Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

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...

The answer to that question, in some cases, might be "No." Instead, writes PCI Columnist Walter Conway, based on the PCI Security Standards Council's revised guidance on when encrypted cardholder data may be considered out of scope, it might be possible that existing vendor offerings could potentially bring some merchants the same benefits with less work and without waiting—and paying—for the first P2PE products to hit the market.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...

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...

"Having the terminal request the nonce from the issuer adds another full round-trip message, which is a lot of extra time. Nobody wants that," said one security manager with a major chain. "It's an extra pass through the payment network. That raises the question of cost. Will payment providers carry them for free? Will that impact their peak season throughput?"Read more...

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...

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...

Even more impressive is that the owner of this group of six California (Bay area) Little Caesars said it took him months before he realized that one store had posted no revenue for eight months and another for two months. This guy owns six stores and it takes him months to notice that one-third of his stores are reporting zero payment-card revenue?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...

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...

The difficulties are that the Scoping SIG never released its report and that this Open PCI Scoping Toolkit, which is based on that SIG, lacks the approval of the PCI Council. The Toolkit addresses three fundamental scoping questions: What systems are in scope for PCI compliance; where does a merchant's or service provider's scope end; and what does it really mean to have a system or device "in scope?"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...

A key reason? The U.S. stores' systems were more secure and more sophisticated, which also slowed down operations more. The irony: Had the U.S. self-checkout systems been less secure, they might still be there.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...