Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

That said, tablets are becoming quite popular, and a migration of sales from PCs and laptops down to tablets is inevitable. From the chain's perspective, though, that change may be barely felt, because the tablets will simply be accessing your regular Web site. At best, it might be a slightly tweaked version of your site. Most of the current tablets don't really need much—if any—tweaking to deliver an acceptable experience.Read more...

Why not use ZIP codes (IP address locations are typically too inaccurate and/or cover too wide an area to be practical for a prom no-duplicates strategy) and a high school pull-down menu (with a behind-the-scenes list of each school's primary ZIP codes) to flag likely repeats? This approach pushes this idea beyond high-school proms and could be used to flag apparel conflicts at any type of event or formal function. Weddings? Theater? This could even be helpful beyond events. What about giving an option to indicate the name of an employer? Depending on the size of the employer, it might be nice to know if that business suit you've been eyeing has already been purchased by anyone else within that company.Read more...

Given the dominance of the key U.S. holiday next week (we mean Thanksgiving, not Black Friday), StorefrontBacktalk‘s weekly newsletter won’t publish on November 24. Everything else will still be live (the Web sites, our Kindle version, our Twitter tweets, our mobile sites, etc.), but we need a little time off to burn some turkey and over-season some stuffing.

Speaking of which, we want to tap into the knowledge of our audience with a question that has nothing to do with retail technology. One of us here at StorefrontBacktalk is going to try something new for Thanksgiving: Cooking the turkey on a gas grill. The problem is that, well, it’s me. And my Weber grill seems to have two temperature settings: 750 degrees Fahrenheit and OFF. To be precise, it has tons of settings, but those two numbers seem to be the only heat levels the beast is capable of delivering and maintaining. In a short duration grilling (say 5 to 8 minutes), it’s easy to compensate. But when dinner for a dozen people needs to cook for five hours, I’m open to any tricks to get the temperature to get down to 325 degrees and to stay there. Any suggestions? If you do have any suggestions, please E-mail me at Help Evan To Not Turn His Entree Into Sawdust Held Together By Static Electricity.…

Here, it is illegal to intercept the contents of a cell phone call or to force a cell phone provider to pony up information about a user without—at a minimum—a court order based upon a certification by a law enforcement or other official that the information is relevant to an ongoing criminal (or sometimes intelligence) case, writes Legal Columnist—and former federal prosecutor—Mark Rasch. The federal pen register law makes it a crime to "install or use a pen register or trap and trace device" without such a court order, unless you are a "provider of electronic or wire communication service" and your use of the pen register is for certain limited purposes. There is little doubt that neither a mobile nor a mall operator would be considered a "provider of electronic communication services."Read more...

Huber adds: "Chip-and-PIN doesn't eliminate your requirement to be PCI compliant. You still have to do that. If we adopt Europe's old technology, the card data will still pass in the clear. You still need to spend all of that money securing your point-of-sales, auditing your network and reporting on your compliance status. Well, maybe not reporting to Visa—if you meet its requirements—but there's still MasterCard, American Express and Discover."Read more...

The retail chains, which hold most of the important cards in this game, are quite content to sit back and let the process take time. Cutting deals with whoever remains standing makes it slightly less risky anyway. We spoke with a few senior retail IT execs about their mobile-payment vendor discussions and the comments from two were the most illuminating. Dollar Tree CIO Ray Hamilton said he sees the tech limitations issues as already resolved ("I would prefer to pay with my smartphone than with a magstripe card—a crude, historic technology invented during my youth. Smartphones will have more than sufficient processing capabilities to encrypt data during the NFC transaction."). No, it's the standards issues that are his greatest concern, especially given that there are really hardly any significant mobile standards yet.Read more...

Costco, Kmart and Kroger took the top dishonors, with each chain responding to zero of the complaints lodged against it during the review period (five working days in September). Wal-Mart ignored 41 percent of all legitimate complaints, Macy's ignored 35 percent of its complaints, Bloomingdale's ignored 20 percent, Nordstrom ignored 20 percent, Sears ignored 11 percent and Safeway ignored only five percent.Read more...

Macy’s is testing a merged version of its brick-and-mortar and online inventory systems chain-wide, and it expects to go live with the new system early in 2012. On Wednesday (Nov. 9), Macy’s CFO Karen Hoguet told an earnings call that “we’re going to be able to do [chain-wide merged inventory] very soon. We’re testing it right now. And early next year, I think we’re going to start doing it more and more, with the systems we have today. Having said that, we are going to invest over time in better systems that allow us to maximize the inventory easier without as much manual intervention, but it’s not going to prevent us from doing the site to store to door.”

