Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

In the otherwise futile battle against showrooming—do you really think making it

harder for your shoppers to compare prices on their mobile devices isn’t going to backfire?—some chains have started to get clever. Perhaps the motivation is ill- advised. But if the results are helpful to both shoppers and retailers, why complain?

Target’s QR endcap move is a fine example. Although it is only one of many, Target’s efforts are the topic of StorefrontBacktalk‘s October monthly column in Retail Week, the U.K.’s largest retail publication. The column lives here at Retail Week. For those who don’t have a Retail Week subscription—shame on you!—here’s a copy at StorefrontBacktalk.…

Given the intense emotions at play, an attempt to treat this rule lightheartedly could backfire in so many ways. On the other hand, dealt with seriously and with good integrated analytics, much good could happen. Consider a program that analyzes how long it takes a particular family to go through soap, bread or coffee and then alerts them when the program anticipates they are about to run out.Read more...

Maybe it's the Walmart mystique.Read more...

Back in May, we told you about a train-station grocery trial by online grocer Peapod, which was itself a direct steal from a Tesco QR code subway trial in South Korea. The Peapod effort started at 16 stations in the Chicago and Philadelphia metro areas. Here's the unexpected part: On Monday (Oct. 1), Peapod expanded the trial to more than 100 locations. The expansion—adding Boston, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey and Washington, D.C., commuter rail stations to the test—is impressive in its scope. And it means someone at the retailer must have seen some powerful numbers.Read more...

Given all of those interesting attributes being tested, the trial—which starts October 14—is going to have to extrapolate data from an unusually small product sample: 20 toys that will be featured on endcaps. Granted, those are literally the expected 20 hottest toys from this upcoming holiday season. But it's still only 20. That's statistically tiny within a store with an average of 70,000 SKUs.Read more...

The shift is part of an IT revamp that includes a merged inventory system, ship-from-any-store capability and improved turnaround on returns—in addition to a new West Coast datacenter that effectively works as a disaster recovery hot site for the company's existing East Coast IT operations.Read more...

When Todd saw last week's StorefrontBacktalk story by Frank Hayes about how top retailers did not seem to know that Android tablets existed, he was surprised, because those results were quite different than his own research done just a few months earlier. But Todd's research focused solely on the iPad. So what is causing us to have such different experiences, beyond Android versus iPad? It appears that the 7-inch form factor is the culprit.Read more...

If there truly is no expectation of privacy in what is called "historical cell data" (where you were, as opposed to where you are right now), then there would be no problem with retailers' collecting this data about their customers with or without the knowledge and consent of those customers, pens Legal Columnist Mark Rasch. Just as video cameras in the mall capture images of customers (and their locations), retailers could use cell data to find out where their best (and worst) customers are. Accepting the government's argument before the federal court, there would be no privacy violation for a retailer doing this.Read more...

But even Kantor admitted PayPal could fix the problem with a simple change in its merchant terms. A much trickier problem for retailers post-settlement may be deciding what price to put on each item—or whether there even is a single official price.Read more...

The answer to that question, in some cases, might be "No." Instead, writes PCI Columnist Walter Conway, based on the PCI Security Standards Council's revised guidance on when encrypted cardholder data may be considered out of scope, it might be possible that existing vendor offerings could potentially bring some merchants the same benefits with less work and without waiting—and paying—for the first P2PE products to hit the market.Read more...

This is just not Walmart’s week for price management. On Tuesday (Sept. 25), a Walmart store in China was slapped with almost $16,000 in fines for a “discount hoax,” according to China Daily. In May, the Walmart in Wuhan changed its price for a bottle of liquid soap from 47.6 to 48.8 yuan (a 19-cent increase), but called it a discount price. Not so, according to the local government price watchdog: “When the promotion price is higher than the traceable lowest price of the period of seven days before the campaign, it is a price fraud,” said Zhang Jianmin, vice head of the Hubei Provincial Bureau of

Commodity Price.

It may be true that what the Chinese call a hoax, everyone else calls marketing. But with 370 stores in China, Walmart should know how this game is

played. And with its fanatical tracking of its own and …

"It undermines the strategy," said Finish Line CIO Terry Ledbetter. "But quite frankly, it was hard to imagine how resistant customers would be to telling you who they are. 'You don't need to know who I am,'" he said, adding that the chain is exploring using an opt-in feature on its mobile app that would broadcast to all associates when a customer walks in the store.Read more...

