Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

This month, though, Amazon is learning through two unrelated initiatives that pushing the envelope can deliver one heck of a paper cut. The first is a feature designed to be very consumer-friendly, one that flags when a product is being sold for more than list price. The other is a global Internet effort tied into the non-U.S. rollout of Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader. Both initiatives seem to stem from a retail chain that intuitively understands technology and what can be done with it, without necessarily thinking through how the new elements will ultimately impact consumers and partners.Read more...

Although the new iPhone app will accurately point shoppers to the aisles and shelves housing their desired products, Lansley acknowledged that the wireless signal at some stores is too weak to work with iPhones turned on while customers are deep within the depths of Tesco's larger establishments.Read more...

Gonzalez was whisked from his federal prison cell at the Central Falls Detection Center in Rhode Island to face U.S. District Court Judge Jerome Simandle in Camden, New Jersey. (Yes, I know. "He was forced to spend hours in Camden. Hasn't the man been punished enough?" Hey, I'll make the New Jersey jokes around here. At least he was spared a trip to the federal courthouse in Newark. When you're indicted in Jersey, you count your blessings.)Read more...

We're also running a survey on how bad an uptime season retail IT and E-Commerce executives are expecting. The iPhone, AT&T, brand-new (and relatively untested) retail mobile apps and holiday shopping: A more perfect recipe for site outages the world has never known.Read more...

Starbucks’ recent problems with its iPhone M-Commerce application–specifically its inability to facilitate actual purchases—are the result of its preparations to replace the chain’s entire POS system, according to a vendor that has been in discussions with the coffee chain about mobile integration. From Starbucks’ perspective, it made little sense to integrate a mobile application into a system that was about to be gone, thereby forcing the mobile integration to have to be redone from scratch, said Jorge Fernandes, CEO of Mobibucks, a mobile vendor that, according to Fernandes, was in talks with Starbucks recently about a payment application.

Fernandes’ comment is consistent with suggestions from Starbucks headquarters managers—along with other Starbucks employees—that the lack of POS integration is a temporary issue, although no one said when or how the problem would be resolved. Starbucks did not respond to a request for comment on Fernandes’ remarks. Even if true, the question remains of why Starbucks didn’t simply delay the entire mobile application until the POS situation was resolved. Presumably, the chain wanted an iPhone application out in time for the holidays and believed that partial functionality was better than none. …

Some of these efforts are being artificially fueled by applications launched specifically for Apple's iPhone, while other retailers are getting their mobile acts together in time for this year's holiday season. J.C. Penny threw its hat in the ring by launching what it said was the first non-grocery system that can read 2D barcode coupons presented on mobile phones. The new imaging scanners were deployed at J.C. Penny store POS terminals in 16 Houston area stores.Read more...

But retailers pursuing such a strategy might quickly discover that, with payment, when one door closes another opens—and it's likely a trapdoor beneath your feet. For example, a secure route to bank accounts may indeed sidestep most—if not all—card fees for those mobile transactions. But it would also remove the liability shield that the brands' zero-liability programs offer.Read more...

In late September, Starbucks introduced two very different M-Commerce applications, both designed for the iPhone. One was for a very limited trial, impacting eight stores in Seattle and eight more in and around Silicon Valley (specifically Cupertino, Mountain View, Sunnyvale and San Jose).Read more...

The site—delivered from Digby—also seems to need a little work. It didn't seem able to actually access that database data, forcing us—during a test of the site—to have to type in full E-mail address and name three times (that's annoying, even on an iPhone). It also crashed four times during 30 minutes of testing.Read more...

IT security is truly a funny business, writes Franchisee Columnist Todd Michaud. If you ask any business leader about the importance of having a top-notch IT security program, they will almost always tell you that it is paramount. Unless it is a large company that has regulatory requirements, when there is a conflict between a business need and a security concern, the security concerns more often than not are pushed aside or diminished. Such is often the case when determining if the chain should be leveraging a secure network (example: private frame or VPN connections) or going with a standard offering such as DSL, cable, satellite or a FIOS-like product.Read more...

