Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Several indications—from reduced ATM interest, increased use of online bill payments and sharply improved consumer bank perceptions—show that banks are starting to understand their customers. Given that it's a business where almost everything comes down to moving numbers from one column to another, one might think that online banking should have been one of the first e-Commerce segments to mature. From that perspective, it's an Internet natural. Read more...

One key part of a CIO's job is to protect company information. That forces a healthy amount of paranoia, as the exec must anticipate the unlikely and envision the impossible. Maybe we should call CIOs Chief Imagination Officers? Perhaps a Stephen King-like imagination. Read more...

With the nation's worst credit card security disaster on its resume and AmericanExpress and Visa cutting its contract, payment processor CardSystems has few long-term options.

In what might signal the closing chapter in the CardSystem credit-card security breach saga, CyberSource announced its intent to acquire all of CardSystem's assets for an undisclosed amount. Read more...

For years, the retail and supply-chain worlds have spoken of item-level tagging as the holy grail of inventory control, but added it can't be done until tag prices hit 5 cents. With recent pricecuts delivering 12.9-cent chips, is that Holy Grail imminent? When leading RFID chip manufacturer Alien Technology announced it was cutting the price of its 96-bit Gen 1 RFID labels some 44 percent to 12.9 cents apiece, it was more than a typical price cut. It pushed the industry tantalizingly close to the much-ballyhooed 5-cent RFID tag.Read more...

With an estimated $10.5 billion of idle spare change lying around American households, Amazon sees that found money as found money. And it will now accept it for purchases. Pity the poor penny, the neglected nickel, the despondent dime and the queasy quarter. The times are changing and for change, it's for the worse. Read more...

The most altruistic gift is an anonymous contribution, in which a giver wants to help but does not want to benefit from the donation. Sometimes, though, anonymity is not possible, and that's where things can get dicey. Read more...

CardSystems violated contracts by not encrypting data and retaining data it wasn't supposed to—and then became the nation's largest data-theft victim. Now it wants bygones to be bygones. When credit card processing firm CardSystems announced Thursday that an independent auditor had declared its systems sound, one CardSystems executive said he now wants Visa and American Express to take it back. Read more...

Generous people wanting to help victims of Hurricane Katrina should direct their financial contributions carefully, so that the money isn't diverted by e-commerce thieves.

Scammers taking advantage of the disaster don't need much capital or personnel: The Web provides them all they need in the way of cover, illusion and false identities.Read more...

Yahoo Inc. has gone into beta on an enhanced version of its e-commerce hosting service, which is positioned for the small business that can't justify its own Web team nor the time to outsource it to programmers and Web designers. Read more...

With almost 3,000 stores in all 50 states, the Rent-A-Center retail chain needs to be able to expand quickly and easily. But its business model allows customers to rent and return merchandise with little notice, forcing store layouts to be flexible. What if 30 customers return mattresses to the same store tomorrow? Read more...

In the Visa data theft case, much has been made of a security audit that cleared the clearinghouse that improperly handled the data. But security experts see audits rarely shedding much light on what the CIO doesn't already know. Read more...

When it comes to privacy issues, the online airline/travel industry is moving in the opposite direction from most industries and is using personal data more aggressively than it did just a few months ago, according to a new report from an industry consulting firm. Read more...

Top payment-system executives traveled to Washington on Thursday to try to convince members of Congress that no new laws are needed for credit card payment security, that the industry can police itself just fine. But the facts delivered during the testimony told a very different story.

What forced the hearing was a well-publicized security breach in May, when CardSystems Solutions reported that someone had broken into its systems and stolen the details of as many as 40 million payment cards, including names, account numbers and expiration dates. Read more...

During congressional testimony, executives from bank and credit card companies involved in the largest credit card data loss ever pointed fingers at a new culprit for gaps in security: the auditors who had certified the credit card processing systems as being up to snuff. But in an interview those auditors said one of the CEO witnesses was either lying or very mistaken. Read more...

Retailers are using cameras and pattern recognition software to fight back against shoplifters who try to hide items in the compartments underneath grocery carts. Those spacious compartments underneath grocery carts may be convenient for shoppers, but retailers say they are also attractive to shoplifters as they usually can't be seen by a cashier nor by typical security cameras. Read more...

As the CIO for a $4.1 billion health care products distribution company, Jim Harding knows only too well the changing face of medical technology today.

He sees senior physicians hand-writing prescriptions, penciling notes in patient folders and resisting electronics while the younger physicians embrace PDAs and digital transcription units.Read more...

In analyzing more than 6,500 data points from the top 19 e-commerce sites, a new Keynote Systems report found sites that were too slow, failed too often and often glitched during the crucial checkout period. In analyzing more than 6,500 data points from each of 22 top e-commerce sites, a new Keynote Systems report found that many sites were too slow, failed too often and often glitched during the crucial checkout period. Read more...

Trying to make eBay as attractive and comprehensive as possible for small businesses that represent a huge portion of eBay's revenue, the auction company is offering to help customers create their own Web sites to complement their eBay presence. Read more...

A major pharmacy chain's program designed to let customers view a history of their purchases in e-mail had weak enough security to make it vulnerable to identity thieves, forcing the chain to temporarily shut down its Web site while it reconsidered security. The chain was CVS Corp., which has more than 5,400 stores in the United States. Read more...

As the retail industry starts to embrace contactless payment in a big way—led by $41 billion retailer 7-Eleven and Chase, the nation's largest issuer of credit cards—arguments are renewing about just how safe and fraud-proof these cards will be. Read more...

The conventional wisdom in large-scale networking is that sitting a virtual private network atop the Internet is the most cost-effective way to build a wide area network. But the CIO of $558 million children's shoe chain Stride Rite isn't so sure.

Stride Rite is in the final stages of contracting for an $8 million upgrade to the point-of-sale systems and network for its 270-store national chain. CIO Yusef Akyuz is hoping the upgrade will yield major productivity improvements.Read more...

Hoping to at least slow down the wave of electronic fraud threatening retailers, a group of major credit card firms—led by Visa—asked all merchants to submit recognized security audits. The firms also wanted full compliance with 12 key elements of the PCI Data Security Standard, but those have already been required, although compliance has been spotty. Read more...

Contactless payments—whether they're made using a fob dangling from a keychain at a gas station, an RFID chip embedded in a cell phone or a new contactless credit/debit card—have now moved from the experimental to the real-world stage. Read more...

It has been said that a university's role is not necessarily to preach the right answers, but to teach students how to ask the right questions. To the extent that's true, a recent University of Pennsylvania report seems to be properly performing its role. The report itself was hard to ignore; it reported that 64 percent of consumers "do not know that it is legal for an online store to charge different people different prices during the same time of day, a practice used by some companies that base their prices on what they know about a customer's buying habits." Read more...

The CIO of the $3 billion Wawa convenience food chain was frustrated that various business units saw business data in different formats—and, consequently, were basing decisions on different numbers. So, he sought bids to consolidate all retail software systems and present a more unified view for the 13,000-employee chain with stores in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia. Read more...