Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

What was different this time, though, is that members were more candid in explaining why they have the goals they do, even if they were not especially forthcoming in how they plan on achieving those goals. The group, for example, re-stressed its intent that data from one chain will not be shared with another chain. Jay Culotta, the treasurer at regional convenience chain Wawa, said many of the mobile vendors say they are not—today—planning on sharing data, but they refuse to say what will happen down the road. "It's not a forever situation," Culotta said, adding that the temptations for leveraging such data will likely be overwhelming. "It's unclear what their business case would be without monetizing that data."Read more...

Yes, the Albertsons logo is the same on both sides. But seven years later, everything from self-checkout to loyalty to POS to prescription systems is now different across the soon-to-be-unsplit chain. And everything will have to be merged—and fast.Read more...

The bad news: PayPal has said nothing whatsoever about how many shoppers in all of these stores, plus Home Depot, JCPenney, Abercrombie & Fitch, Toys”R”Us, Foot Locker and Barnes & Noble, have actually used the service. And of those who did, how many came back to use it again? How many dollars are shoppers pushing through the retail PayPal system? You know that if those figures were anything less than humiliating, they'd have been released by now.Read more...

Part of that may be a novelty factor—glossy printed material isn't so much a part of young consumers' lives today. But that only explains why catalogs might have some influence, not as-big-as-Facebook influence. Given that many chains completely dumped their catalog efforts in favor of social efforts in recent years, this is a genuinely annoying result.Read more...

Our voice and approach—for good or for bad—will not change, and we have been told to continue delivering the same mix of breaking retail IT stories, analysis and opinion columns. (Yes, and some truly awful jokes. It's in the contract that those stay.) The bylines here will stay, as Frank Hayes, PCI Columnist Walt Conway, Legal Columnist Mark Rasch and the rest of the team will continue to do that which we do. Me, too.Read more...

Why is it that the more retail execs applaud the brilliance of a merged-channel strategy, the more chains roll out everything but? Michelle Tinsley, director of transactional retail at Intel, thinks she’s figured it out. It really is just a matter of culture.

“There is a lot of infrastructure and culture built around today’s model of doing retail, which—unfortunately—is still historically a brick-and-mortar type of model. So your incentive plans, your enterprise systems, all are gauged toward a brick-and-mortar. In the last five to 10 years, we’ve added onto that an online capability. But it’s very much bolted on,” Tinsley said. “Even organizational structures have the online version of the store competing with the brick-and-mortar.” Tinsley was a guest this week on StorefrontBacktalk Radio, where she discussed ways to push merged-channel strategies that will actually get them deployed.…

The problem for retail chains is the vagueness of definitions for sites aimed at children. Is the toy section of Walmart.com such a site? What about games at McDonalds.com? Then there's the Catch-22 of asking ages online. If you ask, you'll be required to segregate the data from anyone in that age group and handle it—no pun intended—with kid gloves. (No pun intended. That was a play on words, not a pun.) And if you don't ask, you have the perfect defense that you didn't knowingly collect data from under-age shoppers without parental consent. Did the FTC really intend to encourage what Legal Columnist Mark Rasch calls the Sgt. Schultz Defense?Read more...

This puts retailers in an awkward position. As malls and stores track mobile device activity, retailers will likely have no idea the age of the shoppers associated with phones and tablets unless they ask—which is exactly what COPPA is intended to prevent.Read more...

When asked if they personally want to use mobile as a payment device, the overwhelmingly strongest answer—across literally every demographic group sampled—was the single answer of "not very or not at all interested." That's a wonderful statistical illustration of today's challenge for mobile payment: A lot of people think it's a great idea, but they personally have no interest in doing it. It's great, though, they believe, for everybody else.Read more...

The ongoing saga of Card Activation Technologies (CAT)—the gift card patent owner that has been suing many of the nation’s largest retailers including RadioShack, 7-Eleven, Nordstrom, Macy’s, Starbucks, JCPenney, Sears, OfficeMax, TJX, McDonald’s and Walgreens—took another bad turn for CAT as a federal appeals panel upheld on Monday (Dec. 10) a federal court that had ruled against CAT. CAT has previously said that all of its survival hopes are based on a successful appeal. The financially strapped CAT’s only choice now is to try an appeal to the full circuit or even to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court directly, both of which would be considered long shots.

