Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

The curse of the Web site upgrade has struck again. But fortunately for Amazon, which Web-monitoring service Pingdom reported to be down for more than three days last week, the E-tailer’s site was working fine. The Amazon-is-down alert “referred to a problem we had getting to Amazon due to something they’d done with their system,” a Pingdom spokesman later explained. “Amazon started treating monitoring services [and most bots in general, if they presented themselves as such] slightly differently for a while. Most likely it wasn’t even intentional, just some side effect.”

This isn’t the first time E-tail updates have wrecked havoc with uptime tracking systems, as 1-800-Flowers discovered in February. Exactly what Amazon changed to confuse Pingdom’s bots isn’t clear; Amazon wouldn’t comment. And in fairness, it’s not an E-tailer’s job to play nice with monitoring services. But something at Amazon continues to drive monitoring sites a little crazy. On July 1, after the Pingdom problem was cleared up, there was a rash of Twitter reports that Amazon was down. They were based in part on the popular downforeveryoneorjustme.com site, which reported: “It’s not just you! http://amazon.com looks down from here.” As of tonight, that site still thinks Amazon is down.…

One retail IT line that is too cynical to not share: In an unrelated interview, a senior IT manager discussed working with certain internal clients—business unit heads who had, until recently, been just colleagues.

What’s the difference, he was asked, between a colleague and an internal client? “Simple,” he said. “An internal client is a colleague who’s had his reasonability removed.”…

But Kroger—a 2,449-store chain in 31 states—is always a fan of experimentation, so this change might be more about trialing a new checkout approach and the removal of self-checkout might simply be a matter of freeing up space in a tightly designed store in an urban Houston, Texas, location. More meaningfully, though, it also reflects a POS approach conflict, with grocers today ambivalent about not only self-checkout but (both old and new) express lanes. It's an age-old argument, but one that is still valid: Why not reward and incentivize your best customers, rather than those who buy the least?Read more...

Before downloading the Twitter Commerce app, a user must agree that the vendor can read the consumer's tweets (including private direct messages), "follow new people," "update your profile" and—my personal favorite—"post tweets for you." Yeah, what consumer would have any problem with any of that? A third-party wants to send tweets out under my name? No problem. "I don't think it's the best choice of words," said Harrison Lee, the Tweetalicious co-founder/chief marketing officer, who also dubbed the warnings "intimidating." But, he added, it's not his firm's fault; Twitter dictated that wording.Read more...

In fact, the vast majority of our stories (often 80 percent or more) are deliberately not Premium. We are hoping that these colorful images will make it easier to tell which stories are Premium and which ones can be read in their entirety by non-Premium subscribers. We're hoping that this clarification cuts back on the frustration of non-Premium readers who click on stories that they can't read fully as well as encourages readers to click on a story, confident that it's entirely available to them. This is also a good time to explain how StorefrontBacktalk decides which stories are Premium.Read more...

This information is actually good news for retail IT for two reasons. By eliminating the possibility that mobile payment is imminent and by offering a "no sooner than" timetable, retailers are freed up to pursue various mobile-payment schemes without worrying about immediate change demands. The second reason this is good news is pragmatic.Read more...

The big difference between merchants and issuers is how they validate their compliance. Or, more accurately, whether they even need to validate their compliance. We should give Citigroup credit for going public to the extent it has fairly soon after the breach. But other than replacing the compromised cards, we have not read anything to indicate what Citi is doing internally to fix its system and network vulnerabilities.Read more...

There are two elements to mobile payment that need that standardization: payment card security and other payment data. The retail need for consistency of payment security will be handled cleanly by the PCI Security Council, whenever it gets around to it, most likely before the end of this year. The more critical area, though, is all of the data involved, whether it's CRM, giftcards, coupons or anything else. And a later stage of the data mess will be two-way near filed communication (NFC), which is when things will get both interesting and ludicrously complex. If there are multiple competing wallets—say from Google, Apple and ISIS—how easily will it be to deal with all of that data in a homogeneous fashion?Read more...

That means the retailers who spent more to acquire this particular flavor of two-factor authentication may actually be less secure right now than if they relied only on strong passwords. After all, two-factor security effectively becomes one-factor security as soon as users start trusting too much in one factor (such as SecurID) and get sloppy with the other (their regular passwords). That's a natural danger—after all, how many people use two different keys to unlock their front door?Read more...

