Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Given that prior judges have ruled that a benefit to consumers is helpful in establishing the need for a subpoena to overcome retail privacy policies, Wright told Superior Court Judge Fred Rotenberg that "it is hard to imagine more of a benefit than allowing Macy's customers to take a toxic substance away from their children. (Macy's) is playing a dangerous game of hide the ball and the only one who loses are the children it puts at risk." The case is important because it raises many critical retail IT issues, including how private--or proprietary--the courts should consider data, including purchase histories from CRM/loyalty and POS payment files.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...

The 4,308-store Tesco grocery chain, one of Europe’s largest retailers and the largest in the U.K., suffered some sort of a systems glitch during “an IT update overnight” that shut down POS systems for about 100 stores on Monday (May 11), but spared all self-checkout stations, Tesco officials said. Given that a retail self-checkout system typically runs its own application separate from the POS app, said IHL President Greg Buzek, this suggests the problem was internal to the POS software, not the payment application or database.

“Tesco said that all types of payments, including credit and debit cards and cash via normal tills, had been affected. However, self-service systems in affected stores and in Tesco garages had not been affected,” reported ZDNet. “An investigation into the cause of the outage will be launched shortly, the spokesperson said, noting that the problem was probably caused by software updates that had been sent out on Sunday night. The issues were unlikely to have been caused by a hacking attack, the spokesperson added.”…

Data breach victims pushing back against fines is nothing new, but a processor calling out one of the two largest card brands and doing it during a very public investor conference call, well, that's a bit different.Read more...

Making the hardware technology part work will be comparatively easy, compared with the task of getting retailers to buy in, along with getting the backing of Visa, MasterCard, AmericanExpress and other card brands. Heartland CEO Robert Carr discussed the details of his plan for the first time in a pair of StorefrontBacktalk podcasts, with the first of the podcast series focusing on the technology details of the plan and the second delving into the practical industry political realities of getting such a plan widely used.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...

With an eye on group buying—whether it’s 20 people in an office buying a birthday gift or 9 farflung residents chipping in on an anniversary trip or even a Boy Scout Troop—Sears.com on Tuesday (May 5) introduced Givetogether. The program allows for gift givers to use credit cards or other means to pool resources for a combined purchase.

Despite being the great-great-grandpappy of the Big Box chains, Sears has consistently been ahead of the curve with creativity in E-Commerce, mobile commerce and cross-channel thinking. Unlike many of the E-Commerce ideas we’re hearing from the largest chains these days, this development isn’t the proverbial solution in search of a problem. This is an actual awkward issue that consumers have today that the Web can help with. …

This goes far beyond the CVSes, Walgreens, Rite-Aids and Wal-Marts of the world. We often complain about the store-centric thinking that undermines merged channel strategies, where they see online, mobile and even the call center as the enemy. What about the myopic view that goes beyond "store versus online" and gets into "my wonderful store on Elm St. versus your horrible store on Maple Ave." We discuss intra-chain rivalries, often overlooking into-in-store rivalries.Read more...

Every now and then, a piece we’ll run here at StorefrontBacktalk ignites a bit more of a furor than typical. Such was the case with a Dave Taylor column we ran last week called PCI’s Grading System Is Failing.

The reader comments were so strong and, in some cases, contradictory, that they make an almost more compelling case than did the original column. We’re mentioning it because our readers tend to rarely go back to a week-old story and look for comments. In this case, though, If you’re interested in PCI strategy debates, you might want to check out some of the comments.…

But GuestView PCI Columnist David Taylor wonders if one national standard beats two pairs of industry standards. He takes a hard look at some of the current players and their rather interesting histories.Read more...

On Tuesday (May 5) , the National Irish Bank (NIB) reported that “technology problems were behind the failure of its debit and credit cards at point-of-sale machines in shops and other businesses across the country” earlier that day. But while the unspecified glitch was resolved within a few hours, retail POS issues continued, prompting the bank to “apologize unreservedly,” according to The Irish Times.

Here’s where it gets interesting. The bank issued a statement that “as soon as the problem was identified, the network was switched to a back-up system and National Irish Bank customers are able to access their funds at the bank’s ATMs as normal now.” But what about Ireland’s retailers, whose transactions were halted? No emergent backup system for them? Another reminder that banks know ATMs and vaults, but POS is a new and lower priority concept. …

The journey began when Heartland was certified PCI compliant April 2008. A few months later, Heartland was severely breached and Visa began its revisionist history dance. Given a public stance that no PCI-compliant merchant or processor had ever been breached, Visa determined that Heartland therefore could not have been truly compliant in April 2008. On March 12, 2009, Visa removed Heartland from the compliant list. But just in case someone might mistake this move as Visa actually caring about security, Visa stressed to retailers that everything was OK and that they were completely safe using Heartland anyway.Read more...

