Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

A new restaurant product identification standard for POS and commercial kitchen equipment integration has been introduced by an international group of standards groups, lead by the National Retail Federation.

The groups–including the Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS), the National Council of Chain Restaurants, the North American Association of Food Equipment Manufacturers (NAFEM) and a Japanese not for profit foodservice support corporation called OFSC–say that they hope the improved product identification will help lower IT costs and improve food safety.

“As restaurants continue to diversify and expand their menus, it becomes more difficult for managers to keep track of information,” said Jack Whipple, President of the National Council of Chain Restaurants. The POSLog for Foodservice Technical Specification provides a set of consistent data messaging standards that enables POS data to easily flow to back-end financial systems for better sales reporting and inventory management. The standards also incorporate commercial kitchen equipment standards that monitor proper operations, maintenance and up-time, as well as food safety protocols.…

Oracle on Monday will official launch its Retail Returns Management package, which will support highly-customized returns policies, such as one allowing a frequent purchaser to return more products than a less profitable customer.

Oracle is pushing the package’s ability to track–and enforce–returns across mutliple channels, making it theoretically easier to deal with in-store returns of catalogue and online purchases, as well as those from a store in another state.

This has some strong potential as many retailers are feeling the pressure to liberalize their return policies. This suite could at least allow merchants to formalize exceptions, which might at least take away some of the sting of aggressive return policies. Also, the integrated CRM capability across multiple channnels couldn’t hurt with that elusive single-view-of-the-customer goal.…

Kroger’s, which controls about 2,473 U.S. supermarkets including Ralphs, Fred Meyer, Food 4 Less and King Soopers, has inked a deal with IBM to use Big Blue’s Store Integration Framework across its chain, the two companies confirmed Friday.

The firms issued a vague statement that said few specifics about the plans, other than it will somehow involve more than 30,000 already-installed IBM SurePOS 700 POS units and that they are now being monitored by Tivoli Manager for Retail software.

Kroger CIO Chris Hjelm issued a brief statement that his chain intends to “significantly reduce development cycle times by using the open standards and techniques available through IBM’s framework.”…

As key governments–especially in Latin America and Asia Pacific–start protecting against the most common forms of credit card fraud, they are pushing the thieves into other countries and making it the problem of another country’s retailers, according to a new report from market research firm Frost & Sullivan.

“There is a noticeable shift in card related fraudulent activities to
neighboring countries using less secure magnetic stripe cards for a majority of their transactions. With the United Kingdom implementing Chip
and PIN and France implementing dynamic data authentication (DDA) cards, countries such as Germany and Italy are facing the brunt of the increasing migration of fraud,” the report said. “Singapore and Indonesia are facing a significant threat from fraud escalation and are considering a move toward EMV-compliant card technology. This phenomenon is significantly feeding the demand for electronic funds transfer (EFT) at point-of-sale (POS) terminals worldwide.”…

A software package that will—without human intervention--add and remove products based on inventory and item profit margins will be introduced next week by Mercado Software.

The significance of the rollout of Mercado 4 is not in the integration between web analytics and the E-Commerce platform—which has been offered by various vendors—but in the package's ability to instantly make site changes without employees getting involved.Read more...

With a backdrop of renewed E-Commerce fraud fears, EBay’s PayPal is doubling its buyer protection effort–to $2,000–for some eBay transactions, according to a statement eBay and PayPal issued Wednesday.

The program will be offered by American and Canadian eBay sellers who qualify by “maintaining a 98 percent positive feedback rating and having at least 50 feedback points.” The program covers products that are not delivered as well as “items that are significantly not as described,” the companies said.

Effective Jan. 17, PayPal said the program should cover “more than 95 percent of items listed on eBay.com.”…

Despite cross-channel initiatives of every kind at virtually every major retailer, it seems that certain capabilities at any one company either shine offline or online, rarely both.

The best evidence of the great online/offline divide can be traced to the earliest days of the Web. As the Web was just creeping into prominence, if you had asked any hotshot market observer who would likely run the biggest online bookstore in the new medium, the answer would have been Barnes & Noble or Borders, anything but Amazon.com.Read more...

