Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Had the court found him not guilty, it would have sent a message that shoplifting requires some proof of illegal intent. NYC sees a huge number of shoplifting charges every year. The city can now expect a lot more, unless retail loss prevention operations suddenly get a lot smarter. This is far from solely an LP issue, though. News of this arrest can seriously reduce consumer willingness to try mobile payment at any retailer. Certainly the consumers we've mentioned this situation to had the reaction, "Well, I think I'll be whipping out Mr. MasterCard for any of my Apple purchases from now on. It's slower, but it sure beats jail if I happen to hit the wrong button or forget to hit the right button."Read more...

And it can't be created the same way Visa and MasterCard were, because that's now illegal. If the MCX retailers' alliance wants to beat the card brands, that's going to require some seriously new thinking—and it should probably start with loyalty.Read more...

Given that the PCI Council's guidance is final in all matters related to PCI scoping, pens PCI Columnist Walter Conway, it is time to shift the discussion to helping merchants that qualify to use a self-assessment questionnaire (SAQ) and pick the right one. We can do this by posing a question: When is a merchant that has just validated its PCI DSS compliance not compliant?Read more...

Don't be so quick to conclude that your people aren't doing this, though, as it extends way beyond rent-to-own. Many current—and many more future—devices will have technology that enables post-purchase information capture. For example, RFID tags that aren't disabled before the customer leaves the store might enable retailers, marketers or others to capture data from those devices without the consumer's knowledge or effective consent. And don't get Legal Columnist Mark Rasch started on mobile.Read more...

That's way outside the traditional scope of an E-Commerce president. Then again, Durchslag's lack of retail experience and tech background might explain much of his optimism—and his scope creep. And he's still up against Best Buy's reputation as a victim of showrooming, unknowledgeable associates, high prices and the customer perception that it's the electronics retailer of last resort—after Amazon, Walmart, Target and Costco have turned up empty. Durchslag understands some of the huge perception issues his team must overcome. "Showrooming is a symptom, not a cause," he said. "It's arrogant to think that you're going to cause or prevent that kind of behavior. It is a reality that is happening today. The only question is: Are you going to harness that and make things easier, or are you going to try and put your head in the sand and deny reality?"Read more...

The advantage seems pretty obvious: Using an app on a phone or tablet means a store manager or associate can see what changes look like as they're made, avoiding embarrassing differences between what appears on a PC's screen and the display. The equally obvious downside: You're trusting your public face to the security of a smartphone.Read more...

We were hoping this week to find out when Isis will finally launch its mobile payment trials in Salt Lake City and Austin. No such luck: “Imminently” is all Isis Chief Commerce Officer Ed Busby would say at a presentation in New York on Wednesday (Oct. 10). But Busby did pass along a comment that crystallizes the problem chains have with the mobile-operator consortium, as well as with Google Wallet and PayPal: “I have a friend over at Banana Republic. He always tells me, ‘Ed, why is it everybody is knocking on my door all the time saying they can give my gross margin away faster than everybody else?'”

That’s how chains see Isis and its rivals? No wonder retailers aren’t pushing mobile payments at POS. Coupons and promotions (which the mobile payments guys love) eat margins. Mobile payments aren’t offering much-hoped-for interchange relief, either. That suggests mobile payments players need to start scrambling. Should they help enable loyalty first and ride payments on loyalty’s coattails? Or make it easier to use phones as in-store customer trackers? Or promise to give chains more and better CRM data? We don’t know. But without something serious in it for retailers to encourage a serious retailer push, there won’t be any mobile payments—Isis or not.…

The lack of cash payments rips into tips, which hits employee compensation. Not only are tips employee compensation that the retailer doesn't have to fund, but tips can enable employees to be paid less in salary. Mobile payment has far greater convenience, but its ability to undercut tips is something few retailers have seriously considered. Clearly, this is important to Starbucks. It's important enough for the company to violate one of the golden rules of mobile app announcements: Never announce a capability before it's deployed, especially as many as 11 months before it's deployed.Read more...

"If your organization is spending too much time and money maintaining legacy systems, it's because you either made poor decisions in favor of short-term gains or lacked long-term vision," pens Retail Columnist Todd Michaud. "If your IT leader (I won't even assume you have a CIO) is trapped working for your CFO or your IT budget is based on a percentage of your sales, you deserve the spaghetti diagram that is your IT infrastructure. Showrooming is a self-inflicted wound."Read more...

In the otherwise futile battle against showrooming—do you really think making it

harder for your shoppers to compare prices on their mobile devices isn’t going to backfire?—some chains have started to get clever. Perhaps the motivation is ill- advised. But if the results are helpful to both shoppers and retailers, why complain?