The ruling elevates language over substance, and it may leave consumer information at unnecessary risk if retailers take it as a green light to print full credit-card numbers on electronically mailed receipts, writes Legal Columnist Mark Rasch. After all, which is more risky: having a printed receipt with your credit-card number in your wallet or having an electronic version of that same document floating around the Internet?Read more...

The most glaring difference was for projected hiring. When compared with the national numbers and against seven other verticals (manufacturing; finance, insurance and real estate; professional services; construction; wholesale; transportation; and business services), retail CIOs were the most optimistic about hiring IT people, tying manufacturing, with 9 percent of both segments' CIOs saying they plan to add staff and one percent saying they plan to reduce staff. The national average is 7 percent to hire and 3 percent to reduce. Three percent of wholesale CIOs say they plan to hire, with zero planning to reduce. Finance CIOs also have 3 percent planning to hire, although 8 percent plan to reduce.Read more...

Sharing on social networks could be a CRM bonanza—there's a seemingly endless flood of data on what people are doing and buying. Retailers know how valuable that data can be and how hard it is to pry information loose from customers, which makes social tantalizing. But it's easy to forget that helping retailers isn't why customers are playing the social game. Neither is throwing away every shred of privacy. It may be that what social users really want is some attention—and their purposes don't always align with those of retailers.Read more...

Envision an approach that merges geolocation, mobile communication, social sites and—critically—a trusted retail brand and in-store interactions. Put it all together and the future may not look so dim for in-store, after all. Starbucks, which did not want MacLaren elaborating on the concept, said he gave one example as Starbucks’ existing MyStarbucksIdea.com. For the sake of humanity, let’s hope his vision is light years beyond that site, which has a strangely narcissistic quality to it.Read more...

As companies start to make inroads into mining the vast social data fields, early strategies are emerging. For example, one company—Attensity—says the best course is not to take a customer database and try and match it with social profiles floating around. It’s better to do the reverse—find the data in Social Land, look for helpful datapoints and then try and match it with the customer list. Why is that approach better? It’s more efficient. The discovered useful datapoints are valuable on their own, even without a customer match.

Attensity hasn’t done this for a retailer directly, but it is working with two chains through Teradata. When Catherine van Zuylen, Attensity’s VP of global product management, was asked how she feels about the privacy ethics of doing these searches and associations, she paused and said wisely: “We just make the tools. It’s really up to the individual retailers to use those tools for good or evil.” Didn’t Maxwell Smart say that?…

Mining tens of petabytes of data may sound like overkill for most retailers, but on May 20 IBM announced new tools for analyzing that level of data in less than a second. The move is really not too much overkill. As retailers start searching social-networking sites to flesh out their CRM data on customers, adding huge amounts of data from mobile on top of more facts being retained from M-Commerce, this capability could prove a lot more useful.

Unlike data on actual purchases, social-network data is literally out of anyone’s control. It ranges from static Facebook data to rapid-fire information in tweets. If a chain can track such data and react to it in real time, that could make huge-data analysis useful—even if it means merely spotting customer complaints bubbling up. But it would be especially useful if the analysis lets a retailer see almost everything customers are interested in. The fact that Big Blue is claiming to be able to tackle those mountains of data while it is still in its native format makes this announcement even more intriguing.…

The idea of aggregating the shopping and other experiences of a closed community is a good one, with lots of potential to boost the meaningfulness of such results. There's also a downside with this aggregation approach, namely that most consumers trust different friends to very different degrees.Read more...

Logistically, though, those types of things are not that easy with about 14,000 employees spread over 1,206 stores. For bonding, videoconferences and company-wide E-mails can only take someone so far. The chain's answer? Arrange—surreptitiously, mind you—for 5,300 pizzas to be cooked and delivered on Sat., May 14.Read more...

Beefing up security for more than payment-card data isn't a new idea, but it's unfortunate for retailers that Apple got so sloppy with its users' location data. Spotting customers as they're headed for a store is the holy grail of retail mobile-location technology, whether via GPS, Wi-Fi, cell-tower triangulation or POS tracking, and right now that's all getting a slightly creepy reputation. But in practice, it's going to become the norm—retailers will just need to get their best customers to opt in.Read more...

