Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Mobile-commerce sites, take note: Android phones are now outselling all other smartphones in Asia. On October 20, ABI Research reported that in 2011, Android will represent 52 percent of smartphones sold in Asian markets, up from 16 percent last year. (Combined with the 56 percent increase in Asian smartphone sales that ABI reported, that means a stunning five times as many Asian Android phones sold in 2011 as in 2010.) ABI also reported on Monday (Oct. 24) that, worldwide, downloads of Android apps now outpace those for the iPhone by 44 to 31 percent, although Apple users still download twice as many apps per phone.

That doesn’t mean iPhone use has fallen off a cliff—many of those Androids are likely lower-priced phones that are being snapped up by customers who can’t afford Apple’s price tag. But it does mean large numbers of M-Commerce customers will be using Android phones. That could actually make life easier for M-Commerce developers: With the market mainly split between spendthrift iPhone customers and more numerous cheapskate Android users, developers can decide who they want to target and how to make their mobile sites work well with either group—or both.…

That could take a while. No one—including ICANN, the body that handles new TLD names—knows how many retailers, manufacturers, cities, organizations or other entities will apply for their own TLDs, or how long the approval process will take (estimates range from seven months to years), or whether there will ever be another chance to buy up vanity domains. What is clear is that it's going to be expensive—even for retailers who decide not to pop for the chance to slice .com off the end of their E-Commerce site's address.Read more...

The appellate decision clarified the legal environment, but it merely said what self-interested chains should have been doing all along, pens Legal Columnist Mark Rasch. From a merchant, vendor, supplier or technology consultants' standpoint, the goals remain the same: Prevent the breach in the first place, and do what is reasonably necessary to control or mitigate the harm if a breach occurs.Read more...

There are two likely near-term impacts from the ruling. First, Hannaford itself will now have this case return to an active trial status, where it will likely reside for an absurdly short of time before it's settled for the very small number of dollars that such an insurance policy and card replacements (for just a few customers) will cost. For retailers throughout the country, though, the impact will be more muted.Read more...

That crucial point, buried in Yegge's 4,800-word rant: Google (just like most retail chains) has built a company on top of a collection of applications. Amazon (where Yegge worked for six years) has built its enormous E-Commerce success because it is not just a bundle of retail applications. It's a platform that lets customers interact, outside retailers sell and other third parties connect. But Amazon didn't start that way. And how it made the transition should have retail chains thinking hard about whether that's the right approach for them, too.Read more...

Is it illegal, or even against the various card brand rules or PCI's rules, to use information from the confirmation process to access public information and to then use it? Amazon is not accused of publishing the verification data directly (which would have raised very different issues) but of using that data to track down public records. And if Amazon indeed did that—and that's still a big "if"—is that a legitimate area for retailers to use to grow CRM databases?Read more...

The guidelines, which are generally filled with commonsense security restrictions, offer nothing about timing, schedules or when retailers can—or should—include the new requirements in RFPs. The closest the guidelines get to referencing existing hardware is a brief comment that such components can be reused in newly approved systems. It does, however, detail fees.Read more...

Sears' conservative move makes more sense in the context that many customers may not feel like using their phones while shopping and, more to the point, most American consumers don't yet have smartphones—if you accept the smartphone definition of a phone that can download third-party apps.Read more...

For example: Where should the QR codes be placed? Should it be near the bottom of the screen? Well, what if the consumer time-shifts with a DVR or Tivo? A part of the code could be overridden by screen buttons. Place it in a glossy magazine? Good choice, but you have to steer clear of the page side toward any glued (perfect-bound) gutter or else consumers won't be able to get a full scan of the image.Read more...

Beyond the obvious—strengthening the local friendly face of the neighborhood store—this could alert corporate to stores that are resonating with their audiences and those that are not. It's not unusual for chains to allow specific stores to have very different product mixes based on the manager's read on local customers. In turn, this could enable those differences to be much more pronounced than is practical today with a single walmart.com site. This all presumes, though, that customer interactions with local Facebook sites—especially as measured by the number of "likes" a site gets—is a meaningful metric. That's far from being a given.Read more...

