Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Yes, everyone hates the last-generation E-mail king, which on Tuesday (May 29) announced an operating loss and layoffs. But earlier this month RIM also finally agreed to let carriers and banks use NFC-enabled BlackBerrys for payments in Canada—without coupons, ads or a cut for RIM.Read more...

Gartner said: "Worldwide mobile payment transaction values will surpass $171.5 billion in 2012, a 61.9 percent increase from 2011 values of $105.9 billion." Within minutes, a statement from IHL said: "Mobile in all aspects of retail is now a $5.5 billion market worldwide."Read more...

MasterCard on May 23 released formal guidance giving retailers a roadmap to implement MPOS using smartphones, tablets and other devices equipped with a "card reader accessory." The problem? The recommended best practices may not be PCI compliant and they conflict with MasterCard's own rules, as the card brand acknowledges.Read more...

As chains become more merged-channel and outright encourage customers to fly back and forth between mobile, in-store, online, call centers and Twitter interactions, the lack of visibility into real-time inventory is going to create headaches much worse than mere out-of-stocks.Read more...

That's unlikely—if widely deploying a technology was the problem, contactless cards would have wiped out magstripes years ago. But will Apple use Bluetooth for payments? We may know by the end of the summer.Read more...

On the down side: Police said they found "hundreds of unopened boxes of Legos" at the VP's home, strongly suggesting that he had had considerable success using switched barcodes. On the plus side: Target's loss prevention team coordinated with various stores and shared pictures of the VP, enabling him to be identified and followed before a barcode swap.Read more...

One vendor is arguing that by visually making the screen image look identical to whatever card shoppers are using, the shoppers will be more inclined to enter their PIN. The company has added a nice security twist: rotating the key position so anyone sniffing the communication—or using keygrabbers or spyware—can't easily determine the numbers entered. But that twist has its own twist: By scrambling the number positions with each click, some consumers will take a lot more time to enter their PIN, because they have memorized it based on the ATM, retail in-store and computer keypads they are used to.Read more...

This came to mind because of an interesting product rollout on Monday (May 21) by a vendor called Passware. Its launch involves a means of grabbing passwords from within any Excel spreadsheet or Word doc by quickly locating encryption keys in memory.Read more...

What is the "price" of an item? New technologies enable the prices charged, and the display of those prices, to change instantly. Ask anyone trying to purchase a plane ticket from New York to Detroit what the "price" of that ticket is. Read more...

That's not a bad turnout for a normal technology trial. But ISIS is promising just hundreds of locations in cities with a total population of nearly a million—and considering the weak consumer response so far to mobile wallets, anything less than an overwhelming assault may already be doomed.Read more...

The result: It costs JCPenney at least $600 million per year more than it should to run the chain—which explains a lot about the quarter's $55 million operating loss. "I can think of no other thing to say about our systems and our IT infrastructure, and I have seen a lot of them: It's a mess," Kramer said.Read more...

One online payment vendor is preparing to sell tons of youth purchase data—apparently, this is the first time anyone has tried—avoiding immediate legal problems by offering the data in aggregate.Read more...

Beyond encouraging shoppers to use over-the-air access that chains need do nothing to facilitate, what if apps used the mobile device's memory to play those demos and to look up those barcodes, and then waited to update until the device was reconnected? Shopkick is using one version of this modified store-and-forward mobile strategy, as of an update deployed last month.Read more...

Russo said the training will be an online course so nobody should have to travel, Conway writes.Read more...

With more than 3,000 stories, columns and GuestViews in the content database here at StorefrontBacktalk, we thought it was time to do a little upgrading. Starting this week, readers (both free and Premium) can search for stories by limiting the search to just the story’s headline—as opposed to the headline and the full text. (Note: Right below the search bar, readers can choose HED Only or Story And Hed.)