Target’s QR endcap move is a fine example. Although it is only one of many, Target’s efforts are the topic of StorefrontBacktalk‘s October 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.…

Maybe it's the Walmart mystique.Read more...

Back in May, we told you about a train-station grocery trial by online grocer Peapod, which was itself a direct steal from a Tesco QR code subway trial in South Korea. The Peapod effort started at 16 stations in the Chicago and Philadelphia metro areas. Here's the unexpected part: On Monday (Oct. 1), Peapod expanded the trial to more than 100 locations. The expansion—adding Boston, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey and Washington, D.C., commuter rail stations to the test—is impressive in its scope. And it means someone at the retailer must have seen some powerful numbers.Read more...

Given all of those interesting attributes being tested, the trial—which starts October 14—is going to have to extrapolate data from an unusually small product sample: 20 toys that will be featured on endcaps. Granted, those are literally the expected 20 hottest toys from this upcoming holiday season. But it's still only 20. That's statistically tiny within a store with an average of 70,000 SKUs.Read more...

The shift is part of an IT revamp that includes a merged inventory system, ship-from-any-store capability and improved turnaround on returns—in addition to a new West Coast datacenter that effectively works as a disaster recovery hot site for the company's existing East Coast IT operations.Read more...

When Todd saw last week's StorefrontBacktalk story by Frank Hayes about how top retailers did not seem to know that Android tablets existed, he was surprised, because those results were quite different than his own research done just a few months earlier. But Todd's research focused solely on the iPad. So what is causing us to have such different experiences, beyond Android versus iPad? It appears that the 7-inch form factor is the culprit.Read more...

If there truly is no expectation of privacy in what is called "historical cell data" (where you were, as opposed to where you are right now), then there would be no problem with retailers' collecting this data about their customers with or without the knowledge and consent of those customers, pens Legal Columnist Mark Rasch. Just as video cameras in the mall capture images of customers (and their locations), retailers could use cell data to find out where their best (and worst) customers are. Accepting the government's argument before the federal court, there would be no privacy violation for a retailer doing this.Read more...

But even Kantor admitted PayPal could fix the problem with a simple change in its merchant terms. A much trickier problem for retailers post-settlement may be deciding what price to put on each item—or whether there even is a single official price.Read more...

"It undermines the strategy," said Finish Line CIO Terry Ledbetter. "But quite frankly, it was hard to imagine how resistant customers would be to telling you who they are. 'You don't need to know who I am,'" he said, adding that the chain is exploring using an opt-in feature on its mobile app that would broadcast to all associates when a customer walks in the store.Read more...

Among the largest retailers, only the Amazon, Home Depot, McDonald's, Kohl's, Apple, JCPenney, Gap and Overstock Web sites showed up in a tablet or full-screen version. Staples.com showed up on a seven-inch tablet with slightly more content added to what was still clearly a site designed for a phone screen. But Walmart, Target, Walgreen, CVS, Lowe's, Best Buy, Sears, Macy's, Rite Aid, TJ Maxx, Nordstrom and even eBay served up exactly the same screen for a tablet as for a phone with a screen a small fraction of the size. On the phone, those compact, minimalist sites help usability. On even a small tablet, the result is vast expanses of blank space that all but drives away customers.Read more...

It used to be only chains that kept detailed databases of competitors' prices. Now every coupon or rebate Web site has data that's even more current, which makes beating a chain's price-match promotion trivial.Read more...

This marriage could be a very low-cost proposition, with the app asking for the cart's number or, better yet, the cart presenting a QR or barcode that the app can scan. The app—with its capabilities and its CRM history—could use a cart equipped with a simple radio beacon for navigation purposes.Read more...

For the Amazon sales tax haven to be an issue, you first have to believe that the only—or even a main—reason why people shop at Amazon is to save the sales tax. There are quite a few reasons why that is absurd. But the fact that shipping charges are typically many times the sales tax is a pretty good place to start.Read more...

No major advances in mobile location technology have emerged. In the last couple of months, however, quite a few very different approaches to location tracking have emerged. These range from leveraging the earth's magnetic field to piggybacking the data already used by mobile ads, tracking a combination of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signals, and riding the audio signals from existing music speakers. One app even reacts to light patterns from specially enhanced LED bulbs.Read more...

What's impressive is that this approach is three levels deeper than what RedLaser has been used to. It goes beyond limiting its results to Best Buy, focusing instead on what that specific Best Buy store sells and then limiting the results to what that specific Best Buy store has in stock. This means Best Buy's APIs are sharing real-time inventory data.Read more...

The 1,100-store chain's CEO, Ron Johnson, admits that JCPenney is still figuring out the workflow for checkout. He'd better work fast—this is a lot more complicated than anyone assumed.Read more...