Still, CAT attorney Mark Peterson said his client has about 30 days to decide its next move. The case that the Third Circuit sustained included a memorable line from Kent A. Jordan, who was serving as trial judge but who is primarily a member of the appellate panel. Jordan referred to one CAT claim, involving granting another party more time to amend a complaint, with the comment that “it takes some chutzpah to mount those objections.” It’s likely to take more than chutzpah for CAT to mount another appeal.…

Facebook went down for about an hour on Monday, apparently due to what Facebook said was “a change to our DNS infrastructure.” Like many DNS mishaps, the users who couldn’t reach the site were scattered around the world, as many could get through when their local DNS lookups updated. But in a heads-up for all of retail, Facebook’s mobile sites never went down.

Based on pings to both Facebook.com and m.facebook.com, Facebook handles load-sharing by routing (non-mobile) traffic to different servers, and that’s probably what the DNS infrastructure change they made had to do with. Because the mobile site was not using the DNS load-balancing—all those requests went to the same IP address—it didn’t suffer from the problem. This is exactly the potential advantage that retailers want to leverage for their sites. By keeping the mobile sites active—and, of course, available for desktop traffic too—it’s one additional level of security when the site has problems. Don’t forget that when the site goes down, a lot of in-store functionality can crash right along with it. The lesson is that you want a separate IP address for your mobile site, so you’re not putting all your IP eggs in one basket.…

Retailers have become—understandably—quite smitten with texting shoppers, given the immediacy and intimacy involved. This starts with capturing their mobile numbers, which has to be done very carefully or retailers will suffer the legal headaches that now bedevils Walmart and Papa Johns.

But there’s a huge downside with texting. Namely, many shoppers either do not have texting plans or they have very limited texting plans. That means those sale price heads-ups are costing your customers’ money and, most likely, alienating them to a massive degree. Although harvesting mobile numbers is relatively easy, identifying who has a generous texting plan is not. AT&T, in what the telco says is an industry first, on Wednesday (Dec. 5) unveiled a program for retailers to send marketing texts to shoppers without those shoppers racking up charges, whether or not they have a text plan. Shoppers must use AT&T and retailers—initial chains include Gap, Staples, Zales and Neiman Marcus—will have to work within the limits of AT&T’s program, suggesting that the texts may be able to flow as freely as a chain might want. But it’s an interesting workaround for the text customer charge issue.…

The Web site, where a company "publicly" advertises its goods and services and shows its prices, is similar to the brick-and-mortar store. However, unlike the store, access to the Web site is granted subject to a "contract" between the merchant and the visitor, typically a "Terms of Use" agreement linked to on the bottom of the homepage. Visit the site, and you are agreeing to these terms. Violate the terms, and you are visiting the site unlawfully, exceeding the scope of your authorization to use the site. Or, in legal parlance, violating the computer hacking statute, 18 U.S.C. 1030.Read more...

This new pricing transparency could severely undermine the purchase behaviors these optimized prices were supposed to cause. Will shoppers wait out fluctuations, knowing that prices will eventually drop sharply again? Will the dizzying speed of the changes make them ignore the price wars entirely and default to the chain and products they're most comfortable with? Should this new shopper pricing transparency change how retailers use pricing optimization? Chains today are soon going to have three buckets of pricing optimization options to crunch: internal, such as inventory level, close-outs, slow-moving SKUs, manufacturer incentives, etc.; external, such as competitor price monitoring or what rivals are running out of; and customer/CRM, which is individualized pricing based on a shopper's purchase history, cart assortment and demographics—for both online and, ultimately, in-store pricing.Read more...

Such flaws could be more easily overlooked were this a minor promotion that no one has focused on. But stickers for Merry Christmas, America adorn almost every door to JCPenney stores, and the promotion involves almost every associate and customer-service desk. The idea is that customers ask associates for some holiday-themed pins (three to a customer at any one time seems to be the rule). The back of the pin has a sticker with seven numbers and letters on it.Read more...

