The report identified these as out-of-stocks but it used a rather expansive definition of out-of-stocks, including in-stock products that had an incorrect price as well as in-stock but misplaced product that neither the customer nor the associate could easily locate. Read more...
IT investments will increase by 4.3 percent this year, thanks mostly to small- and medium-sized retailers spending to become PCI compliant, according to a new report from IHL.
“PCI compliance has come down to the small and medium businesses,” said IHL President Greg Buzek. “That starts to drive a lot of upgrades.”…
And among those who actually left the stores, 90 percent of them never returned, according to Scott Drobner, Motorola's director for market intelligence programs. Read more...
But as I was looking at two unrelated privacy legal filings on Friday, was struck by the different legal tactics and the very different probability of success. This all stems from two unrelated privacy breaches from three deep-pocketed companies: $52 billion Sears, $41 billion Sprint and $36 billion Wells Fargo. Read more...
But is the guarantee legitimate if the retailer controls the terms? Read more...
The Sears move came hours after Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Benjamin Edelman published details on how consumers using Sears' ManageMyHome site could find detailed purchase histories about other Sears shoppers merely by typing in their name, phone number and street address into the site. Read more...
I was reminded of this when shopping this past holiday season in a major national chain and wanted a particular model product, which the store was out of. "No problem," I was told by a store associate. "We'll have a large shipment in just a few hours. It may be in there." Read more...
Some of them are so classic that it might be helpful for retail IT execs to hear these customers' stories in their own voice, without editorial comment or filtering. From time to time—when we see some that look especially intriguing—we'll share these.
This one comes from a reader describing a holiday shopping attempt: Essentially, I purchased two bar stools (I have a breakfast nook in my new apartment—and no, I never thought I'd use the words "breakfast nook") from Target, using a Target gift card and a Visa gift card I received for Christmas. Read more...
ComScore on Sunday gave its latest snapshot of E-Commerce sales this holiday season and reported a 19 percent boost compared with the identical period last year. Looking at Nov. 1-Dec. 27, it found nearly $28 billion spent. Read more...
The timing of this nation-wide hiccup couldn't have come at a worse time for retailers. Merchants and giftcard exchange sites have been pushing giftcard convenience more aggressively this year than ever, positioning it as the ultimate hassle-free gift. To have that network crash on Dec. 26—one of the busiest days for gift returns and gift card redemptions—is certainly not ideal. Read more...
When Amazon.com releases its holiday sales stats on Wednesday, there wasn’t anything truly newsworthy in it. Still, the volume of sales being churned out by the world’s largest E-Commerce outfit is worth a brief look.
For example, on one day (Dec. 10), Amazon sold more than 5.4 million items and shipped more 3.9 million units. An Amazon statement calculated that it sold 62.5 items every second on Dec. 10.…
The as-yet-unnamed 12-inch touchscreen units will likely list for about $1,300 to $1,800 each and will use power-over-Ethernet, said Brian Slaughter, Dell's director of retail.Read more...
The arguments raised are similar to the total cost of ownership (TCO) strategies that were all the rage a few years ago, but they take it one step further. Read more...
“More than 95 percent” of the Visa-issuing banks have agreed to a multi-million settlement worked out between Visa and TJX, TJX announced late Thursday.
The announcement—which came one day after the deadline for the banks to accept and two days after TJX had negotiated separate settlements with other banks suing them—cleans up some of the last remaining loose threads from the TJX case. Read more.…
During the watched period, Mastercard's site was down for almost five hours (4 hours, 54 minutes), compared with the second-worst site (Discover's) with 45 minutes of downtime and the third-worst site (Visa Europe) at 14 minutes of downtime. The next two sites were Diner's Club (nine minutes of downtime) and Visa (five minutes of downtime) with AmericanExpress and Maestro both experiencing zero downtime during the watched period. Read more...
The choice of whether the self-assessment option is available to Level 1 merchants varies by card brand, but Visa is now selectively permitting it. Officially, the issuing bank and the card brand must agree before a Level 1 is given the self-assessment permission and it's often approved for re-certification, once a retailer has already been certified PCI compliant.Read more...
Almost all of the banks and bank associations still suing TJX agreed to settle for undisclosed sums on Wednesday, in an anticipated move following the collapse of bank’s the federal class-action lawsuit against TJX. This all stems from the worst-ever data breach in credit card history, impacting more than 100 million credit/debit cards.
TJX CEO Carol Meyrowitz issued a statement that TJX has finally achieved PCI compliance. Read more.…
Sports Authority, some Staples, KB Toys, The Limited and Express got on the naughty list because of their use of The Return Exchange's database to limit customer returns.Read more...
Consumers who have been fairly nonplussed by repeated reports of retail data breaches are expressing more worries about gift card frauds, fueled by retail lobbing groups.
This story in the California daily newspaper, The Fresno Bee details how at least one gift card exchange site, Otartel.com, “has disappeared completely.”…
Is the human factor to blame? Managers "are going to have to build dependence on RFID. Instead of routing through styles of slacks, will they trust it? It's going to take a lot more than technology. People are going to have to change the way they work."Read more...
Beyond the cost per-use, Soares said the trial continuously delivered a 100 percent accurate read-rate and delivered a "21 percent reduction in out-of-stocks for the items that were counted." The chain also saw "zero percent shrink" on the tagged items, which Soares said was especially noteworthy because the tagged items high-theft-targets such as MP3 players, laptops and desktop PCs. Read more...
Amazon also weighed into the alternative payment space, saying that it would make an equity investment in Bill Me Later. To varying degrees, this gives the three most powerful online companies a stake in each of the three top alternative payment players, with Google pushing its own Google Checkout, EBay banking on its PayPal service and Amazon owning a slice of Bill Me Later. Read more...
The move, which had been expected ever since U.S. District Court Judge William Young ruled that the case shouldn't be considered a class-action, will mean a different set of rules for the few financial entities that decide to pursue the case anew.Read more...
Cards issued by European banks when used online cross border don't usually support AVS checks. So, when a European card is used with a billing address that's in the US, an ecom merchant wouldn't necessarily know that the shipping zip code doesn't match the billing code.
-Marc
