Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Ironically, the same contactless albatross is behind both moves: Visa's pricing policy that charges a lot more for contactless debit transactions, compared with MasterCard. Home Depot's move will quietly start happening in about a month, as it will start to distribute more than 20,000 contactless readers, more than enough to outfit lanes in all of its 2,238 stores.Read more...

"Despite the world’s largest RFID project, the $6 billion China National ID card scheme, being completed a year earlier, the global RFID market is rising 5 percent this year to $5.56 billion, in the face of the global financial meltdown which has caused some car production, for example, to plummet by 50 percent," wrote IDTechEx CEO Raghu Das.Read more...

On the deployment side, about one in every 20 of the largest E-tail sites now support mobile, according to figures released by m-commerce consulting firm Acquity Group. But those rollouts reflect a lack of standardization (or even basic consistency) and suggest a community that is overwhelmed by the radically different environments (screen resolution, size, OS capabilities, etc.) offered by the major phones today in the U.S..Read more...

Just a few weeks after it roughed up Level 2 merchants with demand for on-site assessments, a dustup with MasterCard was causing confusion about their remote key injection policy. A Gartner report this week–carried by Computerworld–said that MasterCard was rejecting it.

MasterCard indeed changed its policy regarding using remote key injection to install new encryption keys on point-of-sale (POS) systems, but the change was only to ban when the hardware is not already PCI compliant. If it’s PCI compliant–which many are–then it’s not an issue. “Our customers and vendors can use Remote Key Injection services to upgrade the terminals if those services meet all aspects of the PCI Pin Security Requirements,” said a MasterCard clarifying statement issued Friday (July 10).…

It's not a coincidence that, for the last couple of years, Sears has been at the forefront of several major technologies, almost all of which resonant overwhelmingly with Gen Y, including social networking, mobile and companion shopping. These include being the first retailer to support 2-D barcodes, a new approach called a GiveTogether gifting program and a GPS-based mobile commerce application.Read more...

But that's not the way it's playing out, especially among younger consumers. The nirvana is to go with a full mobile approach, whether it be NFC or regular smartphone coupon displays. The idea would be a color display with enough CPU and RAM to handle a very large number of customized coupons and a POS-connected scanning device that could read off of the screen. Or perhaps it could be beamed to the POS system. Even for those retailers who want to deploy such a system today, there are three obstacles to widespread immediate deployment.Read more...

The deal (see our full coverage of the terms of the settlement) consisted of three elements: Payment; new security rules; the need to report back to the states. How painful were any of those elements for the $19 billion owner of Marshalls, T.J. Maxx, HomeGoods, A.J. Wright, HomeSense and Winners? Let's take a look at each.

But the dollars behind the settlement are relatively trivial for the $19 billion owner of Marshalls, T.J. Maxx, HomeGoods, A.J. Wright, HomeSense and Winners. The biggest impact will likely come from a wide range of security concessions, although many of the rules had already been directly or indirectly required by existing PCI guidelines.Read more...

Maes makes the point that the data being made available to today's smartphone is fine, but it's rarely practical to reach into one pocket to access. At a conference, for example, "You don't shake somebody's hand and then say, 'Can you please hold on for a moment while I take out my phone and Google you?' When you go to the supermarket and you're standing there in that huge aisle of different types of toilet paper, you don't take out your cellphone and open a browser and go to a Web site to try and decide which of these toilet papers is the most ecologically responsible purchase."Read more...

When the driver walks into the Nordstrom location, text alerts have told associates that he's the driver of a red 2009 S600. The scanner he walked by recognized his cell phone's unique identifier number as the same one that exited the Mercedes, which had its license plate number automatically logged as well. When he purchases a dress shirt 20 minutes later with his Visa card, the system can now attach a name (and the purchase of that shirt) to that license plate and that cell phone. If that customer happens to use a loyalty card, his complete purchase history is then associated with the car and his phone.Read more...

As e-tailers have learned the hard way from E-Commerce, customers don't care about tidy legal contracts assigning responsibility and quality-of-service obligations. If they go to a Wal-Mart or a Home Depot site and they have a bad experience—whether it's with uptime, a FedEx delivery hiccup, incorrect status reports, a video consumer comment that glitches or anything else that the retailer may or may not be directly handling—those customers are going to blame Wal-Mart or Home Depot and might take their business elsewhere. If M-Commerce is on your plate, you need to get used to living by the carrier's standards.Read more...

An alliance between CBS Outdoor and Clustra is testing out such an approach using iPhones as the control devices. Will it deliver more eyeballs and ultimately better sales of whatever is being marketed? And could the same approach also work in a mall or department small, where the crowds are presumably much smaller?Read more...

Victoria's Secret's new mobile experiment is more of an adjunct to its catalogue (paper and online), with the mobile app needing a catalogue number before an item can be purchased and tracked.Read more...

But when those consumers return to that Dairy Queen with those tags stuck to their wallets, their watchbands or the back of their cellphones, identical those tags shall be no more. Given the differing purchase histories of each customer, the tags will deliver sharply different discounts and offers. In effect, the tags will serve as digital coupons as well as makeshift CRM/loyalty programs.Read more...

