Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

A good social strategy is simply a different lens on a good business strategy. A few "tweets" and a few more "fans" or "friends" are not going to produce bottom-line results. Michaud believes IT needs to take a leadership role in a company's social strategy, helping the business partners avoid shooting themselves in the foot. The new world of everything "social" will absolutely be a game-changer for business as we know it. But it will absolutely not happen overnight. And it certainly won't be cheap.Read more...

The real danger here, he writes, is that the larger NFC value proposition might be poisoned if NFC is pigeonholed as just another card replacement. If that happens, it would effectively kill retailer and consumer adoption.Read more...

To qualify for the money, a merchant doesn't have to be PCI compliant (although that's always nice). Indeed, it doesn't even have to experience a real breach, said SecureConnect Director of Marketing Kristyan Mjolsnes. For example, if the chain's bank or a card brand suspects a breach and insists the chain pay for a forensic probe, that would be covered, she said. If the chain gets nervous and wants to triple-check on its own, however, that would not be covered, Mjolsnes added, reasonably enough.Read more...

RadioShack and 7-Eleven are among seven new defendants in the latest round of retail chains accused of violating gift card process patents owned by Card Activation Technologies (CAT). Thus far, more than 30 chains have been sued, including Nordstrom, Macy’s and JCPenney, and a significant number of them—including Sears and OfficeMax—have settled, according to attorneys involved in the case.

The five other chains newly named were Giorgio Armani, Caché, Denny’s, Sunglass Hut Trading and the Brown Group Retail (doing business as Famous Footwear). Several of the chains were accused of not merely violating the patent but of doing so willfully because, CAT alleges in court filings, the chains continued to use the process even after they were told they were in Patent violation.…

This story begins with a Pennsylvania consumer's complaint that he was instructed to show identification to make a $100 payment card purchase at the Willow Grove, PA, Wal-Mart. The cashier told him it was Wal-Mart policy to require a photo ID for all plastic purchases of more than $100.Read more...

The next time you’re stuck on an airplane with just your Kindle and you want to know what other retailers are working on to make your life miserable when you land, fear not. StorefrontBacktalk is now available as native content on Kindle.

It goes beyond the headlines, and the Kindle supposedly updates this content when you’re near a connection so you can read it when you’re not. (I have to trust my Kindle-carrying colleagues to tell me how our content looks. Personally, if something can’t give me a paper cut while reading it, why bother?)…

When we announced our joint PCI/Mobile report with Forrester last week, we expected to see some interesting reactions as we asked people to weigh in on several controversial issues. But the preliminary results were a bit startling. For example, most respondents so far have said they wouldn’t change a thing about the PCI process, which is fascinating given how many nitpick complaints we hear about that process from retailers. (It’s probably the best overall approach available, but you’d make no changes? Really?) The second most-selected PCI response (thus far) has been “making all payment card industry compliance reports public so that competition can motivate my rival chains into doing the same security investments as I am.”

Retail IT execs generally have freaked out at the suggestion that any security reports be made public, which is why that answer startled us. Care to set the record straight by giving us your own answers?? It only takes a few minutes, it’s free and it’s guaranteed to add 11 years to your life. (That’s my favorite impossible-to-prove promise.) On a more mundane level, it will make the results more accurate (well, at least more to your liking) and help push the community in the right direction. Think of taking the survey as one of those adult responsibilities, like voting or eating high-fiber cereal: You know you should do it even though it’s not especially fun. (There’s a reason I don’t work in marketing.) …

The case involves the final litigation surrounding the 2007 data breach against the 165-store Hannaford grocery chain. That breach exposed some 4.2 million payment cards to the cyberthief gang run by Albert Gonzalez.Read more...

This incident, which police are still investigating, raises the issue of associate training. Preliminary information given to police by Wal-Mart did not indicate that the caller gave the associate any reason to believe he really was from Wal-Mart IT. Nor was any reason offered as to why an IT person would make such a request. Was the thief assuming the 1 AM crew might be more accommodating and less suspicious?Read more...

If retailers could do anything, what would be the top five things they’d change about PCI? What about mobile? Which mobile interactions will be deployed first and which will backburnered? And how far are merged channel (the last element of the multi-channel to cross-channel to merged-channel triumvirate) efforts going to be adopted by June of next year?

To try and get answers, StorefrontBacktalk and Forrester Research on Wednesday (Sept. 22) launched a research project on these issues and we’d love to have you share your views with us. Responses will be published anonymously, in aggregate only. Other topics in the survey include customer service techniques, global distribution, E-Commerce and store investment priorities, and CRM strategies. If you’d like to be included in this study, the survey is the best place to start. We’ll be publishing the results shortly before the holiday insanity begins. …

The new groups would be modeled on industry-specific security groups formed in the U.S. in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. One of those groups now puts on real-time security exercises for retailers and payment-card processors, and a handful of large retailers also have participated. But exactly how useful are those war games? It's hard to say, because the participants aren't identified. And that may be one of the biggest selling points of this type of security program.Read more...

