Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

IT investments will increase by 4.3 percent this year, thanks mostly to small- and medium-sized retailers spending to become PCI compliant, according to a new report from IHL.

“PCI compliance has come down to the small and medium businesses,” said IHL President Greg Buzek. “That starts to drive a lot of upgrades.”…

And among those who actually left the stores, 90 percent of them never returned, according to Scott Drobner, Motorola's director for market intelligence programs. Read more...

But as I was looking at two unrelated privacy legal filings on Friday, was struck by the different legal tactics and the very different probability of success. This all stems from two unrelated privacy breaches from three deep-pocketed companies: $52 billion Sears, $41 billion Sprint and $36 billion Wells Fargo. Read more...

But is the guarantee legitimate if the retailer controls the terms? Read more...

The Sears move came hours after Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Benjamin Edelman published details on how consumers using Sears' ManageMyHome site could find detailed purchase histories about other Sears shoppers merely by typing in their name, phone number and street address into the site. Read more...

One $200 million retail chain—1800mattress.com—is taking a baby step toward merged channel, by sending copies of online chat transcripts to the local brick-and-mortar. "Having the complete transcript of what the customer is looking for onscreen in the store facilitates the sale," EVP Joe Vicens said. Read more...

I was reminded of this when shopping this past holiday season in a major national chain and wanted a particular model product, which the store was out of. "No problem," I was told by a store associate. "We'll have a large shipment in just a few hours. It may be in there." Read more...

Some of them are so classic that it might be helpful for retail IT execs to hear these customers' stories in their own voice, without editorial comment or filtering. From time to time—when we see some that look especially intriguing—we'll share these.

This one comes from a reader describing a holiday shopping attempt: Essentially, I purchased two bar stools (I have a breakfast nook in my new apartment—and no, I never thought I'd use the words "breakfast nook") from Target, using a Target gift card and a Visa gift card I received for Christmas. Read more...

But the chain is also learning that the online world—with its thousands of bloggers armed with screen captures—is fairly unforgiving when it comes to marketing excesses. Read more...

The timing of this nation-wide hiccup couldn't have come at a worse time for retailers. Merchants and giftcard exchange sites have been pushing giftcard convenience more aggressively this year than ever, positioning it as the ultimate hassle-free gift. To have that network crash on Dec. 26—one of the busiest days for gift returns and gift card redemptions—is certainly not ideal. Read more...

As small groups of Web thinkers sketch out what Web 3.0–the so-called Semantic Web–may look like, how much attention should E-Commerce execs be paying?

In an interesting RetailWire story and discussion, questions are raised about whether this will be a broad transition or merely a niche enhancement for those who bother. But if major e-tailers want to change, the sad reality is that they need to get involved early or surrender the ability to complain later. Given how much E-Commerce execs love to complain, that latter option seems unrealistic. ;-)…

Noticed the Christmas Day report in The Boston Globe that TJX had created two new positions: chief privacy officer and privacy director and was intrigued.

The story was based on an October memo from a TJX search firm that it was looking to fill the privacy director role and that it had quietly promoted an existing TJX executive– Jeffrey Naylor, senior executive vice president for administration and business development—to the chief privacy officer role.

What does this all mean? If TJX is telling the world that it is now taking privacy seriously, then why did it never announce the creation of chief privacy officer? How does creating this position change any of the ROI issues that caused them to not invest as heavily as they could have in security? …

The as-yet-unnamed 12-inch touchscreen units will likely list for about $1,300 to $1,800 each and will use power-over-Ethernet, said Brian Slaughter, Dell's director of retail.Read more...

The arguments raised are similar to the total cost of ownership (TCO) strategies that were all the rage a few years ago, but they take it one step further. Read more...

“More than 95 percent” of the Visa-issuing banks have agreed to a multi-million settlement worked out between Visa and TJX, TJX announced late Thursday.

The announcement—which came one day after the deadline for the banks to accept and two days after TJX had negotiated separate settlements with other banks suing them—cleans up some of the last remaining loose threads from the TJX case. Read more.…

Office Depot has pushed out some IBM legacy mainframe applications and retired “a substantial number” of servers with a limited move to Linux, said CIO Tim Toews.

The $15.5 billion 1,212-store chain used the switch to “eliminate most of our servers in the field” said Toews, whose department went with SUSE Linux. …

The choice of whether the self-assessment option is available to Level 1 merchants varies by card brand, but Visa is now selectively permitting it. Officially, the issuing bank and the card brand must agree before a Level 1 is given the self-assessment permission and it's often approved for re-certification, once a retailer has already been certified PCI compliant.Read more...

Almost all of the banks and bank associations still suing TJX agreed to settle for undisclosed sums on Wednesday, in an anticipated move following the collapse of bank’s the federal class-action lawsuit against TJX. This all stems from the worst-ever data breach in credit card history, impacting more than 100 million credit/debit cards.

TJX CEO Carol Meyrowitz issued a statement that TJX has finally achieved PCI compliance. Read more.…

Is the human factor to blame? Managers "are going to have to build dependence on RFID. Instead of routing through styles of slacks, will they trust it? It's going to take a lot more than technology. People are going to have to change the way they work."Read more...

Getting to the bottom of these he said/she said exchanges—which is necessary to put these pieces of information into meaningful context—is made difficult because so much of the supporting material being referenced is still classified as confidential in the lawsuits surrounding the worst data breach in credit card history. Read more...

The move, which had been expected ever since U.S. District Court Judge William Young ruled that the case shouldn't be considered a class-action, will mean a different set of rules for the few financial entities that decide to pursue the case anew.Read more...

"Occasionally, Marketing, Purchasing, Operations, or the Facilities Management group have researched a topic, vetted vendors, purchased product and only then considered that they might need IT assistance in order to provide whatever it is with a connection to the Internet," said the IT leader, who asked to remain anonymous. "Then, when IT takes a look at this new technology and tries to bring up all the issues that should have been considered (security, reliability, support, incompatibility with other systems in the store), IT gets labeled as being difficult to work with and not team players. It isn't a fair rap." Read more...

Leverage's vision is not radically different than other giftcard firms—such as PlasticJungle—but it's focus on the CRM aspect is. With a formula that will likely deliver about 40 percent of its giftcards directly from retailers with the remainder consumer to consumer exchange, Leverage plans on selling information about their consumers to retail and manufacturing advertisers, said Leverage CEO Mark Roberts. Read more...