Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

An Apple surprise might have forced the mobile-operator consortium to rush into its launch. That's not something ISIS wants to do, especially now that Google has already tried and abandoned ISIS's chosen technical approach and the number of ISIS-supporting retailers still isn't up to what ISIS wants it to be. And that's not the worst of it: There's still no leadership in mobile payments.Read more...

Yet another video-related shopping patent was issued last Friday (Sept. 14), and it’s not for retail chains—at least not at first glance. U.S. Patent 8,244,594 describes a personal shopping service in which a customer can use video to actually see the shopper-for-hire collecting the shopping list in real time, so it’s possible to reject or swap out items as they’re being grabbed from the shelf. That’s not a likely candidate for a service from a big chain, but it raises an interesting question: Why aren’t chains already using video this way in-store?

After all, customers have long called stores to ask if a particular item is in stock. Associates can check the shelves to confirm, though they

don’t always get it right. Now that camera- and Wi-Fi-equipped phones and tablets are so cheap, it’s practical to let customers watch online as associates check those shelves to see exactly what’s there. That’s at least as compelling a use of video as Amazon’s “watch while we pack your order” approach—and in this case, it could actually save customers time and avoid associate mistakes. Besides, half the retail battle is getting that customer into the store—even virtually.…

There have always been only two reasons for seeking opt-ins—supposed legal protection and to negate future customer backlash. As a practical matter, opt-ins help out in neither situation. Let's start, though, by admitting there are two types of opt-in: knowingly/deliberate, and what retail chains use.Read more...

Currently, retailers have a choice. They can use their smartphones and tablets, sticking on a dongle that reads a payment card's magnetic stripe, and be cruising down the mobile commerce highway. Or they can be PCI DSS compliant. Unfortunately, the PCI Council has stated that smartphones and tablets are not secure, pens PCI Columnist Walter Conway.Read more...

Clearly, that's not always the case. Sometimes spending much more is highly beneficial but may not deliver immediately better mobile stats; for example, an infrastructure investment that will provide better uptime and faster performance for many years. That caveat caveated, the fact that Forrester found few, if any, performance gains from spending more money on mobile is deliciously counter-intuitive.Read more...

Unfortunately, the two software suppliers aren't just throwing the usual hissy fits at each other. They're configuring their software as part of the feud, which means retailers and their online privacy policies and, potentially, the Federal Trade Commission are caught in the middle.Read more...

When it comes to merged-channel thinking, customers are already there. E-Commerce execs are getting there. But chain CEOs don't get it yet.Read more...

Becoming a CIO is a lot like running for office. You have to make a lot of promises to get the job. Once you get the job, you have high expectations to deliver on a lot of competing interests (a lot of people to keep happy). You find way more ghosts in your closet from your predecessor than you expected. You get about four years to make everything happen, or they will find someone else to do the job. Sound familiar?Read more...

So you think your team has difficulty making your QR codes work? Try making a QR code out of corn stalks. In one of the more bizarre—and pointless, which is what makes it fun—QR codes we’ve run into, an Alberta, Canada, farmer has created what the Guinness

Book of World Records has concluded is the world’s largest QR code. It’s cut into a cornfield and only visible by a mobile-phone-carrying helicopter pilot. The QR code was verified at 28,760 meters, according to Guinness spokesperson Sara Wilcox.

One of the farmers, Rachel Kraay, said they had some IT lawnmower work to do when the code

initially didn’t work: “Did some figuring and figured out that the contrast wasn’t quite good enough. So then we got in there with the Rototiller and dug up the paths …

With a staggering $444 billion in annual revenue, Walmart has generally been sluggish and conservative, allowing tech innovations to be toyed with by rivals such as Amazon.com. But in the last few months, Walmart has quietly started acting like quite the aggressive startup. It has embraced mobile and various innovative tech approaches, including an infatuation with social media, in a way that no major chain—especially not the old Walmart—has ever done.

Consider just the last couple weeks’ activity at Walmart alone, and it becomes clear how change is being embraced by Bentonville. And as anyone who has ever worked with an aircraft carrier knows, turning such a huge boat around quickly is hardly easy. How that’s happening at Walmart is the topic of StorefrontBacktalk‘s September 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.…

PCI Columnist Walter Conway has a lot of sympathy for the participating organizations that have asked for a little mercy here. He wants to see whether the PCI Council will permit merchants and service providers to determine their own requirements in some of these areas—and there is precedent for that.Read more...

What should be the policy if the customer absentmindedly—or sloppily or in haste—forgets to click an icon? Even more frightening, what if the shopper does properly process the transaction on his/her mobile phone but the application or the transmission glitches, for whatever reason?Read more...

When Walmart quietly (was it really intended to be quiet? More on that in a moment) ran this test at one store near the Bentonville mothership, many compared it with the chain's self-checkout efforts. But this setup's advantages make that particular function of minimal interest. Still, it's the most palatable explanation to offer shoppers.Read more...

Walgreens has finally committed to putting planograms of every store on its own mobile app by the end of this month. Back in mid-July, we pointed out that although the drugstore chain would be the first major retailer to do that, hardly any customers would know about it because the store maps would only be available on an app from the vendor (Aisle411), not Walgreens.

