslag's lack of retail experience and tech background might explain much of his optimism—and his scope creep. And he's still up against Best Buy's reputation as a victim of showrooming, unknowledgeable associates, high prices and the customer perception that it's the electronics retailer of last resort—after Amazon, Walmart, Target and Costco have turned up empty. Durchslag understands some of the huge perception issues his team must overcome. "Showrooming is a symptom, not a cause," he said. "It's arrogant to think that you're going to cause or prevent that kind of behavior. It is a reality that is happening today. The only question is: Are you going to harness that and make things easier, or are you going to try and put your head in the sand and deny reality?"Read more...

The advantage seems pretty obvious: Using an app on a phone or tablet means a store manager or associate can see what changes look like as they're made, avoiding embarrassing differences between what appears on a PC's screen and the display. The equally obvious downside: You're trusting your public face to the security of a smartphone.Read more...

We were hoping this week to find out when Isis will finally launch its mobile payment trials in Salt Lake City and Austin. No such luck: “Imminently” is all Isis Chief Commerce Officer Ed Busby would say at a presentation in New York on Wednesday (Oct. 10). But Busby did pass along a comment that crystallizes the problem chains have with the mobile-operator consortium, as well as with Google Wallet and PayPal: “I have a friend over at Banana Republic. He always tells me, ‘Ed, why is it everybody is knocking on my door all the time saying they can give my gross margin away faster than everybody else?'”

That’s how chains see Isis and its rivals? No wonder retailers aren’t pushing mobile payments at POS. Coupons and promotions (which the mobile payments guys love) eat margins. Mobile payments aren’t offering much-hoped-for interchange relief, either. That suggests mobile payments players need to start scrambling. Should they help enable loyalty first and ride payments on loyalty’s coattails? Or make it easier to use phones as in-store customer trackers? Or promise to give chains more and better CRM data? We don’t know. But without something serious in it for retailers to encourage a serious retailer push, there won’t be any mobile payments—Isis or not.…

Yes, those tests should be a surprise to the security and ops people. But to the CIO? In today's legal environment, with PCI and personal information on the line? That's crazy. For a retailer, it's even crazier.Read more...

The lack of cash payments rips into tips, which hits employee compensation. Not only are tips employee compensation that the retailer doesn't have to fund, but tips can enable employees to be paid less in salary. Mobile payment has far greater convenience, but its ability to undercut tips is something few retailers have seriously considered. Clearly, this is important to Starbucks. It's important enough for the company to violate one of the golden rules of mobile app announcements: Never announce a capability before it's deployed, especially as many as 11 months before it's deployed.Read more...

"If your organization is spending too much time and money maintaining legacy systems, it's because you either made poor decisions in favor of short-term gains or lacked long-term vision," pens Retail Columnist Todd Michaud. "If your IT leader (I won't even assume you have a CIO) is trapped working for your CFO or your IT budget is based on a percentage of your sales, you deserve the spaghetti diagram that is your IT infrastructure. Showrooming is a self-inflicted wound."Read more...

The insurance company denied the claim—it took a judge to force the insurer to pay—arguing that cyberthieves hadn't actually stolen the data, so much as they made a copy of it. The insurance company also tried denying payment because the information was excluded for coverage, because it was proprietary, pens Legal Columnist Mark Rasch, who strongly encourages readers to start reading their policy exclusions right now.Read more...