Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

That suggests the fallout from all that lost learning during Target's Amazon years goes a lot deeper than it earlier appeared. And any advantage in Target's latecomer-to-E-tail status may have been lost in the struggle just to get the site working properly.Read more...

Sometimes you just have to listen to what people are really saying. Home improvement chain Lowe’s just spent more money on IT in 2011 than in any other year in its history, an aggressive investment that was spelled out in the company’s earnings call on Monday (Feb. 27). But we were still taken aback when we saw a transcript of the call from investment site SeekingAlpha.com, which quoted Lowe’s CEO Robert Niblock citing network and Wi-Fi upgrades, and then saying, “And it meant rolling out offense to replace existing functionality and to enable the ability to tender a sale at any place in the store.”

Rolling out offense? Now that’s aggressive language. But a quick review of the actual earnings call recording reveals what Niblock actually said in his North Carolina accent: “And it meant rolling out iPhones to replace existing functionality.” That makes more sense. But we still like the idea of a retail CEO bragging about going on offense with IT better.…

In our attempts to battle the never-ending assaults by Spammers, StorefrontBacktalk had to do something this week for which we need to apologize. Our direct discussion forum—Go Beyond The Story—was recently overrun by Spammers. To make the forum useful, we had to wipe out existing users. We then put in place much better security. Now, we are asking our readers who had signed up for accounts in the forum to please sign up again.

We have also cleaned up our discussion forum on LinkedIn. If you want to jump into a discussion on our LinkedIn page, you simply need to first join the StorefrontBacktalk group forum. For you Facebook fans, we have also reactivated the StorefrontBacktalk‘s Facebook page. We love when people comment on the stories, but we need to insist that only comments relating to a story be posted to that story. For comments that do not directly relate to a story or column, the Go Beyond The Story forum is home. And we want it to be a noisy home, with lots of loud arguments and shouting. That’s how retail discussions are supposed to be.…

Consider today's situation: A shopper is driving to the mall to use a new giftcard she's been sent and she pulls into a gas station en route. She says "fill 'er up" and hands the attendant the giftcard. Given that it's an unknown amount, the attendant keys in $100 and starts pumping. The final bill is $35 and the customer gets her receipt and drives off to the mall. When she tries to buy something, she discovers the card has been emptied and it won't be restored for 2 to 3 days.Read more...

This is proving to be an especially key point with Home Depot as the trial's convenience factor—no phone needed, no card, no chip, nothing beyond a phone number and a short PIN—is trumping its security.Read more...

With cookies already under tighter controls in the U.K. and the European Union, and the near-certainty of some sort of U.S. Congressional hearings, retailers should be making new customer-tracking plans—plans that don't include cookies.Read more...

And ever-changing explanations of the incident didn't help.Read more...

And although retailers are turning up customer characteristics that customers would never volunteer, pens Legal Columnist Mark Rasch, some mobile payment systems are digging through a phone's data to raise equally troublesome privacy issues.Read more...

The big problem: The most logical and secure technology fix—moving PINs to secure hardware—is something Citi seems unwilling to do.Read more...

Hewlett-Packard announced a new open-source Web browser for mobile devices on Tuesday (Feb. 14). It’s name? Isis. That’s the latest slap for ISIS, the mobile payment initiative backed by Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile—apparently HP didn’t even wonder if anyone had trademarked “Isis” as the name for a mobile app (yes, ISIS has). It’s especially worrisome with ISIS now slipping into third place in the mobile payment horse race behind Google and PayPal, which are both already taking payments.

Even more confounding: Starting this month, Google now offers Google Wallet on some AT&T mobile phones and, unlike Verizon, AT&T is apparently officially allowing it. To be fair, ISIS still plans to start trials of its payments system this summer in Salt Lake City and Austin. But to be realistic, if ISIS can’t keep its founding members on board or even defend its brand name, you have to wonder whether these telcos still think they can win the mobile payment game—or if ISIS is about to change directions again.…

Whether or not its methods go too far, it's in good company in the mobile early-stage convenience versus security argument, with both PayPal—and its phone-less and card-less purchases at Home Depot—and Visa, which is pushing PIN-less EMV transactions while MasterCard is taking the more secure and less convenient pro-PIN EMV position.Read more...