Most current mobile-payment approaches—including the mobile wallet Visa announced this week—are still based on the payment-card accounts Visa currently makes its money from. But eventually someone will come up with a better way and leapfrog over the card companies. Then Visa will be stuck with a large, expensive network for real-time transaction processing. That could explain why Visa wants to use its new service to follow cardholders around from one retailer to another.Read more...

To further minimize worries, as of Wednesday (May 11), the bill had zero cosponsors. As such, it certainly doesn't look like the Senate will pass the bill anytime soon. Is it possibly a news release bill, one designed to justify a news release but never be actively pursued? Just in case it does go anywhere, here's what the bill actually mandates.Read more...

The cascading problems were the result of Amazon's efforts to promise continuous availability of its cloud storage. That meant no downtime for maintenance windows—Amazon's network techs had to work without a net, and this time they were unlucky. But a dive into the details of the outage suggests that a cloud like Amazon's may not be worth the risk, or even offer an advantage, for big retailers—even though Amazon itself is one of the biggest.Read more...

Remember Firesheep, the free program that showed up last October and made it easy for almost anyone to hijack the Web browsing of other people using public Wi-Fi to visit social networks and popular Web sites? It turns out that YouTube didn’t forget. Since February, the video-clip site has been quietly adding Secure HTTP to its pages (so YouTube’s URLs begin with https: instead of http:), and at this point almost the entire site appears to be hijack-proof—at least by tools such as Firesheep.

Today, most online retailers just use Secure HTTP when customers are logging into their accounts; conventional wisdom is that the overhead of https (encryption, special session management and other compute-gobbling elements) is just too costly for an entire E-Commerce site. But it may be time to rethink that. If YouTube can handle that security workload, there’s a good chance it’s not outside the reach of major retailers. Or think of it another way: If your customers come to understand that they can watch funny-kitten videos securely on YouTube, how unhappy will they be to learn that they can’t have the same privacy and security in your online store?…

When Square simultaneously accepted a hefty Visa investment and then reversed course to match Visa’s position last week, many observers were trying to make sense of the move. What made Square so attractive to Visa? One industry observer—longtime payments power-player John B. Frank—has an interesting, albeit non-traditional, take. He argues that Visa’s affection for Square has little to do with Square and everything to do with Twitter. Indeed, Frank’s argument is that it was all about Jack Dorsey (Twitter Founder/Executive Chairman and Square Founder/CEO) and his ability to make Twitter deals happen.

“Shout out to Verifone: If it makes you feel any better, I’ve got a feeling, that Visa isn’t as interested in Square as they are in Twitter’s 200 million base,” Frank penned. “If Goliath was going to invest in David, why not a David with a PCI-certified personal POS? It’s because David isn’t really David after all. David is Goliath. Square is Jack Dorsey and Jack Dorsey is again Twitter. It’s all about P2P (person-to-person money movement) and this is Visa making a brilliant P2P investment/move.” Not so sure I buy into this very original theory, because I don’t see Visa connecting the dots with Twitter that aggressively—yet. Still, if it’s wacky and conspiratorial and it involves Silicon Valley today, well, it’s hardly wise to rule it out.…

But Pepsi has now rolled out a touchscreen vending machine that isn't primarily designed to actually give you anything to drink. It's an interesting intersection between social media, vending machines and CRM. In a "tis better to give than receive" mode, consumers walk up to the machine and can only use it to gift a drink to a friend or colleague (or, for that matter, a bitter enemy) by "selecting a beverage and entering the recipient's name, mobile number and a personalized text message." This creative idea actually has some fascinating CRM potential. It exposes Pepsi to friends/associates lists and flags new people who might be open to receiving promotional contacts.Read more...

PCI is impervious to silver bullets of any kind. There are a few things every retailer needs to understand about both EMV and PCI before jumping on this particular bandwagon. Conway crafts a little thought experiment that assumes, as was suggested, that EMV becomes the "metric system" equivalent for payment cards. That means Chip-and-PIN—like a shift to the metric system—replaces all previous card and cardholder authentication methods. My EMV metric system card has no signature panel, no magnetic stripe. And the PAN is printed, not embossed, on the front of the card. Does PCI go away? Conway suggests it does not.Read more...