Like the constant reports that every food imaginable causes cancer or some other deadly ailment, IT managers looking for the mythical safe security approach would be best served by giving up and having a bowl of hot fudge. This is prompted by a university report out of the U.K. that chip-and-PIN terminals, which were touted as a more expensive but more secure way to validate credit and debit card purchases, are–you guessed it–not secure.

A team at the University of Cambridge “opened up one of the supposedly tamper-proof terminals, replaced its internal hardware with their own, put it back together without any external evidence of tampering and then got the machine to play Tetris,” according to a report in Computerworld.

Researcher Saar Drimer said the school’s experiments proved that all components of the PIN pads used to authenticate such transactions could be made to interact and respond to input from one another. “This means that the card reader can read information from the chip and display it on the screen. The data from the keypad, such as a PIN, can also be recorded,” Drimer was quoted as saying.…

NCR on Monday confirmed that it is splitting into two independent publicly traded companiesby spinning off its $1.5 billion Teradata data warehousing business.

The impact on retail tech may be minimal, but the company is hoping that the fewer distractions from its self-checkout and POS businesses couldn’t hurt. NCR said the distribution ratio will be determined at a future date and that the spin off is “expected to be completed in six to nine months,” subject to regulatory approvals. …

Major e-tailers this holiday season kept their customers happy for the most part, according to a report issued Thursday by the Gomez Retail Benchmark.

But there were still some order process response time laggards including the Gap (35.09 sec.) and OfficeMax (20.73 sec.), who were quite slow compared with J.C. Penney (6.23 sec.), CircuitCity (7.27 sec.) and Dell (7.75 sec.). The benchmark average for response time was 13.97 seconds.

On availability, the laggards were Williams-Sonoma (88.83 percent), HP (92.57 percent) and QVC (93.82 percent) and the most available sites were Target (99.86 percent), CDW (99.75 percent) and Apple (99.68 percent). The benchmark average for availability was 97.59 percent.…

Was the inefficient technology deployment a reason for HomeDepot’s CEO resignation? An interesting Retail Systems Alert Group analysis suggests it absolutely was.

The group’s Paula Rosenblum writes that HomeDepot was relying too much of technology–and cost cuts–alone and was surprised when customers started to disappear.…

Online auction behemoth eBay is having an unexpectedly strong impact on brick and mortars, with piles of retailers set up just to provide physical purchase and pickup points for eBay merchandise. One such merchant–iSold It LLC, with about 200 locations–manages about 50,000 different auctions per month.

An interesting story in CIOInsight reports on the software challenges as the merchant tries to links directly to various eBay sites for pricing and listing information. It’s trying to deal with this by using a community of roughly 40,000 ISVs, all of whom are using eBay’s own APIs.…

The best gift for a cyber thief is retail and banking apathy. The good holiday news for those thieves is that, this year, they're making out a like a bandit. Security and privacy are among the top issues for consumers so it seems odd that so many retailers and banks often take security so very lightly.

Please don't get me wrong. Officially, all executives with those entities say they take such matters seriously, but when we listen to the day-to-day management, the priorities seem to be elsewhere. Consider an upcoming report from the Aberdeen Group, which details a survey of retail IT execs who were asked to discuss contactless payment.Read more...

Amazon.com this week touted sales figures that make the 2006 holiday season its best, with one day (it was Dec. 11th, for those who track such trivia) ringing up more than 4 million items.

The company also boasted of some impressive speed sales, such as selling 1,000 Xbox 360s in 29 seconds and 1,000 Axion DVD players in 34 seconds. (Note to marketers: Add more Xs in your brand names.)

Let’s look at some of the wonderfully trivial Amazon holiday claims for this year. The company announced that “one of Amazon’s most remote shipments” was a copy of Mission Impossible—the Complete First season that went to Wainwright, Alaska. It actually sold a $20,000 MP3 player, which is cast in 750 gold (18 karat) with 63 diamonds (one-karat). The last Prime order placed in time for Christmas delivery contained a Bogen-Manfrotto Classic Tripod (Silver) delivered to Norman, Oklahoma on December 23rd. Its top-selling toys were Radica 20 Questions, Laugh & Learn Cuddly Learning Puppy and Princess Genevieve Doll — Barbie In the 12 Dancing Princesses. The top-selling Kitchen items included the Matfer Exopat Nonstick Baking/Roasting Sheet, Santa Fe Quesadilla Maker and Calphalon’s Commercial Hard-Anodized 12-in Everyday Pan.…

Dr. Pepper and Snapple vending machines in Dallas, New York City and Chicago will now be contactless payment friendly, according to a deal announced Thursday between MasterCard and the Cadbury Schweppes Americas Beverages. As part of that deal, the test machines will accept “all major credit cards” and not just those using MasterCard’s PayPass.