That merged inventory will presumably be the base for Macy’s item-level RFID efforts, which are slated to go chain-wide by 2013. Merged inventory could also smooth out some of the kinks in Macy’s Search-and-Send program, which lets one store access inventory from another store and have items shipped directly to a customer. That’s currently in only a few dozen stores, but it should be easy to roll out chain-wide once the merged-channel inventory is in place.…

The shortsighted payment limitations aside, this Toys "R" Us trial is quite clever and it showcases what eBay can do in the mobile space. Consistent with the mobile wallet pitch PayPal itself is making to retailers, parent company eBay's trial showcases the strength of being platform-agnostic. This trial can work just as well on an iPhone or an Android. (Note: eBay's information seems contradictory on how multi-platform it will initially be, however.) On the flip side, Google Wallet can work just as well on Visa and MasterCard. Therein lies the frustration of the Toys "R" Us trial.Read more...

Shoulder surfing is an unavoidable problem with smartphones in a crowd, but 14 feet away feels like enough distance to be safe from video eavesdropping. And although there are workarounds to block the attack—turn down the screen brightness or turn off the pop-up keypress confirmation that makes the iPhone's virtual keyboard so much easier to use—it's unlikely that customers will be willing to do that. Store associates, on the other hand, might want to do both those things, along with being careful to guard their screens and watch for customers who happen to be using video cameras nearby. The biggest question is whether they can be convinced to do anything.Read more...

For many retail IT execs, it's more than a little uncomfortable. Store managers are on the same side as IT. Setting up systems to see who's underperforming—and exactly how, in near-real-time—can feel, well, a little dirty. Maybe that's why so few chains are doing it—and why most of the systems offered by vendors for using RFID data aren't built for that type of visibility. "Our number-one fight with software vendors is, your software doesn't do enough," said American Apparel VP of Technology Stacey Shulman. "'Well, it's what everybody else uses.' Well, it's not enough."Read more...

If this was just another marketing survey that over-hyped its results, it would be one thing. But there's a serious issue at play here. The holiday shopping season of 2011 is going to be a crucial one in retail M-Commerce, the one where meaningful purchases start to happen and where millions of consumers will try—or consider trying—M-Commerce. And it is where they will be satisfied or dissatisfied. Even more crucially, there is a critical expectation issue at play. What will your CEO and board expect from mobile? Surveys will create the bogus impression that a huge number of mobile transactions will happen this month (the 61 percent from this survey's headline is a perfect example), and when that doesn't happen, you're going to be blamed.Read more...

While U.S. grocery chains are struggling with whether they’re better or worse off with self-checkout and express lanes, a supermarket in Espoo, Finland, is experimenting in the opposite direction: intentionally slow checkout. Dubbed the “don’t panic” lane, the slow-track checkout at a store in the K-citymarket chain offers armchairs for people waiting to pay, help putting products on the checkout belt and a generally relaxed approach to paying for merchandise.

The pilot project is being done in conjunction with researchers at Aalto University, who thought mentally disabled customers would prefer a less hectic, more helpful checkout process. But it seems elderly customers and even parents with small children in tow also like the slow lane (those armchairs seem to be a big draw in both groups). Running customers through checkout at top speed may be the most efficient way to do it, but an extra-slow checkout offers plenty of opportunities to hit those armchair-bound customers with digital signage and potential impulse items—keeping some customers happier and potentially paying for itself with increased sales. For chains that have already given up on one-size-fits-all checkout, that slow lane might actually make good retail sense.…

Consider this true story from Legal Columnist Mark Rasch: About a week ago, Rasch's wife's E-mail provider notified her that she was a baaaaad girl. Apparently she had sent out a bunch of spam in violation of the Terms of Service. Of course, it wasn't her, and he notified the provider of this fact. What happened next, or more accurately what didn't happen next, is a cautionary tale about the nature of the relationships between IT vendors and customers (like merchants) and the relationships between merchants and their customers.Read more...

Yes, that's what HP needed. But instead of offering the tablet and sled as a general-purpose in-store mobile POS, HP is positioning it largely as an add-on to HP's own POS systems. OK, that limits the market. So does the lack of a clear advantage over an iPad (HP says being Windows-based will make it "easy for retailers to integrate," though a product manager acknowledged that iPads probably work fine with most retailers' systems too). Then there's the mag-stripe reader, which can work right out of the box in unencrypted mode. Wait, isn't that exactly what retailers don't want?Read more...

