Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

American consumers—especially frequent fliers—are becoming quite comfortable with self-checkout systems, to the tune of a projected $475 billion in self-checkout purchases this year, according to a new study from the IHL Consulting Group.

That's a 47 percent increase compared with what IHL recorded last year and IHL is predicting the sharp increases will continue, with a projected $1.2 trillion in self-checkout sales projected by 2009.Read more...

Fresh from its merger talks with Siemens, Nokia is announcing a major smartcard company, the first large-scale mobile payment trial in China and the killing of its CDMA deal with Sanyo.

On Tuesday (June 27), it announced a deal with Giesecke & Devrient, the world's second largest producer of smart cards, to form a company that will " provide services to the NFC ecosystem by enabling consumer applications, such as credit cards or transport tickets, to be securely and easily downloaded over-the-air to NFC enabled mobile devices."Read more...

Warning consumers about anything presupposes that there is something bad with that item, something that should be avoided. This might be a self-fulfilling prophesy. The commissioner for Information and Privacy in Ontario unveiled on June 19 a series of tips and guidelines for using RFID within Ontario.

But the guidelines themselves certainly need to be examined seriously because North American products can ill-afford to accommodate two different standards and, besides, neither Mexico nor the U.S. have any material privacy RFID rules at the moment.Read more...

In theory, a smartphone can bring into the store the depth of data possible on the web, merged with enough site- and user-specific data to make even the stodgiest CRM system blush. But can it work in the real world? NeoMedia is arguing that it can. Read more...

A technology vendor called SmartTools thinks that customers should stop lollygagging around in the cashier checkout lanes. While waiting, they should be scanning their own items and saving the cashier's time. If you find this idea attractive, we need to chat. (Hint: This is not an especially good career-advancement purchase.) Read more...

The old BidPay online payment service—which boasted more than 4 million registered users when it shut its doors in December 2005—has relaunched under the umbrella of new owner CyberSource. But the service has been significantly revamped.

CyberSource has a fondness for bargains, especially when the potential acquirees have as little negotiating room as possible. Read more...

When a Cincinnati man brought his hard-drive to Best Buy to be repaired, he was told that he couldn't have his old hard-drive back. But fear not, he was told: the drive would be made useless by having holes drilled in it. A few months later, the fully intact drive is purchased at a flea market in Chicago for $25.Read more...

The Web is all abuzz with the Grass Is Always Greener On The Other Side Of the Firewall stories about Google preparing an online payment system (a la EBay's PayPal) to be called GBuy while EBay is preparing a contextual Web ad service (a la Google's AdWords) to be called EBay AdContext.

But the most reality-based analysis is that Ebay and Google are proving to be the quintessential example of coopertition (is there an accepted spelling yet for that blend of cooperation and competition?). Read more...

This year, some 1.3 billion RFID tags will be sold, a number that will top 2.2 billion next year, according to figures released Wednesday by European market analyst firm IDTechEx. Those figures are noteworthy in the sense that they show particularly steep growth in the immediate future.

But the most interesting detail in the new figures is an estimate that 200 million of those tags to be sold this year will be used for item-level tagging, which is the same problem the firm is projecting will be sold this year for contactless smart cards. Let's put those figures into startling context: the 400 million for item-level and smart cards is merely 20 percent less than the 500 million IDTechEx expects to be purchased for the traditional pallets and cases of supply chain drudgery. Read more...

As the rules for payment data get tighter and well-publicized incidents invite regulatory scrutiny, hungry lawyers and bad publicity, many smaller E-Commerce shops are hungry for an easy way out. Being the kind-hearted altruistic souls that they be, vendors are flocking to help these folk out. Read more...

Just as E-Commerce players are getting used to the idea of people buying products using their cellphones, whether in a physical location beaming right to a POS or making purchases online, the cellphone wants to make the next leap forward. Nokia has ported the Apache webserver to Symbian, which will theoretically allow cell phones to directly serve Web content.

According to a report in LinuxDevices.com, Nokia installed its experimental port, initially, on a Nokia 6630, which it then accessed over a Bluetooth PAN (personal area network). This proved somewhat useful, in that it brought “the possibility of accessing functionality on the phone using a big screen and proper keyboard.”

However, the project’s goal was to enable access to the phone of the cellular network, the story said. This proved challenging due to firewalls explicitly deployed by operators to prevent such access.