Typically, statements announcing such deals (which, in this case, included Subway's acquirer for its stores in Canada, Chase Paymentech) feature a canned quote from an executive with the chain, praising the vendor for its wisdom. In this case, the quote provided by Subway was anything but warm. Read more...

Google hasn't been faring especially well, with some seeing Google's move in April to boost prices as desperate. Then on Thursday (April 30), Amazon counterpounched, offering to waive fees for five months for retailers who would be new customers for its Amazon Payments program. The Amazon offer was quite limited, excluding any existing consumers, having the fee waiver only lasts five months (from April 29 through Sept. 30). Technically, it would be five months for those who signed up immediately. The deal isn't for five free months, it's free transactions until Sept. 30, apparently regardless of when a merchant signs up. The deal also has an especially low ceiling, with Amazon saying that the fees will start sooner than Sept. 30 if $2 million or more is sold.Read more...

With the business clientele, the ability for self-service systems to award points for purchases is important, but not necessarily as important as allowing customized screens delivering different options for employees of different companies, said Jay Eisenberg, a senior marketing director for the $14.5 billion 1,713-store office supply chain. The trick was in how to identify the customer given that the printer was initially only outfitted with a magstripe reader.Read more...

Although IHL's projection of "strong growth" for POS units in China and India should not have an immediate impact on POS pricetags, a secondary effect just might.Read more...

The system is oriented to forcing retailers to fail, argues GuestView PCI Columnist David Taylor, and it does this by being utterly insensitive to risk, which is surprising because the financial services industry runs on risk management. So if big finance runs on risk management, why are retail payment security rules running away from it?Read more...

But analysts were less than impressed, pointing out that the Motorola units were actually larger than many other major RFID readers today, despite being smaller than other Motorola RFID readers. "I definitely classify this as 'ho hum.' ThingMagic and Impinj as well as some others have much smaller form factors and more functions," said Pete Abell, a longtime RFID analyst (used to be with IDC) who today works as an independent consultant.Read more...

Starbucks is boasting of a 60 percent redemption rate on a mobile coupon trial being done in Mexico, where customers send SMS messages to access 2D barcode mobile coupons. That is an unusually—suspiciously?—high redemption rate, especially for a mobile program.

“Every time you present your coupon, the offer would be modified, such as get a venti for the price of a tall, to make people come more often to the store,” said this story from Mobile Marketer. “The call-to-action urged consumers to text keyword STARBUCKS to short code 80080 to get a WAP link to download a buy-one-get-one-free 2D barcode mobile coupon. Starbucks is equipped with 2D bar code recognition software, so employees can read the mobile coupon directly from consumers’ mobile phones at the point of sale.”…

The neighborhood physical video rental business is in a very difficult position these days. Blockbuster is trying to survive with a kiosk strategy, courtesy of an NCR acquisition of a large operator of video rental kiosks.

But is this too little, ludicrously too late? A nice discussion happened Wednesday (April 23) at RetailWire about the Blockbuster strategy. My favorite comment comes from author Ryan Mathews from Black Monk Consulting: ” Blockbuster stumbled because the notion of physical access became less important in the video rental business. Does creating another physical solution change all that? I don’t think so.” The discussion is worth a read.…

Most of the products that are likely to be at play in the merger talks—including Java, MySQL, Sun servers and workstations and Oracle's Retail suite—will either be unchanged (Oracle Retail seems to have no redundancy and is likely to be not impacted at all) or the changes will be irrelevant (MySQL operates so far below the database size and needs of most major chains that it is likely to be irrelevant). Although Java has attracted a lot of attention and debate, it's unlikely that Oracle would handle it much differently than did Sun. But if one looks a bit further down the road, things could get a lot more interesting for the typical retail chain CIO.Read more...

GuestView PCI Columnist David Taylor said the problems crop up in easy-to-miss ways and he rattles off three of his favorites.Read more...

Washington State’s governor has signed into law one of three bills relating to RFID and privacy, a measure that prohibits, with a dozen exceptions, the scanning of RFID chips by anybody other than the company that attached them.

The signed bill includes a number of significant changes to the initially-proposed measure which was denounced in January by Dan Mullen, President of the Association for Automatic Identification and Mobility (AIM), as potentially being “traumatic” to retailers and consumers. Mullen, according to an RFID Journal report, believes the enacted version is “pretty reasonable” because it focuses on banning the surreptitious scanning and reading of RFID chips, as opposed to the devices directly.…

The patent in question is held by a company called Actus and it's a very specific methodology for handling and sharing the revenue associated with smaller purchases such as, according to an example cited in the lawsuit, Wal-Mart MP3 music downloads.Read more...