The 64-store grocery chain Bloom is trialing a GPS-based shopping cart device, one that uses satellite data to alert consumers to nearby price specials as they browse the aisles. The chain, part of the Food Lion group and a subsidiary of Brussels-based Delhaize Group, operates stores in North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland and Virginia.

The touchscreen devices, known as PAT for Personal Assistant Technology, are being tested in a Fort Mill, S.C., store, reported Supermarket News. …

PCI Columnist David Taylor suggests that this almost guarantees PCI will have to address tokenization, end-to-end encryption and other “beyond PCI” issues. But it's also going to put severe pressure on payment processors and gateways, push retailers to demand portability answers and add a whole new layer of complexity to merged channel strategies.Read more...

The use of NFC technology for mobile payments will hit $8 billion globally this year and will exceed $30 billion by 2012, according to Juniper Research. The researchers said the world’s first NFC devices will be sold commercially later this year by Nokia “and the market will ramp up (starting) 2011.”

Juniper said payments using NFC or Sony’s FeliCa RFID technology, already commonplace in Japan, will be in the midst of a substantial growth spurt in North America and Western Europe by 2014. Juniper analyst Howard Wilcox is quoted in RFID Update saying “the clear readout from industry analysis is that NFC is going to be a default feature of phones in the future, much like Bluetooth is now.”…

The difference between wireless in a test lab and wireless in the field has again reared its ugly 802.11 head. The J.C. Penney trial began in December 2008 at the $18.5 billion 1,101-store chain's 103,000-square foot Ft. Worth, Texas, store. The goal was to test the system for a deployment at the chain's first Manhattan store (a much larger 153,000-square foot store), which opened this summer.Read more...

Among the complaints: No guidance, the standards are designed for a bygone era of technology, the standards are anything but standardized, why should banks have to not comply with PCI?, compliance gamemanship and "We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Credit Card Data."Read more...

When it comes to mobile investments, E-Commerce Director Dan Shelffo said "we're poking around" and that his group has made some "site modifications so that we can start to dabble" in mobile communications. But the spreadsheets do not look attractive. "I have to protect the billion-dollar brand. When I look at the dollars that I am going to invest, I look at the return. I know what my ROI is," Shelffo said. "When I look at mobile, I see a lot of investment."Read more...

Despite those heavy-weight retail brands, only a couple have borne the vast majority of the costs and headaches associated with a breach. Why? Because the first one or two chains have to go through the expense of identifying the breached numbers and having them shut down and reissued. That task's completion makes life so much easier on the others. It's also better for investigative costs, brand reputation and several other factors. Is this fair? Can and should something be done to make it more equitable?Read more...

Today, writes Franchisee Columnist Todd Michaud, his average restaurant has eight to 10 pieces of technology that are complex enough to house their own operating systems. These same restaurants now have five or more vendors providing technical support. With the high level of integration, when a problem occurs the store manager is often hit with the “It’s not us, it’s them” excuse. The store manager, who is typically not an IT administrator, is left trying to decipher cryptic error messages, leaning on a peer group and spending hours if not days on the phone with various support organizations trying to get to the root cause of the issue. Symptoms of this situation usually manifest themselves in screams from the back office: “I have already rebooted it 14 times. I am not doing it again!”Read more...

In Friday's hearing, the government for the first time put a number next to the DSW breach, saying that the $1.5 billion apparel chain operating 300 stores in 37 states (in addition to supplying footwear to 367 leased locations) lost more than one million card numbers in the breach. The government also said that OfficeMax—the $8.3 billion office supplies chain with 939 stores in the United States and 83 in Mexico—played a crucial role, with Assistant Boston U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann saying that OfficeMax's "then vulnerable encryption of PINs enabled Gonzalez (and a colleague) to sell the conspirators' bounty for particularly large profits." The only new data morsel about TJX to emerge was a Heymann estimate that TJX alone "suffered close to $200 million in losses and associated expenses."Read more...