The agreement also included USA Technologies, which makes the e-Port device that lets the vending machines accept contactless payments. The companies said “as many as 1,000” Pepper/Snapple machines effort is the beginning of a larger contactless rollout for 5,000 POS terminals and vending machines in a dozen U.S. cities, including Las Vegas, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Denver, Seattle, Miami, Orlando and Washington, D.C. That larger rollout “will be installed over the next several weeks and represents the largest rollout of contactless technology in the vending and POS markets,” a joint statement said.

The move is not unexpected, as the contactless payment space is one of the brighter spots for RFID. But the vending machine segment is especially compelling as candy/snack/softdrink prices soar, making cash payments more inconvenient.…

It shouldn’t be much of a surprise that as Zero Hour approaches for holiday shoppers, the “have run out of time to think of anything clever” giftcard gift will suddenly dominate purchaser thoughts. The latest Web traffic figures from Hitwise–released on Tuesday–showed gift card searches soared 109 percent compared with the prior week. The top giftcard searches were, in sequence, Visa giftcard, AmericanExpress giftcard, iTunes giftcard, Rite Aid giftcard, the Simon Mall giftcard, the Citizen’s Bank giftcard, AAA Visa giftcard, MasterCard giftcards, Discover giftcard and the Home Depot giftcard.

A Hitwise statement attributed to GM Bill Tancer said “branded credit and charge gift cards dominated top searches as gift givers opted for the most flexibility for their gift recipients.” It’s more likely they dominated the searches because advertising made them top-of-mind for desperate consumers.

One other interesting detail from the Hitwise research were the top search terms (in the U.S., at least) that sent consumers to key retail sites: For eBay, that term was “iPod.” (Maybe there’s an afinity between brands that have this psychotic first lower-case and second upper-case lettering.) For Wal-Mart and BestBuy (and, for what it’s worth, Craig’s List), it’s Nintendo. For Target, the magic word has been Ugg boots and for Amazon, it’s Heelys.…

Consumer groups are making their lists and checking them twice, to see which store return policies are naughty or nice. It’s a delicate balancing act, with lax return policies are a huge source of fraud but strict return policies a major disincentive for purchases, especially gift purchases. The typical retail answer has been to “have a strict policy but don’t tell anyone.”

ConsumerWorld.org on Monday tried to shed a little light on those merchants, with Sears, CircuitCity and BestBuy on the naughty list for aggressive restocking fees, Amazon got a lump of coal for keeping as much as half of the purchase price for post-30-day returns and–my personal favorite–the site Grinched Buy.com’s “Easy Returns” policy for being more than 1,400 words long.

On the nice list–which included some of the same merchants–the site listed retailers who have liberalized their return policy into January but who inexplicably have not prominently announced this. The site did them the courtesy of announcing it for them. Moral of the story: If a retailer feels the need to keep a policy quiet, there’s a wonderful chance it’s not a policy it should have.…

In the ongoing saga of IBM’s patent infringement lawsuit against Amazon.com, Amazon struck back on Thursday, countersuing that it’s actually IBM that is violating patents.

The lawsuit is not subtly phrased: “IBM’s broad allegations of infringement amount to a claim that IBM invented the Internet. If IBM’s claims are believed, then not only must Amazon.com pay IBM, but everyone conducting electronic commerce over the World Wide Web (indeed, every Web site and potentially everyone who uses a Web browser to surf the Web) must pay IBM a toll for the right to do so.”

An IBM spokeswoman–Kendra Collins–said that Amazon’s counterclaims “ring hollow” and represent “nothing more than a transparent litigation ploy,” Collins said, because Amazon never brought up concerns over those patents during four years of cross-licensing discussions with IBM, according to a story in News.com.