On Monday (Dec. 3), a European mobile and E-Commerce payments and POS card reader vendor (Adyen) introduced a device that can handle both magstripe and EMV, which certainly makes sense for Europe. The interesting part, though, is that the Adyen approach uses two units (a reader/scanner and the Apple or Android smartphone or tablet) connected by Bluetooth. That's a lot of hardware for an associate to lug around in the aisles, but it's apparently necessary (at least now) for the EMV functionality. It also nicely—if unintentionally—sidesteps the Apple Lightning problem. Indeed, Bluetooth would theoretically avoid other interface upgrade issues, too. Is the trade-off worth it?Read more...

One new element here is Visa's use of various phone and tablet attributes to try and authenticate the device being used. (Sign of the times: In Visa parlance, laptops are no longer considered mobile.) "There are more than 100 different fields that we can get back from a particular device," including frequency, operating system version, the existence of antivirus software and physical location, said Mark Nelsen, Visa's head of risk and authentication product development.Read more...

Get it wrong, writes Legal Columnist Mark Rasch, and you can be paying tens of thousands of dollars in fines, court costs and legal bills. And here's the fun part: There's virtually no difference between the two.Read more...

U.S. District Court Judge C. Lynwood Smith, Jr., said that Walmart associates said that the "telephone number was needed 'in case there were any questions that came up.' None of the defendant's employees explicitly sought permission to send plaintiff text messages. Nevertheless, plaintiff received an undisclosed number of text messages on her cellular telephone from defendant within hours of leaving her prescription at defendant's pharmacy."Read more...

Before retailers start taking down the happy Santa videos and replacing them with films about dying puppies, let's drill down into what the study actually found. (OK, you can show one of the puppy videos, but not the one with the beagles.) The study, from the University of California Riverside's School of Business Administration, offered participants various levels of Amazon gift certificates, with some of the awards being given immediately and larger payments delivered later.Read more...

When a CEO takes over a troubled chain, bold moves are generally encouraged. But when the chain is a much-beloved 110-year-old, 1,100-store, $17 billion household name, bold can be very bad. Enter Ron Johnson—fresh from Apple and formerly from Target—and his taking over JCPenney. The chain is melting impressively quickly, and Johnson’s boldness is a textbook example of taking the wrong lessons from retail history.

This is explored in StorefrontBacktalk‘s November monthly column in Retail Week, the U.K.’s largest retail publication. The column lives here at Retail Week. For those who don’t have a Retail Week subscription—shame on you!—here’s a copy at StorefrontBacktalk. You can also check out all of our recent Retail Week columns here.…

The result, as our media partner Retail Week reported, isn't just that vendors were pulled into thinking in terms of actual retail needs. It also pulled non-IT managers into thinking about IT. As John Lewis Retail Operations Manager Mark Lewis said, "It sparks ideas in our minds."Read more...

Visa officially went live with its V.me online payment service on Tuesday (Nov. 13), and there’s a lot to be underwhelmed about. After a year of testing the service—in which customers type in a login and password at an E-Commerce site and have all their payment and delivery information automatically filled in—V.me’s marquee E-tailers are Buy.com and 1-800-Flowers.com, along with about two dozen more. Visa has also lined up 50 banks (the best known is U.S. Bank) with a total of about 55 million card customers.

But

none of that may matter, because Visa is counting on the banks to promote V.me to their customers. Yes, the same banks who have sent millions of contactless cards to their customers without telling them they were contactless cards—that’s who Visa believes can convince cardholders to use a service they’ve never heard of instead of PayPal and Amazon. The likelihood they’ll ever hear about it in a meaningful way from their card-issuing bank? Just slightly less than V.me’s infinitesimal chances.…

Giving those shoppers an in-store option to use that PayPal currency, a place that has used (along with new) instruments and audio equipment and where said equipment can be touched and listened to before being purchased, made a lot of sense to Wes Muddle, Guitar Center's VP for Finance. So it's not surprising that the chain made it a priority to let every customer know about the PayPal option, through lots of store signage and associate training. And, gasp, Guitar Center is even considering offering cash incentives—though it would much rather PayPal do that instead.Read more...

The tags are soft tags and Kovio's approach is to try and get manufacturers to embed them deep within shoes and other clothing so they are not visible to the shopper, which makes the removal of the devices almost impossible without severely damaging the product. Mashkoori argues that this could change many standard retail tactics, such as having only one shoe on the floor and forcing the associate to go to the backroom to get the mate.Read more...