Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Most CIOs know this pain, and know it well. It's a no-win situation. If they build it the way the partner wants, they watch failure in slow motion. If built the way the CIO thinks it should be done, you might as well hand over torches and pitch-forks to an over-tired crowd.Read more...

As retailers evaluate practical ways to use mobile payments in-store, they have a new pioneer ally: Holiday Inn. The hotel chain is trialing a program at two Holiday Inns—in Chicago and Houston—where visitors are allowed to use their own smartphones to open their rooms. Hotel guests go to the Web and download an app the chain calls Open Ways. “Guests ultimately will call up the confirmation E-mail on their smartphone and hold it up to a sensor on the door to unlock it,” a USA Today story said.

The advantages are the elimination of going to the front desk to pick up and return the key, plus the convenience of not having to carry anything else. This trial could be key—pun not intended—to helping retailers eventually use the smartphones for authentication and payment. The more consumers get used to the idea of phones for authentication, but not necessarily for payment (door access at a hotel, to borrow books at the local library, to access a private gym, to pick up a package at the Post Office, etc.), the easier it will be to get them to use the phones for payment.…

"As far as we are concerned, signature is a waste of time. It has to be PIN or nothing," Jamie Henry, Wal-Mart's director of payment services, told attendees of a panel discussion held Wednesday at a Smart Card Alliance event in Scottsdale, Ariz.Read more...

The trial is using Sprint CDMA for data connectivity, which made it easier for Wal-Mart to do the tests. Sprint CDMA didn't require any of the test systems to interact with the chain's LAN, thereby bypassing questions such as "Do I want to put in a separate WiFi network in the stores? With this, all we have to worry about is power," said one person involved in the trial.Read more...

The upshot: The search giant has now decided to end its entire WiFi survey. And that's exactly the wrong lesson to learn from an incident like this.Read more...

The statement caught Michaud a bit off guard, and it made him realize exactly how negative the group sounded about the entire project. In fact, his team had spent a good part of the meeting talking about risks and planning for contingencies. Read more...

While the co-owner of this family-owned scoop shop said he likes the RFID technology, he's fonder of the push nature of his current flavor updater--where he tells his customers what he has--rather than the pull nature of a system in which his customers tell him what they want. When does customer feedback become too much?Read more...

"You never use the PAN on the handset. Never, never," said an official with the security company that discovered the hole.Read more...

Unless you are an L2 merchant who plans to self-assess, advises PCI Columnist Walt Conway, you could find yourself overpaying for a certification that you don't need.Read more...

He figured that being 60 pounds overweight and having absolutely no real experience in any of the three sports was a perfect metaphor for some of his IT projects. How different could a Triathlon possibly be, after all, from a global IT deployment that is ludicrously underbudgeted with ridiculously unrealistic goals, which the board somehow believes? Read more...

The law specifies that the post-breach game won't fly in the state of Washington: A retailer "will be considered compliant, if its payment card industry data security compliance was validated by an annual security assessment and if this assessment took place no more than one year prior to the time of the breach. For the purposes of this subsection, a [retailer's] security assessment of compliance is nonrevocable."Read more...

The trend to use loyalty card data for product recalls is nothing new. Much of the motivation stems from a lawsuit against Kroger a half-dozen years ago, where a Kroger's customer ate beef contaminated with Mad Cow disease even though the chain supposedly had more than enough time to have alerted her before she consumed the tainted product.Read more...

As Blippy's recent data breach problems make clear, this is new territory. Two distinct issues are at play here: security protection against fraudulent transactions (essentially PCI) and privacy/identify-theft concerns involving companies that leverage consumer transaction histories. Making this scenario much more delicate is the fact that consumers themselves are often giving these third-party vendors permission to share their data.Read more...

Envision a customer walking up to a kiosk, looking into a mirror and smiling. The mirror digitally captures the customer's face. With the captured face on a screen, the customer chooses makeup options. Read more...

The man arrested, Thor Alexander Morris, said he worked at a Food Lion in North Carolina as a manager. Morris used Wal-Mart Green Dot Pre-Paid cards ($400 each) and a false ID to purchase those cards. The FBI said Morris' plan was to attach GPS tracking devices on the vehicle of an ATM maintenance person working for ATM manufacturer Tranax and hit some 35 ATMs in Houston while wearing a wig, a goatee and different clothing as a disguise.Read more...

To be fair, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Google today has the largest slice, by far, of the search engine pie. New Hitwise stats released Wednesday (May 5) give Google 71.4 percent of the search market, compared with 14.96 percent for Yahoo, 9.43 percent for Bing and 2.18 percent for Ask. (Interestingly enough, of those four engines, Google is the only one that gained marketshare from March to April. Ask, meanwhile, lost a painful 37 percent in that same month.)Read more...

The value—and extreme value it is—comes from a search engine finding products that simply cannot be found otherwise. Read more...

A key provision of the proposed bill (nerdy detail: This is a draft of the legislation circulated for comment. It has yet to even be officially introduced) is to restrict information given to a retailer from being distributed to an outside business, such as a marketing firm that sends spam or junkmail. That's politically safe territory. But the wording is sufficiently vague to raise other concerns.Read more...

How is it that the term "cloud computing" came to be? Granted, it's better than all its predecessors. But a cloud is about the most unstable thing Michaud can think of. It moves whichever way the wind is blowing; it may disappear; it may become a terrible storm. Exactly what marketing genius is responsible for this term catching on?Read more...

Our tale is about an interesting startup called Blippy. (Note: A very prominent co-founder of Blippy's is Philip Kaplan, the Pud of F*cked Companies fame. Yes, that makes one of the deepest ironies in Silicon Valley coming up the street right now.)Read more...

In our increasingly strange new world of social networking and mobile commerce, a whole range of unexpected places will need to deal with PCI DSS. This week's example is Blippy, the social exhibitionism site that last week posted more than just some members' purchases online. It also posted their payment card numbers for the world to see.Read more...

The incident raises questions about the credibility of customer comments, in addition to all the difficulties today of doing much of anything anonymously.Read more...

We here at StorefrontBacktalk are looking to add to our stable of columnists. (Or should that read, “add to our unstable columnists?”) Specifically, we’re looking for some of retail’s most insightful and opinionated E-Commerce thinkers to form a rotating group for a weekly column on various E-Commerce efforts. The goal is to have each columnist deliver only perhaps one column a month. (To be clear: The columns—and not the columnists—are to rotate.)

The qualifications are flexible, but the ideal columnist is a retailer who has focused on E-Commerce for enough years to have strong opinions about what works and what doesn’t and who is willing to share those views with the world. If you’re interested, we’d love to hear from you! Please E-mail Evan at eschuman@storefrontbacktalk.com.…

A post-conviction look at how Gonzalez was caught suggests a change in the type of retailers likely to be targeted and ways today's largest chains can protect themselves. But it also raises questions about whether the very nature of such a large-scale a cyber-attack could ever succeed, assuming success is defined as both getting the money and not getting caught. Retailers are worried about protecting against similar attacks, but it's not likely to be repeated—at least not in the same way.Read more...

All of these companies have quickly admitted their current—to be charitable—accuracy deficits. Milo executives, for example, agreed that their engine needs a lot of work. But they also stressed their efforts in improving inventory accuracy. Although that is certainly important, it should be a Phase Two goal. If someone is asking for a "green vest to wear" and the results are showing videos, books, a glow-in-the-dark safety light and a top response of "Nerf Dart Tag Fury Fire Blasters" (actual search target and results from Milo's engine), the fact that it may be accurate in knowing the number of Nerf Dart Tags a toy store has isn't very helpful.Read more...