Why did Walgreens flip? The chain had been considering such a move throughout, Aisle411 CEO Nathan Pettyjohn said on Wednesday (Sept. 5), but wanted to first let the vendor go live so that it could be tested publicly for glitches without risking associating any problems with Walgreens directly. Within a few weeks, Walgreens had tested sufficiently that it agreed to incorporate the planograms into its core app. Walgreens, which is expected to announce this feature imminently, did not comment for this story. And it’s still not clear how—or even if—Walgreens will tell its customers about the new functionality, whether through its homepage, in-store signage, E-mail blasts or other advertising. That’s been a key issue with mobile features, the lack of “selling” them to customers and the lack of any incentives to encourage shoppers to try them.…

Now imagine the same idea used in-store: A customer walks in, taps her phone against a pedestal-style kiosk and is automatically connected to the chain's CRM system via a secure Wi-Fi network. After that, everything she does in-store is CRM gravy.Read more...

Although the case before the panel—which ruled August 14—involved accused drug traffickers, the jurists made it clear that privacy was not waived simply because of criminal activity. "We do not mean to suggest that there was no reasonable expectation of privacy because (defendant's) phone was used in the commission of a crime, or that the cell phone was illegally possessed," the Sixth Circuit ruled in its written decision. "On the contrary, an innocent actor would similarly lack a reasonable expectation of privacy in the inherent external locatability of a tool that he or she bought." That's a crucial point for retailers, as was wording that people who could otherwise be seen by other people—such as when walking down an aisle at Costco or JCPenney or walking in a neighborhood near a Target or Walgreens—could not reasonably believe that their location is a Constitutionally protected secret.Read more...

Even the possibility that the French order-online-pick-up-in-store system is being tested for eventual U.S. launch looks like wishful thinking, considering how differently McDonald's uses customer-facing technology in France.Read more...

PayPal's Discover credit-card network deal will see PayPal integrated with Discover, which it will then push out to all merchants that accept Discover—assuming the acquirers don't stop them. This is big news. Feeling violated by the costs of PCI compliance, merchants are loathe to spend any money on their POS technology, especially when it comes to payment systems. And although there has been a lot of news about the payment industry in the last month, noticeably absent in the media are the major POS players. On the surface, this announcement appears to remove that obstacle.Read more...

And at heart, it's about how much money chains are willing to spend to dislodge the card brands from their lock-in. Short answer: not very much.Read more...

That kind of data-sharing is exactly what many of the retail treasury sorts behind the MCX retail mobile payment alliance have feared. "Whatever the retailer is passing over the lines today, in this initial phase, we'll get that data. We believe the data is that of the retailers, and we would not use that information to share with other retailers," said Don Kingsborough, PayPal's VP of Retail and Prepaid Products. "But, at the same time, when you combine it with our online and mobile information, it becomes very powerful information that we can use—with the retailers."Read more...

Given that a thief can easily walk off with a device that costs hundreds of dollars to replace and is easy to sell, this could change the loss-prevention equation when it comes to tablets. The biggest challenges now may be making sure the POS app is locked down—and convincing police to call Apple. Exactly how easily and extensively can Apple track? Details shared with police are telling.Read more...

Is it time to insist that mobile devices have some type of authentication beyond PIN? The frightening scenario: A thief watches a shopper making a mobile purchase at the mall and shoulder surfs his 4-digit PIN. The thief steals the phone, walks into a store, buys a $5,000 necklace with that phone and that PIN and then dumps the phone into a trashcan.

That authentication might be biometrics (the phone can scan the buyer’s facial shape, match a voiceprint or do a retinal scan, although preferably not a fingerprint) or a onetime-password fob or even—for the ultimate simplicity—a rotating series of personal questions, so that shoulder-surfing wouldn’t work. Even Square and SMB PayPal trials are using customer photos for verification. But with in-store mobile purchases now going into widespread retail trials, it may be time for some real security. Or is the absurdity of signature verification not enough to motivate anymore? …

A report this week from vendor Monetate, for example, showed that desktop devices (laptops, PCs and Macs, primarily) in Q2 2012 typically converted at 3.34 percent, while tablets converted at 3.17 percent and smartphones came in at a measly 1.09 percent. The question is, though, what does it mean when a smartphone shopper doesn't close the deal? Could that shopper actually be inside the store at the time and close the deal by taking the item to a checkout lane? Or perhaps that customer is on the train coming home from work and chooses to do the research, browsing and deciding on his or her phone and then saving the winning product to a shopping cart, with the intent of purchasing that night from a laptop at home?Read more...

This comes on top of the usual political bickering when an organization includes such suspicious rivals as Walmart and Target. Indeed, participants also describe collisions between the group's treasury/finance people (who represent the bulk of the dues-paying members) and those same chains' marketing/mobile groups (who have very different objectives).Read more...

Less power means shorter antenna range, which in turn means the payment card needs to be almost touching the antenna. "The read-rate is not what you need it to be, certainly not the 4 centimeters you expect it to be," said John Verdeschi, Senior Business Leader of Product Development at MasterCard. Read more...