Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

If a PayPal card triggers a transaction on an underlying Visa or MasterCard, might that PayPal account be considered a "high-value token" and, therefore, be in scope for PCI? And if the PayPal account is in scope, is it a big deal? Read more...

"When I think about secondary validation, that gives me more of a warm fuzzy even though we have people saying that I have a more sophisticated chip and that my smart device has got some protection sitting in it," said Bill Titus, the Loss Prevention VP at Sears. Read more...

Wal-Mart has recently been trying to more closely align stores with various online, mobile and social efforts. But like all major chains, brick-and-mortar management resistance is non-trivial.Read more...

It's a fine theory. Trouble is, it doesn't actually seem to work for most of the 16 retailers that ForeSee looked at, ranging from Best Buy and eBay to Avon and Target.Read more...

"The E-receipt problem is that the customer now has a valid receipt. I can't bring it in. I'm not checking it off and signing off on it. So the ability to use that fraudulently increases unless you have a true returns management system," Titus said.Read more...

The conceal part of that action is considered evidence of criminal intent. Now let's see you try and enforce that rule when you have in-aisle mobile checkout.Read more...

The POS defense has been that chains need hardened systems. That argument worked when tablets were $500 and even $400. But now that Android tablets have fallen below $100, the argument falls apart. You could have four spares in the backroom and still be ahead.Read more...

On the mobile front, it's the first retail trial of PayPal's mobile payment program and it doesn't use a mobile device at all. (OK, that's more an embryo step than a baby step.) On the payment front, this is also a test of Home Depot accepting a rectangular magstripe card that doesn't say MasterCard, Visa, American Express, Discover or Home Depot on it.Read more...

We have our early clues from the CIO of the $2.5-billion 481-store Guess chain, one of the first test sites for Google Wallet in "a couple of stores" in California since May. In total, how many customers have tried Google Wallet? Says CIO Michael Relich: "Five or six." Not 500 or 600 customers, mind you. Five or six. Read more...

But the Guess iPad trial is hardly being done to save costs. The flexibility of the tablets and sharp, customer-friendly graphics make the devices a much more effective way to show demos and to locate merchandise, check inventory and do anything else that a kiosk would normally do.Read more...

In-aisle mobile payment isn’t merely a new payment method. It has the potential to force stores to rethink almost all aspects of operations—and few have seriously come to terms with how different environments are going to have to be. At the NRF show in New York City next week, a StorefrontBacktalk IT panel is going to map out the least-anticipated changes. And if you’re around on Tuesday 2–3 PM (1A 21/22 at the Javits Center), please drop by and tell us what we forgot to include. Ann Taylor CIO Mike Sajor, Sears VP/Loss Prevention Bill Titus and the NRF’s Joe Larocca—moderated by StorefrontBacktalk Editor Evan Schuman&mdashlwill look at the neglected items. As a Florida hobby shop discovered while serving as an NCR in-aisle mobile payment beta tester, this in-store mobile payment stuff is a lot harder than it looks.

“It’s really a change management problem,” Sajor said. “Literally everyone has to think through all of the possible change behaviors.” As Sears thinks through in-store mobile issues, it’s seeing how everything will need to change, from the supply chain to customer interactions to SKU-level integrity, inventory and dealing with new threats to the supply chain. “Some significant competitive advantages are going to be lost,” Titus said. The panel will be pure discussion, with no presentations and lots of audience interaction. So please argue with us there. Don’t make me come and find you.…

Almost all retail marketing efforts are based on the not-so-simple premise of getting people to purchase from them, either online or in person. The problem, pens Retail Columnist Todd Michaud, is likely a mesh of old-mentality thinking with a heavy dose of channel conflict.Read more...

The good vendors will be able to address all these questions. The not-so-good ones will hand you a carrier bag or a pen instead. Read more...

But it is clear that Amazon is drooling over its vast CRM files and trying to figure out how much money it can make off them.Read more...