It's a classic single-point-of-failure problem, and it could be frighteningly disruptive—especially since this holiday season will be the first at many stores with lots of in-store mobile devices in use, and almost all retailers are using Wi-Fi to keep them connected. A saboteur who uses a pocket-size jammer wouldn't have access to payment-card information, but what's supposed to be an impressive demonstration of retail technology would just irritate customers and frustrate associates—especially during the high-volume times that mobile POS should be a relief. And that's just from an intentional saboteur. Unintentional Wi-Fi jamming could have even worse effects.Read more...

The new service, called Refill Reminder Text Alerts, is based on a top-notch idea. The goal is to aid customers who have multiple refills and have had the onus of initiating contact with their pharmacy every time a prescription needs to be refilled, even if they have been consistently refilling the same prescriptions every month for years. Instead of waiting for the customer to call, the chain is initiating that contact and asking with a simple text for permission to refill the order. The problem involves restrictions from the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). It prevents the texts from identifying which prescription it's asking about.Read more...

There are lots of reasons for that: IT shops have bad memories of having to run proprietary RIM servers to support BlackBerry users. RIM's periodic network outages (such as the one slowing E-mail delivery and choking BlackBerry Internet access this week) give retail IT plenty of reason to hope payments will never depend on RIM. And although iPhones are sexy and Android phones are at least gadgety, BlackBerrys—until recently—looked downright clunky. But with a growing consumer fan base spearheaded by BlackBerry Messenger users, along with actual experience doing mobile payments, retailers may have to bite the bullet and accept that RIM is going to be a payments player in the U.S., too. The question is, how soon—and then how?Read more...

Retailers are starting to outrun Google when it comes to Google Wallet. On Tuesday (Oct. 11), the $334 million Peet’s Coffee chain announced that, by the end of October, it will upgrade POS devices to accept Google Wallet payments at all 193 company-owned stores—not just the ones in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., where Google Wallet was officially rolled out in late September. Peet’s is working fast—American Eagle Outfitters didn’t even officially launch Google Wallet in the target cities until Wednesday (Oct. 12), although AEO actually had it working in some stores a month ago.

If Google was hoping for an orderly Wallet rollout, it may be out of luck. There’s only so long the window will stay open for retailers to look cool by offering mobile payments—once customers get used to it, Google Wallet will be more useful but not nearly so interesting. That means at least some smaller retailers may be in a race to get Google Wallet running in as many locations as possible, never mind Google’s plans. And once retailers, not Google, are calling the shots on the mobile-payments rollout, that’s control that Google may never recapture.…

But the limited four-day experiment also demonstrated the many QR drawbacks that retailers have to struggle with. A reporter for Forbes, for example, tried making a purchase during the event through a QR code and found that her couch was 10 feet away from the screen but that she had to get up to scan the code from five feet away. People who successfully navigated the QR code got to an ordinary Web site page. No discount, no special reward. And how long would the code be displayed? Then there's the learning curve.Read more...

Not unlike IBM in the 80s and 90s, Apple is in the highly enviable position that it can wait until it's time and then still dominate the market when it makes the move. Indeed, it might even be easier and more effective to do it that way. But that strategy will also determine who will define the retail NFC standards that matter—the ones on the checkout counter and in the retailer's datacenter. And that won't be Apple.Read more...

The specific information that HTC's logging software collects isn't tremendously sensitive—we're talking location, not payment-card numbers. However, the fact that megabytes of data are being scooped up by the phone's maker, but not secured by even a password, is a sign that smartphone vendors still assume a phone is just a phone—instead of a combination payment terminal, mobile wallet and M-Commerce browser.Read more...

Amazon is once again the only company you have to hate over 1-Click. A one-click patent infringement lawsuit against Apple, PayPal and Victoria’s Secret has been dismissed, marking the end of an Amazon competitor’s effort to collect royalties from E-tailers who had already licensed Amazon’s 1-Click patent. The dismissal came after a federal appeals court ruled on September 23 in a separate case that the patent held by Cordance—the Amazon competitor for one-click royalties—was invalid. (A jury came to that conclusion in a 2009 trial, but the judge overruled that verdict. The appeals court last month decided the jury was right the first time.)