The ability to isolate a search to the headline can be useful in two ways. If you happen to remember that the headline mentioned Target, for example, you need not see every story that mentioned Target (or even used the word “target”). The second way is practical. If you want a story that is primarily about tokens—and not a story that merely mentions the word somewhere—the headline-only search can be helpful.…

Ironically, while MasterCard's PayPass Wallet for NFC-equipped phones got most of the attention, that's still largely a pipe dream—MasterCard hasn't even talked any mobile operators into giving it access to the NFC chip. But the online payments effort will offer tokenization to reduce PCI scope for E-Commerce. The bad news: You can probably forget about any interchange relief.Read more...

As E-tailers continue their incursions into rivals’ physical stores, the only viable defense is to radically upgrade customer service and the overall store experience. Two of the retailers most known for this are Apple and Walt Disney World Resort. Have you ever heard of an E-Commerce site cutting into the revenue at Disney? What specific tactics can brick-and-mortars steal? Here’s a good one: Disney this month is experimenting with an RFID/iPad combo to upgrade its famous FastPass system—for letting people reserve tickets/times and thereby get much faster access to rides and events. As Disney employees carry iPads, customers’ RFID bracelets will interact with CRM and ride information.

It’s fair to argue that Disney has always been the retail exception. It pushed contactless payment by offering deep discounts, and Disney even successfully got customers to use digital biometrics (fingerprints) for park access. But that’s just the point. With a heavy enough emphasis on experience and customer service, shoppers are willing to do almost anything, including—just perhaps—forgetting all about Amazon.…

The sales guy says, "Yes. Yes. Yes." You say, "No. No. No." In this surreal world, pens Retail Columnist Todd Michaud, you are watching your hard-fought IT career be dismantled by an onslaught of companies that shake your hand and look you in the eye as they pitch your demise one product and service at a time. And you had better buckle-up, Buttercup; it's only going to get worse.Read more...

With changes as small as 1 percent, it's hard to determine what, if anything, caused the change. The number of Level 2s dropped slightly (from 1,066 to 1,060), so it's possible a couple of the chains that left might have had compliance issues.Read more...

Writes PCI Columnist Walter Conway: Current PCI Council guidance (FAQ 10359) holds that encrypted data can be out of a merchant's PCI scope "if, and only if, it has been validated that the entity that possesses encrypted cardholder data does not have the means to decrypt it." The important word here is "entity." That is, the ability to decrypt the data must rest with some unrelated third party. With the emergence of P2PE, could this scoping guidance be revised to where the only appropriate "entity" is an approved P2PE provider?Read more...

What did the shopper do right after scanning that barcode? If the answer can be found in mobile analytics data, you're fine. But if the answer can only be found by overlaying that mobile data with in-store CRM data, most won't see it. What about synching E-Commerce activity with calls to the call center two minutes later? Or linking an E-Commerce search to an in-store POS action 20 minutes later? How about social activity matched with any of the above?Read more...

And Amazon's CFO offered two interesting stats: One shows that Amazon is collecting a lot more state sales taxes than is generally perceived, and the second reports that almost 40 percent of Amazon's sales these days are not from products the E-tailer directly sells.Read more...

Unfortunately, system resellers and integrators formerly fell in a governance gap in PCI, and their actions were outside the PCI Council's jurisdiction. PCI Columnist Walter Conway says "were," because that situation is about to change.Read more...

Beyond new security holes on the risk side, the reward side is equally huge. While everyone seems to have focused on the general unbanked audience, a much more interesting prospect for this program is teenagers. Plus, this is sort of an anti-showrooming move, where online shoppers are being lured into the stores. Revenue sharing between Walmart channels is also a point of nervousness with this program. And a store's inability to cancel such online orders—even if the customer then finds the item on the shelf—is problematic, too. This is a rare example of the kinds of compromises—between online and in-store operations—chains must make these days.Read more...

The geolocation opt-in alerts are an interesting twist, especially when a consumer is walking in a city (locally or when traveling) and has no idea that a particular retailer has a store three blocks to the right.Read more...