There may be a way to flip this problem into an advantage. What if chains viewed every store as a local distribution center? And used local talent to deliver not only to customers but on the same day? This approach enables the merged-channel retailer to extend that experience right back into the customer’s front yard and maybe through the front door.Read more...

If traditional retailers really want to win the war against their online counterparts, they need to shift the battlefield from price to convenience. And nothing says "convenience" like "drive-thru," right?Read more...

To be clear, the Massachusetts plaintiff is not going after any retailers—in fact, the plaintiff's lawyer says he'd hate to try winning a case like that against a retailer. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean some other lawyer won't chase the same theory, with results that could put a chain in court.Read more...

The items that are on the shelf elsewhere or in the backroom? An employee goes to fetch them. Those that are not in-stock at that store? They'll be shipped to her home. This is where Venky Harinarayan, Wal-Mart's Senior VP for Global E-Commerce, head of @WalmartLabs and venture capitalist extraordinaire, sees the world's largest chain headed.Read more...

But the number-two card brand also spoke of a near-term future where E-Commerce will be able to use the EMV chip to authenticate and process E-Commerce and M-Commerce transactions. However, will consumers pay more for laptops that can handle such security? And will tablets and smartphones—which can more easily and more cost-effectively handle such technologies—grow quickly enough to make desktop/laptop enhancements irrelevant?Read more...

The idea that an E-Commerce transaction is not a real transaction should be repugnant to any retailer in 2012. But those old prejudices that stores are where serious commerce happens are apparently acceptable.Read more...

All of this, pens Retail Columnist Todd Michaud, in an area—such as CRM—where the application of technology could directly impact a retailer's top and bottom lines.Read more...

Given that greater-than-99-percent of Visa retailers in the U.S. also accept MasterCard, chains must go along with whichever brand has the more strict requirements. Typically, that's been Visa, but not this time. On EMV-related PCI relaxations, however, the two brands opted to adopt identical policies.Read more...

But PayPal's approach—which essentially reverses 50 years of payment-card advances by eliminating any physical authentication device—still presents a big challenge when it comes to security. The ability to check out with just a mobile phone number and PIN—no plastic card, NFC-enabled phone or other authentication hardware required—means anyone who can acquire that phone number plus PIN has a free shot at the legitimate customer's account.Read more...

If a marketing opt-in question is posed, who is posing it? And how will customers react when they later learn they weren't sharing with whom they thought they were sharing? Bad news: This is not hypothetical. There is a broader issue at play here. With any of the third-party mobile payment efforts—Google Wallet, PayPal, ISIS, maybe even Apple—there is the potential for this type of confusion.Read more...

The historic argument has been that E-tailers have a huge convenience advantage and that a retailer must combat that by leveraging its experience/ambiance advantage. But with showrooming, the customer has already driven to the store, parked, walked to the aisle and found the desired product. The physical store has the convenience advantage 10 times over.Read more...

Clearly, one errant employee is something every chain has. But this example brings up a too-often overlooked PCI fact: Compliance is an issue for every employee. Mobile payment, being a disruptive factor, will only make things worse, because it creates many more opportunities for payment-card data to be captured/retained against the rules.Read more...

In a typical chain store, what happens when a customer discovers a problem, be it an incorrect price label or an out-of-stock or expired product? It's up to the customer to track down an associate. What happens then? Usually nothing, because it's quite unlikely it's the primary responsibility of that employee to deal with that problem.Read more...

It's time to evict Web and mobile app development, and pretty much any marketing initiative that isn't core to your business. Heresy? Certainly, pens Retail Columnist Todd Michaud. But it's necessary.Read more...