It’s hard to cheer for another Amazon 1-Click court victory—1-Click has been the favorite patent to hate among E-tailers for more than a decade (although in-store, patent lawsuits over debit and gift-card processing make a strong showing). But at least there’s some good news for retailers this time: For now, you’ll only have to pay for 1-Click once.…

A mysterious patent troll that has already quietly sued restaurant chains Au Bon Pain, Panera, Caribou Coffee, Cosi and Corner Bakery Cafe and regional grocery chains Meijer, Dominick’s and U-Save for their Wi-Fi use, last month added hundreds of individual hotels to its list of defendants. That’s despite the fact that the retailers and hotels bought their Wi-Fi equipment from Cisco, Motorola and other vendors that had already paid license fees for the Wi-Fi patents.

What’s particularly clever is that the plaintiff, a company called Innovatio that acquired the patents from Broadcom, is only asking for between $2,300 and $5,000 from each defendant. That’s cheap enough that fighting in court doesn’t make financial sense—but it makes CIOs look bad for buying what turned out to be extremely expensive technology. Cisco and Motorola have filed their own lawsuit asking that a court declare their customers to be non-infringing, but that could take years. In the meantime, be prepared to be served. “This is not a seat-of-the-pants, fly-by-night shakedown,” Innovatio’s lead litigator told patent blog The Patent Examiner—Innovatio plans to go after “anyone who’s wireless networking.”…

To put this into context, PCI has unquestionably improved retail security in the U.S. and few have suggested a concrete alternative approach that wouldn't bring with it even worse problems. Like the criminal courts, a system can be very far from perfection and still be the best of all alternatives. It's also true that when security choices are made, some vendors are not going to be happy with the new rules. Even with all of that said, the directness and intensity of the speech by Magtek CEO Mimi Hart is worthy of note.Read more...

It then offered a clue. For a store in Ft. Worth, Texas, for example, the tease said: "It may be a Full House but we are convinced you will go bananas for this bag. Find it and win the bag." The promotion couldn't really indicate how close the customer was to the gift, because Foursquare's GPS signal typically ends the instant the customer enters the building. Neiman Marcus couldn't go any farther, "because of our infrastructure. We'd need to have sensors all over the store," said Jean Scheidnes, the chain's manager of social media. But what if a chain did deploy such a network of in-store sensors? The potential could go way beyond fun and games.Read more...

This massive item-level selling-floor-to-the-stockroom project began as a pilot at the Bloomingdale's New York SoHo, which is a pilot-friendly place apparently—the chain is now using Bloomingdale's SoHo to test Google Wallet. As a practical matter, this rollout will give Macy's a wide range of technology options as the potential of full item-level RFID gets closer. But Macy's is officially focused fully on just one RFID function: faster and more accurate inventory.Read more...

That's the upshot of the deal cut in bankruptcy court after the Federal Trade Commission and a special court-appointed Consumer Privacy Ombudsman pushed for an opt-in requirement for Borders loyalty customers, while B&N wanted to offer them nothing more than its own privacy policy. Ironically, either of those two choices would have made life relatively easy for B&N's IT shop. Instead, the privacy compromise could require furious IT activity in the weeks after the sale closes on Friday (Sept. 30).Read more...

Several elements over the next few years—the report projects out to 2015—will make this change even more dramatic. Some 45 percent of new stores will be "mom and pops that are just starting. There you'll see a tremendous impact," because the stores won't even start with a traditional POS, Buzek said. "Why pay $3,000 [for a traditional POS] when I can get an iPad and put Square on it? This is going to fundamentally change the mall in the next three years."Read more...

As mobile payments inch along, retailers are trying to balance two concepts: the ideals of mobile-payment strategies with the mundane, practical logistics issues. And nowhere did those two concepts collide more clearly than in the one-location $3.5 million specialty store in Plantation, FL. How could someone at the door verify that the receipt is legitimate? For that matter, if the associate at the door is shown a digital receipt, how is he/she to know if it's a valid receipt—as opposed to a doctored image—unless the associate scans the receipt's barcode and runs a check to see if that item was indeed purchased in the prior 10 minutes?Read more...