With so many consumer devices using the same wireless frequencies, it was bound to happen: Just before Christmas, a U.K. family in a village 50 miles southwest of London lost the use of all wireless devices—everything from key fobs for unlocking vehicles to a wireless thermostat and a digital shower—until the problem cleared up without explanation several days later. The BBC reported that faulty wireless equipment had caused similar incidents in the past, including a street in northern England of homes whose wireless was jammed in 2010 by handheld wireless devices used to take orders at a nearby restaurant.

Retailers get understandably worried about customers who might intentionally or unintentionally block store Wi-Fi that’s used for POS, associates’ handheld devices or free customer wireless service. But there’s a risk the other way, too—the newest Wi-Fi access points have a range of more than 200 feet indoors and 800 feet outdoors. That’s easily enough to jam neighboring stores’ Wi-Fi in a mall or interfere with homes near a standalone store. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to know whether a store’s Wi-Fi is causing problems in the neighborhood—at least not until the FCC shows up to investigate a complaint.…

What started this holiday dogfight was an Amazon promotion, where it was offering a tiny discount (5 percent, with a ceiling of $5) for people who scanned barcodes and then purchased the item on Amazon. eBay's response was what it billed as a $10 in-store coupon, with three retailers: Toys "R" Us, Dick's Sporting Goods and Aéropostale.Read more...

The good news is that this approach, in theory, will be free to retailers, because it will not necessitate any store IT changes at all. The problem—and it's a deal-killer—is timing. With the mobile onslaught, quick is almost certainly going to trump free.Read more...

The store does have a policy: Don't take sides. If the customer wants to call police, let the police handle it. If police aren't called, treat everyone as a legitimate customer.Read more...

There is more to protecting sensitive areas than installing video cameras. The second, and possibly thornier, concern for small and midsize merchants is how effective the reminder is likely to be when many of them mistakenly think they won't need to follow the advice.Read more...

Microsoft has effectively thrown in the towel for Microsoft Tag. On Tuesday (December 13), Microsoft announced that its Tag Reader smartphone app will now support QR codes and NFC. Officially that’s to make Tag Reader a one-stop app so users won’t have to worry about what reader to use with various tags. In practice, it’s curtains for Tag, the multicolored 2D barcode that Microsoft rolled out in January 2009 but that never really caught on (not that the more successful QR code has been a barn-burning success).

In a blog post, Microsoft said it now recommends NFC for retailers to “blend in beautifully,” QR to “grab their attention” and Tag to “raise curiosity”—presumably as in, “curiosity about who’s still interested in Microsoft Tag.”…

Booksellers were up in arms about Amazon encouraging people to go into their local stores to buy on Amazon, despite the fact that consumers have been doing the same thing for as long as Amazon has been around and the fact that—to be nitpicky—books were excluded from the program. U.S. Senator Olympia J. Snowe (R.-Me.) issued a statement that "incentivizing consumers to spy on local shops is a bridge too far." That may be true, but the price-sharing part—the spying the senator is referencing—was excluded from any incentives.Read more...

Why? Because although what it was doing to those physical stores was likely legal, had those stores tried doing the same to Amazon, it would have been illegal, thanks to Amazon's posted policies. That policy phrasing is not even universal—or even common— among major E-tailers, pens Legal Columnist Mark Rasch.Read more...

As is our tradition, StorefrontBacktalk shuts down for the last two weeks in December, due to the fact that y’all are far too busy (a) supporting the biggest selling weeks of the year until December 25th, (b) supporting the biggest returns-and-exchanges week of the year after December 25th and (c) closing the quarterly books until December 31st on what everyone hopes will be a bigger year than 2010.

That means our next regular weekly issue will arrive on January 5th, 2012. In the meantime, everything else will still be live (the Web sites, our Kindle version, our Twitter tweets, our mobile sites, etc.). And we’ll, as always, send out breaking news alerts if circumstances merit. …

By the way, after much effort, PCI Columnist Walt Conway thinks he has finally found a real-world example of what a high-value token should be. Let's say shoppers want to use a payment card at a merchant, but they do not want that merchant to have their PAN, for whatever reason.Read more...

But Google also stores far too much customer information unencrypted on the phone—and if the phone is malware-infected or stolen, that data becomes far too easy for a thief to get at.Read more...