Among the largest retailers, only the Amazon, Home Depot, McDonald's, Kohl's, Apple, JCPenney, Gap and Overstock Web sites showed up in a tablet or full-screen version. Staples.com showed up on a seven-inch tablet with slightly more content added to what was still clearly a site designed for a phone screen. But Walmart, Target, Walgreen, CVS, Lowe's, Best Buy, Sears, Macy's, Rite Aid, TJ Maxx, Nordstrom and even eBay served up exactly the same screen for a tablet as for a phone with a screen a small fraction of the size. On the phone, those compact, minimalist sites help usability. On even a small tablet, the result is vast expanses of blank space that all but drives away customers.Read more...

It used to be only chains that kept detailed databases of competitors' prices. Now every coupon or rebate Web site has data that's even more current, which makes beating a chain's price-match promotion trivial.Read more...

This marriage could be a very low-cost proposition, with the app asking for the cart's number or, better yet, the cart presenting a QR or barcode that the app can scan. The app—with its capabilities and its CRM history—could use a cart equipped with a simple radio beacon for navigation purposes.Read more...

For the Amazon sales tax haven to be an issue, you first have to believe that the only—or even a main—reason why people shop at Amazon is to save the sales tax. There are quite a few reasons why that is absurd. But the fact that shipping charges are typically many times the sales tax is a pretty good place to start.Read more...

No major advances in mobile location technology have emerged. In the last couple of months, however, quite a few very different approaches to location tracking have emerged. These range from leveraging the earth's magnetic field to piggybacking the data already used by mobile ads, tracking a combination of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signals, and riding the audio signals from existing music speakers. One app even reacts to light patterns from specially enhanced LED bulbs.Read more...

What's impressive is that this approach is three levels deeper than what RedLaser has been used to. It goes beyond limiting its results to Best Buy, focusing instead on what that specific Best Buy store sells and then limiting the results to what that specific Best Buy store has in stock. This means Best Buy's APIs are sharing real-time inventory data.Read more...

The 1,100-store chain's CEO, Ron Johnson, admits that JCPenney is still figuring out the workflow for checkout. He'd better work fast—this is a lot more complicated than anyone assumed.Read more...

"Having the terminal request the nonce from the issuer adds another full round-trip message, which is a lot of extra time. Nobody wants that," said one security manager with a major chain. "It's an extra pass through the payment network. That raises the question of cost. Will payment providers carry them for free? Will that impact their peak season throughput?"Read more...

An Apple surprise might have forced the mobile-operator consortium to rush into its launch. That's not something ISIS wants to do, especially now that Google has already tried and abandoned ISIS's chosen technical approach and the number of ISIS-supporting retailers still isn't up to what ISIS wants it to be. And that's not the worst of it: There's still no leadership in mobile payments.Read more...

Yet another video-related shopping patent was issued last Friday (Sept. 14), and it’s not for retail chains—at least not at first glance. U.S. Patent 8,244,594 describes a personal shopping service in which a customer can use video to actually see the shopper-for-hire collecting the shopping list in real time, so it’s possible to reject or swap out items as they’re being grabbed from the shelf. That’s not a likely candidate for a service from a big chain, but it raises an interesting question: Why aren’t chains already using video this way in-store?

After all, customers have long called stores to ask if a particular item is in stock. Associates can check the shelves to confirm, though they

don’t always get it right. Now that camera- and Wi-Fi-equipped phones and tablets are so cheap, it’s practical to let customers watch online as associates check those shelves to see exactly what’s there. That’s at least as compelling a use of video as Amazon’s “watch while we pack your order” approach—and in this case, it could actually save customers time and avoid associate mistakes. Besides, half the retail battle is getting that customer into the store—even virtually.…

There have always been only two reasons for seeking opt-ins—supposed legal protection and to negate future customer backlash. As a practical matter, opt-ins help out in neither situation. Let's start, though, by admitting there are two types of opt-in: knowingly/deliberate, and what retail chains use.Read more...

Currently, retailers have a choice. They can use their smartphones and tablets, sticking on a dongle that reads a payment card's magnetic stripe, and be cruising down the mobile commerce highway. Or they can be PCI DSS compliant. Unfortunately, the PCI Council has stated that smartphones and tablets are not secure, pens PCI Columnist Walter Conway.Read more...

Even more impressive is that the owner of this group of six California (Bay area) Little Caesars said it took him months before he realized that one store had posted no revenue for eight months and another for two months. This guy owns six stores and it takes him months to notice that one-third of his stores are reporting zero payment-card revenue?Read more...