In something that is going to make the day of certain cell phone manufacturers while driving others crazy, the Environmental Working Group has published a very long list of cell phones in order of how much radiation they give off. Now there’s a TV commercial I can’t wait to see: “Our phone will give you brain tumors in twice the time of our key rivals. You want a slow painful death or something quick and merciful with a keyboard for easy texting?”

As consumers use their phones more and more–with retailers preparing to ask them to shop on them as well–it’s yet another in a long line of roadblocks.…

This is the latest in a series of high-tech blunders from the 123-year-old $47 billion 3,900-store chain. Is this because of the chain's size or, more likely, because it has been pushing the envelope on what it's trying to do technologically, perhaps beyond its testing limits.Read more...

When European technology leaders are envisioned, Germany and the U.K. are most likely to come to mind. But a new report suggests that, at least when it comes to E-Commerce, it’s the Parisians and the rest of France that are most comfortable. ComScore reported Monday (Sept. 7) that “26.7 million people in France visited an online retail site in July 2009, an increase of 21 percent (compared with) the previous year, significantly higher than the 5-percent average growth in the retail category across Europe.”

The report is interesting because France is also embracing M-Commerce and particularly the iPhone at an unusually intense rate. (A reader commented on it in a story about M-Commerce.) The problem with any of these stats is that they are percent of increase, which could simply mean that France has been more hesitant to embrace E-Commerce until now. The ComScore study also excluded M-Commerce activity. If France’s M-Commerce activity is indeed picking up, that could be a material exclusion. ComScore offers some rough comparison points between countries, such as “the penetration rate of the online retail category of total online audience,” which it puts at 77 percent for the U.K., 69 percent for Germany and 69 percent for France. But it’s still an interesting report.…

When negotiating—or surrendering to—a service-level agreement guaranteeing uptime levels with a Web hosting service, retailers need to be cautious of how “downtime” is defined. Pingdom is now blogging about more SLA games, including some hosts that exclude any downtime that they consider maintenance. Here at StorefrontBacktalk, if our site is down, it’s of little comfort that it was a planned outage that we never asked about.

Pingdom’s post on Monday (Sept. 7) also spoke of hosts that exclude server downtime and only count network downtime. Again, if the site is unavailable, that’s downtime. Pingdom is a bit more forgiving, though: “To be fair, for dedicated hosting providers, it would be difficult to guarantee anything else when the customer has control over the server.” It also repeated an observation that Pingdom has made before that hosts often ignore smaller outages, even if they have many of them. Of course, for chains, it’s not merely situations of Web hosting. These tricks also apply to services handling mobile sites, customer comments, video reviews, shipping and almost anything else your site needs to outsource, especially for the holidays. Sometimes—and may I be forgiven for saying this—it’s actually good to have the lawyers involved in SLA negotiations.…

But what does any of this have to do with M-Commerce? A lot. If they finally get around all of the technical and logistical hurdles of M-Commerce, they will be trying to get millions of consumers to interact with their sites—via their phones—and see product lists, read reviews, watch multimedia demonstrations, interact with social sites, download PDF instruction manuals and even ask their peers for feedback on their shopping choices before consummating those purchases. That's all great, but—if successful—will it turn the Home Depots, Walmarts and Targets of the world into examples of what may become known as "The AT&T Factor"?Read more...

In the Gonzalez plea bargain, the agreed-to sentencing recommendation—which calls for at least 15 years in prison and "no more than 25 years" in prison—does not seem much more lenient than he would have faced at trial. Even with as extensive a cyber attack as these, most U.S. courts wouldn't go anywhere near "more than 25 years" in cases where no one was physically hurt and the defendant wasn't accused of real violence or threatening violence. But a jury is a tricky animal and, technically, the counts he is pleading guilty to have a cumulative maximum sentence of 193 years in prison. Read more...