With so many chains offering pharmacy services, the debates provide a glimpse into how mobile strategies can slam into privacy rules and, sometimes, technology simply can't get around that. Tim Bell is the director for pharmacy managed care and systems at the 460-store chain operating in Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia and Mississippi. Bell said the issue is that the best approach for sending a quick alert (such as "Your Prescription for Lipitor is due for renewing. Should we renew?") and accepting ("Renew") is the least secure: text messaging.Read more...

If that sounds like an afterthought, it very nearly is, even though self-checkout alone would be a big deal for most chains. What Apple is primarily trying to do is demolish the wall between stores and M-Commerce. It may not work—that 12-minute turnaround promise may just be impossible, and some of Apple's plans for prioritizing customers can collapse when things get busy. But if it does work, it may also represent Apple's demonstration of how it plans to offer mobile payments to other retailers—without either NFC or mimicking a plastic card.Read more...

The virtual store is not new. In a much publicized trial this summer, Tesco re-created almost all of the merchandise from one of its stores as a series of high-res photographs with QR codes on the walls of a South Korean subway. But the Debenhams' effort takes it farther than any other retailer. At least consumers arriving at that subway would see pictures of products and could guess what to do. In the Debenhams' trial, consumers were directed to very prominent street corners in London (Trafalgar Square), Manchester (Albert Square), Birmingham (Centenary Square), Cardiff (Cardiff Castle) and Glasgow (George Square). They then loaded a mobile app onto their phones. If the geolocation of the phones matched what the app had been programmed to look for, it would display a ghostly image of a dress.Read more...

But there's certainly a difference between a marketing event that begins at midnight and one that starts in the middle of prime time on the West Coast. Last year, Kohl's started its Black Friday sales at 3:00 AM New York time, midnight Pacific time, with Macy's and Target an hour later. That didn't make much of a difference online—it was still late-night across the U.S. But wind those times back a few hours, and suddenly it won't just be night owls who are hammering on E-tail sites.Read more...

Conventional wisdom is that consumer resistance to invasive marketing consistently softens over time with each new retail tech innovation. But the friendly shopkeeper demonstrates that's not a linear trend. And there's a school of thought that says mobile technology may break that trend, too. The potential invasiveness of mobile payments is so intense that customers might rebel and resist all privacy-infringing efforts even more—making mobile dangerously likely to blow up in retailers' faces.Read more...

The numbers on their own are somewhat of a concern, given that compliance in any group is supposed to steadily improve. That's especially true with a new entry, such as Level 3s, which start at such a relatively low level of compliance. In this instance, though, the explanation for the compliance dip might lie in a recent increase in the number of Level 3s trying to get compliant.Read more...

There are two main drivers behind this move. The first is the recent E-Commerce obsession with local: consider Wal-Mart's local Facebook move two weeks ago. But the second issue is the rapid death of many regional newspapers, which are taking to their graves the local circulars. The Sears local move not only enables the chain to migrate many of those local promotions from dead-tree to pixels, but it also is upgrading the experience. Consider a circular where the ads instantly disappear as soon as the product is out of stock.Read more...

"At the scan, we get a certain amount of metadata as a result of the scan itself—operating system, carrier, cell tower being used, etc. We get all of that," said Scanbuy CEO Mike Wehrs. "We know what that app has scanned in the past." Indeed, Wehrs argues, the app can secure data from the QR code plus the phone plus online data accessed from a retailer's loyalty card database. "If the app integrates with their CRM files, it can give a completely customized experience."Read more...

The potential of this microlocation mobile approach is compelling, because it provides a relatively easy—and somewhat accurate—way to help customers find product. Of course, that's not the goal of all chains. Some chains—such as Costco—depend heavily on the customer stumbling on impulse buys as he/she wanders the aisles in search of the elusive clothes pins or peanuts.Read more...

Here’s an IT twist: The $9 billion Whole Foods Market grocery chain is pulling back from accepting checks primarily because it wants to collect less customer data. Making this move even more unusual is that checks—along with cash—have a much higher margin than payment cards due to a delicious absence of interchange.

“We simply don’t want the burden of having all that information,” said Whole Foods spokesperson Libba Letton, adding that it’s the same reason the chain has thus far shunned any type of CRM/loyalty program. That said, there are other more mundane reasons for the 300-store 38-state chain’s rejection of checks, added Letton: “It takes too long, and the financial impact of check fraud.” Also, there’s the fact that the number of consumers using checks at grocery stores is plummeting, so why keep associates trained on something that is so rarely used? Still, the idea of a chain choosing to prematurely halt an interchange-free system that brings in lots of customer data, that’s an unusual kettle of organic steamed fish.…