This is the logical next step with the growth of the Web. The Internet’s early days were made powerful because of the networking of millions of PCs around the globe. The potential to expand that now with the networking of huge numbers of connected cellphones is, to say the least, powerful.…

MasterCard today tolled out its PayPass watch in Taiwan today, allowing consumers to pay with contactless without having to take out a credit card. The watch comes with some small retail discounts, but Taiwan consumers are expected to show minimal resistance.

Would this catch on in the United States? Not likely, unless the discounts were a lot more generous than the 10 percent discount in one chain being offered with today’s promotion.

But it’s hard to beat the sex appeal of a lime-green watch with a vendor’s brand on it. Rolex, watch out.…

As retailers find dollars in having certain stores specialize in various Ethnic or lifestyle segments, they are often neglecting to update their store data to match, so finds a new Forrester Research report. This is a matter of frustration among some consumer goods manufacture suppliers who now need to know more about those customers. A product that appeals to only two percent of shoppers should be viewed very differently, for example, if it happens to be appealing to 85 percent of Hispanic shoppers or 86 percent of vegetarian shoppers or 89 percent of senior citizen shoppers.Read more...

Joel Hansen, a 45-year-old Texan, was visiting his local Wal-Mart to purchase some food at about 5:30 p.m..

After what everyone seems to agree was an unpleasant human-computer interaction, the self-checkout terminal had a smashed-in monitor, courtesy of the fist of the consumer. Read more...

In sharing information about an undercover federal investigation of Web frauds involving credit cards and stolen tax refunds, the Secret Service demonstrated that it can adapt with the times.

The seven initial arrests stemming from what the Secret Service has dubbed "Operation Rolling Stone" show that federal investigators have started to learn how to crack through deceptive IP addresses and encrypted IM communications. Read more...

Visa recently sent a confidential memo to selected business partners advising them of a potentially major security threat involving Fujitsu POS software.
We all know this because the memo was leaked to the Wall Street Journal, which prompted tons of media—including eWEEK, of course—to cover the story. The culprit seemed to be a tracer testing utility that Fujitsu provided to some customers, which apparently at least one customer continued to use in a live environment, which is a major security no-no. Read more...

Like every major sales and communications advance that preceded it, e-commerce's 12-year existence has moved along in phases, as it slowly abandoned earlier methods to accept the new reality.
Offline and online brands were initially kept distinct, then they were awkwardly merged. Initial e-commerce efforts were flashy brochure sites, with rudimentary shopping carts and checkout. Read more...

It was apparently a coincidence that two of the biggest names in contactless payment today, Exxon Mobil's Speedpass and credit card leader Visa, both announced changes to their contactless payment system on the same day. The changes were definitely minor tweaks, with Exxon Mobil deploying a much faster way to sign up for Speedpass (taking a weeks-long process down to a few minutes) and Visa rolling out a much smaller form factor, specifically a mini-card suitable for hanging on a keychain. Read more...

With more home deliveries and installations, retailers and restaurants are facing the point-of-sale challenge of verifying payments away from the POS while paying higher credit card fees for card-not-present purchases. Read more...

The report of a 5 percent increase in North American Point of Sale purchases in 2005 was much lower than had been expected, and was a sign of delayed retail IT purchases during a year of substantial retail software consolidation, according to IHL Consulting Group. Read more...

Analysts gave Microsoft credit for doing better than expected in the retail POS (point of sale) space as it announced a new version that adds native support for several common peripherals. Read more...

The IT director at bath products retailer Crabtree & Evelyn wants to move away from the homegrown applications that run point-of-sale and back-office systems, but he says he's trapped.

The multimillion-dollar cost of moving to off-the-shelf apps would easily outweigh the cost of sticking with apps that work quite adequately. Read more...

Breakthrough technologies invariably require some IT executive somewhere to have the guts to deploy when no one else is seriously doing so.

That's a bold and dangerous move, given how many technologies fizzle and die after an impressive beginning. Read more...

As assistant director of information systems for the $700 million Piggly Wiggly grocery chain, Rachel Bolt has been one of the most vocal proponents of biometric retail authentication systems. At Piggly Wiggly, that system—like almost every other retail biometric system being tested today—is based on fingerprints. But although Bolt saw initially strong consumer interest and support for the system, that support has lately seen a serious drop. Read more...

The conventional IT thinking has been that, all else being equal, consolidated and centralized is the most efficient way to run a business. All of the data is analyzed globally and purchasing trends can be quickly spotted and acted on. Read more...