In Google's case, the employee reportedly abused his privileges to access confidential user information. In a payments context, a similarly trusted employee at one of your service providers could have access to your payment card transactions and maybe even your systems. But could PCI prevent a data compromise in such a case?Read more...

Actually, fully a third of the 33,000 sites tested by the CMU researchers used that loophole. But most other sites can at least pretend they've done it accidentally. Amazon actually uses its stock symbol, AMZN, to jimmy the system.Read more...

It seems that those ducts—officially dubbed heating, ventilating and air-conditioning (HVAC) ducts—snaking through these old multi-level escalator-using buildings are natural signal boosters. "The HVAC ductwork is an excellent conduit for the radio transmissions because the ducts typically consist of hollow metal pipes," the university's report said. "Those pipes can be used to guide the radio waves, keeping the waves from dispersing, and helping to maintain a strong signal over a greater distance."Read more...

Once that suite is in place, retail CIOs should plan for a risk- and security-based assessment of their log management needs and allocate the resources to make the system work. Otherwise, retailers may centralize their logging but find themselves overwhelmed by the white noise of too much data. Or, IT could distribute log reviews down to the store level only to learn that the individual locations cannot achieve separation of duties, back-ups or daily log reviews conducted by people who know what they are doing. Read more...

This scenario isn't entirely science-fiction, although this particular mobile technology is in its earliest stages. An Israeli vendor called EyeSight Mobile Technologies announced last week (September 7) a set of what it calls Hand Gesture Interface packages, initially designed to control a phone's MPS player. What's important about EyeSight's effort is that it marks a critical new phase for mobile, where developers start trying to get creative with this descendant of Ma Bell. That's what mobile needs to truly take off in retail.Read more...

OK, maybe rational is a reach. But if you’d like to help mobile be closer to rational, you have your chance. The National Retail Federation’s (NRF) Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS) Council is trying to finalize feedback before its conference this week.

Officially, the comments are supposed to be for the Mobile Blueprint ARTS released in July, as the group prepares to release version 2 of that report. Unofficially, ARTS officials are hard at work trying to hammer out mobile specs for all of retail—from barcode scanning to in-store mobile payments to M-Commerce. Have a few thoughts on that topic? (Thought you might.) Executive Director Richard Mader would love to hear from you at maderr@nrf.com. But please keep it clean. Dick’s a classy guy.…

Although an outage is never a pleasant thing, this one was especially untimely for quite a few reasons. First, it was the middle of the day (or the start of the business day, depending on which coast you're on). Second, it was in the middle of a major well-publicized sale. And the coup de grâce of this outage: It was on a federal holiday, potentially meaning a skeleton crew in the office and perhaps difficulty in obtaining replacement parts.Read more...

Many retailers have tried contactless systems where a customer's smartphone displays a barcode that a cashier scans to complete the transaction. But Cimbal flips that process: The retailer displays a barcode that the customer reads with his phone's camera. That switch means retailers don't need new barcode-reading hardware. It also means customers never show retailers their account information, so it can't be stored—or stolen. Read more...

After spending a lot of time in recent months contemplating and designing an Information Architecture for Focus Brands, he argues that IT systems should be designed from the ground up with an understanding of the information supply chain--as in "What groups/people will need access to the data entered into or created by this system?" Through this process, Michaud has concluded that one precursor to an Information Architecture is an Action Framework. Read more...

It's ironic because both chains are taking substantial steps to secure the access to confidential patient data, but neither is specifying steps to protect transcripts of that very same data. Imagine forcing call center employees to comply with all PCI rules regarding not preserving prohibited payment card data and then allowing them to write down all of that data in plain-text files that are then transmitted to consumers (who are unlikely to protect them) and saved in the chain's files.Read more...

What if the actions were associated with the customer and the product so that the retailer could offer a lot more points if the customer purchased the incentivized product within XX days? The POS could note the customer ID and know to watch for specific products. When a match happened, the points would be automatically issued.Read more...

Think about it: millions of customers and prospects post their innermost product thoughts on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and the blogs of themselves and their friends. this info is free and often visible to all. But how do you take that data and match it to specific customers/prospects so that the data can be acted on? That's the untouchable part.Read more...

What is a realistic near-term goal? Is it to generate true additional revenue or is it acceptable--initially, at least--to simply shift purchases from Web to mobile? Moving from revenue to the much-beloved profit margin, is it possible to say whether mobile or Web has lower operational costs?Read more...

Retailers aren't usually hit with patent lawsuits. Those are usually reserved for manufacturers, although the ways retailers handle debit cards, gift cards, micropayments and site accessibility have attracted litigation in the past. This time, though, it's their Web sites that have the office stores under legal attack. But there's nothing special about these Web sites that make them dramatically different from other large E-tailers. That means if these retailers lose in court--or settle the case--every other major retailer will soon be looking down the barrel of the same legal gun.Read more...