It’s well known that temperature-detecting active RFID tags have extreme value with perishable goods transportation, but a new study delves into microclimates, which indicates subtle differences of temperature in different parts of the same pallet. The Aim Global story looks at the IT ROI implications and whether it could change the business case for active tags.

“Each link in the cold chain must have the ability to reject partial shipments based on temperature data. This could make it either more expensive for the supplier (because some goods are now being rejected that had previously been accepted) or less expensive (because whole shipments are not rejected because of a single temperature reading). In either case, there would be a financial incentive to more closely monitor temperature and other critical conditions,” the story reported. “Customer refusals or charge-backs for less-than-fresh goods might provide an incentive for processors to pressure growers/packers to tag individual cases so that improper handling at the beginning of the supply chain does not adversely affect a processor’s or distributor’s downstream revenues.”…

A Microsoft engineer is being quoted as questioning the safety of RFID tags and whether the tags could be wirelessly attacked. “Technically speaking, if a virus broadcasts itself utilizing a wireless data transfer protocol and another system accepts this transmission and transfers control to the received data, then we may have a case of an ‘airborne’ infection,” said Oleg Petrovsky, senior software development engineer at Microsoft, according to a report in Secure Computing. (Microsoft promised to comment, but didn’t respond by deadline.)

“The most plausible case scenario might include a virus that utilizes a vulnerability in the driver of a wireless device or a service using either TCP/IP or Bluetooth protocols. However, despite the growing numbers of wireless devices, including smartphones, PDAs and 2G, 2.5G, 3G and GPRM network services, so far we’ve been fortunate to not have outbreaks of this nature.”…

But the rollout Tuesday (May 26) from the Papa Johns global chain of 3,404 pizzerias takes it one step farther. Yes, it's generally just glitz and icing, but it integrates webcams that will literally interact with pizza boxes.Read more...

The initial version of the kiosks collect payment card information as well as drivers license data. Even setting aside the potential future POS/CRM access, the payment and highly-sensitive driver's license data will force some of that debate right away. How secure are the kiosks? Who is ultimately responsible in the event of a security breach, both from a legal and PCI perspective?Read more...

NEC is preparing to sell its next-generation of tag readers/writers at a price more than 90 percent lower than current pricing, according to a report in Japanese business publication The Nikkei.

“The tags are compatible with all of the six worldwide radio communications standards. NEC is ready to accept orders beginning as early as this July,” the story reported, adding that some “10,000 of the new tags will be available for approximately (the equivalent of) $100.”…

The scenario of consumers using their smartphones to barcode scan for everything from price lookups to quickly gathering more product information via the Web is nothing new. But despite all the talk, it hasn’t progressed much beyond being in a lot of hypothetical scenarios.

Is Google’s entry into the space likely to change that? U.S. and U.K. owners of mobile devices running the Google Android operating system can now download from Google a “Barcode Scanner” app that allows them to use their phones to scan UPC/ISBN codes with the phone’s digital camera. The application has been integrated into Google Product Search for Mobile. …

Beyond focusing on avoiding "Beyond PCI Lock-in," pens GuestView PCI Columnist David Taylor, retailers also need to focus on ensuring that these new security efforts don't break their existing applications. Some of the tokenization and end-to-end encryption approaches currently (or soon to be) on the market don't always play nice with existing ERP, CRM and other enterprise applications.Read more...

Like everything in retail payment security, the issue is much more nuanced than it initially seems. But the micro-payment version is clean: We materially improve security, proprietary hooks are needed. That said, retailers will soon have a lot less negotiating power than they've gotten used to.Read more...

When Stop & Shop was in the middle of a self-service trial, it discovered an unanticipated fringe benefit of the handheld product scanning device: It slightly boosted revenue from customers on a tight budget. Traditionally, budget-constrained shoppers have a specific dollar amount they can’t go over. During a routine shopping trip, these shoppers tend to add up prices in their heads and will quit right before they hit their limit, on the rationale that it’s better to slightly undershoot than overshoot. To do this easily, the shoppers rounded-up the figures, so that a $4.51 package of soup mentally becomes $5.

But when customers had a screen in front of them with a precise count, they felt more comfortable buying more because they knew they’d still be under budget, even if by only a few pennies. For example, a consumer with a budget of $100 for the trip would often spend $91 or $92, which is the result of a couple of dozen items being rounded up. But if the consumer has a precise readout, they might spend a few more dollars to get closer to $99. “The precise pricing can get them to buy more,” said Mike Grimes, an executive VP with Modiv Media, one of the companies involved in the Stop & Shop trial. …

Sure, we can do news stories and columns on these documents but we thought some some readers might want a database of all of these documents as they evaluate new issues. We're not sure if we have the right answer, but today we're launching our best shot: StorefrontBackground. StorefrontBacktalk and StorefrontBackground are linked and share many of the same resources (such as our image library, some of the editors, shared servers, etc.) but are, editorially, polar opposites.Read more...

"After dozens of failed projects in the last ten years, the time is ripe for payments by mobile phone at retailers' checkouts," said the report. "Powerful initiatives in France and the Netherlands, initiated by the likes of Carrefour, Ahold and Auchan, may be strong enough to set European, perhaps even global, standards for mobile phone payments."Read more...