In other E-Commerce legal action on Thursday, a lawsuit involving Yahoo and Google AdWords was dismissed, which raises the prospect of an out-of-court settlement.…

Earlier this month, giftcard exchange site Plastic Jungle was approached by a giftcard seller, offering two $200 Wal-Mart giftcards. Site CEO Tina Henson declined to buy the cards directly and instead suggested the seller use the site's auction area. The seller did and posted the cards for $125 and $135.

But when the site's authentication team checked on the cards, the Wal-Mart computer reported that the cards were valid and their value was intact, but they had just been purchased the day before. Thinking it was odd that someone would pay $400 for cards and then the next day be willing to sell them for $260, the CEO was contacted, but she shrugged and approved the sale anyway. The cards quickly sold.Read more...

In a strong concession that fines have not worked in getting retailers to comply with credit card security rules, Visa has switched course and has dedicated $20 million for a fund to reward retailers who actually comply with industry-accepted PCI rules by Aug. 31, 2007.

"This is absolutely a different tactic," said Jennifer Fischer, a director with Visa USA, which is the nation's largest payment system company. "We believe that incentives are necessary to achieve compliance. This is the first time a payment card brand has used positive incentives" to encourage security compliance.Read more...

Managed service company Verio on Tuesday introduced a new version of its small E-Commerce business shopping cart package, integrating payment processing services including PayPal, GoogleCheckout, eBay auction, Authorize.Net, WorldPay and FedEx realtime shipping quotes.

Like the earlier versions of the software, ShopSite 8.1 does not require any software to be installed on the retailers because it’s an outsourced service, which all computations happening on Verio servers.…

One credit card processor has issued a list of the characterics of typical fraudsters, including seeking accelerated delivery and purchasing four items at once.

Putting aside the fact that I typically engage in those suspect behaviors (but for honest reasons: I’m impatient and impulsive. I find maturity to be way overrated), the stats collected by Retail Decisions are rather interesting. Beyond the typical well-known fraudster profile elements—such as using free E-mail domains, living in densely populated areas and spending 2.5 times more than typical consumer—the group reported that 56 percent of fraudulent orders seek next-day or two-day delivery “whereas only nine percent of genuine customers ask for next day delivery online.

The company also reported that fraudsters often “bundle their purchases with an average of four items at a time (while) legitimate customers typically purchase one or two items per transaction.”…

U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer is formally petitioning the Federal Reserve to crack down on contactless payment, requiring consumers to be warned about privacy risks and preventing retailers from offering incentives for the cards to be tried.

"If you are using a no—swipe credit card, when you put your card in your back pocket or in your pocketbook, you might as well print your credit card number across your back," Schumer said. "Holiday shoppers need to be extremely careful with their credit cards, and these companies need to step up their efforts to protect people from identity theft."Read more...

With E-Commerce leaders getting more sophisticated in the ways of online fraud schemes, criminals are increasingly turning to auction forums. In those forums, the cyber crooks can use the site's prestige to add to their credibility while they sidestep that very same site's anti-fraud safeguards by selling directly to consumers.

Major auction sites—most notably EBay—often use community policing as a defense, where members who do not deliver honorably are given low ratings by fellow members, which theoretically warn members to avoid them. The fraudsters have tried countering by using a series of fake names, which are quickly abandoned once bad ratings are filed.Read more...

A new survey finds that teenagers plan to scale back on their purchases for others this holiday season, but the conclusions to draw from this trend are unclear. The online poll from Junior Achievement conducted during October and November interviewed 1,512 teens. (The JA people volunteered that participants were aged 13-19, which we pretty much figured out from the word “teen.”)

The survey found the lower-gift-spending from teens consistent with the last three JA surveys, which all found teens pledging to spend less than the prior year. The average amount the surveyed said they would spend for gifts was $75.

But there are a few concerns with the survey. First, it’s results fly in the face of several other national surveys, which have been predicting greater overall spending this year (although few have isolated the younger shopper so it may not be contradictory). The online survey–as opposed to one where a professional conducts the interview–is also notorious for giving skewed results. Lastly, it’s unclear if the surveyed teens plan on spending less overall or merely spending less on gifts for others. Does this suggest teen miserliness or selfishness? JA issued a statement interpreting the results as “a positive indication that (teens) are learning the importance of spending within their means.” Ahhhhhh, such optimism escapes me.…