Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

The IDC report, which analyzed and compared the offerings by top RDI vendors, says Western European retailers are particularly enthused about RDI with about 35 percent of the companies surveyed in 2008 reporting that they planned to invest in the technology in the near future. "Considering the economic downturn, planned investments by 35 percent of respondents is remarkable," the report said.Read more...

Apple and Google hadn't been seeing exactly eye-to-eye for many months, but was pushed this out in the public was the FCC confirmation on July 31 that it was investigating. The bigger picture here, though, is that Mobile Commerce is the next "big thing" in retail and Apple and Google are well-positioned to become two very key—if not the key—players. And they won't be playing on the same side.Read more...

EBay's PayPal group went dark worldwide for all users for an hour Monday, starting at about 1:30 PM (New York time). Many users were unable to make purchases for a much longer period, until the final users were restored by about 6:30 PM. Ebay said the cause of the outage was an "internal network hardware issue" and that EBay was "looking into how to address our affected merchants." If EBay wants to compensate—or, more precisely, console—merchants who were scared POSless on Monday, forget about compensation checks. Instead, do two things. Read more...

A new smartphone from Palm called the Palm Pre is supposed to sell for $199 but a lot of consumers last week bought them for $99. The problem? A data entry error that put the wrong price into stores nationwide. Best Buy Marketing Manager John Bernier used Twitter to confirm the glitch: “System errors happen because we’re a company made up of humans. We apologize for the confusion. The error is being corrected.” He also said “Without releasing confidential numbers, all I can confirm is that the price was honored until removed from the system. Not sure how we reconcile further?”

It’s an interesting dilemma. Could Best Buy have gone back to those people, asking for more money? They get brownie points for doing the right thing, but not sure they had much practical choice. Would love to know how many of the units they sold at that lower price and how it happened.…

Amazon has long held a much-deserved reputation for stellar technological execution, which is why their dastardly diabolical and delicious digital download delete disasters are so damn depressing and destructive. (Fear not. That last sentence has satisfied by alliteration needs for the next month.) In short, digital downloads bring with them a huge number of unanticipated IT problems, in what is likely a preview of mobile commerce nightmares around the corner.Read more...

Marketing will also share in the pain, as the typical—albeit unauthorized—assumptions that tracking a credit card of customer #1234 pretty much tracks customer #1234. That assumption—and all of the data decisions that hang off of that—would be tainted.Read more...

"Our customers tell us that to differentiate ourselves we must be proactive, we must inspire them and we must make grocery shopping easier and faster," wrote Nick Lansley, Tesco's head of research and development. "Perhaps this new immersive experience needs to be a great mobile phone application or perhaps a 3D virtual store or shopping through the TV set-top box or a third party recipe site where ingredients can be added straight to your basket."Read more...

A quick folo on a pair of stories we ran last week, where an attorney specializing in high-tech issues complained that a promotion on Microsoft’s new Bing search engine took his personal information but then welched on the deal by not delivering about $185 in cellphone discounts. This week, an attorney for Microsoft agreed to pay the originally promised amount.

The problem was that Mark Rasch, the former head of the U.S. Justice Department’s high-tech crimes unit, was told he didn’t qualify for the discounts only after he’d given Microsoft and AT&T his personal information during the application process. Although Rasch said that he got the money this week, what he didn’t get were any assurances that the companies would delete from their databanks the information he’d provided. “A Microsoft tech guy said, `You can delete your Microsoft Live account,’ but that doesn’t indicate what happens with my information that’s probably being shared with third parties,” Rasch said.…

Germany’s Metro Group, the world’s fifth-largest retailer with $96 billion in annual revenue and about 2,200 stores, has co-created a new kind of UHF-RFID tag that is reportedly delivering “nearly 100 percent read rates despite being attached to pallets loaded with goods containing metal and fluids.” Metro is using the new Avery Dennison AD-843 tag to track pallets sent from its warehouses to all of its food stores in Germany and to “at least 90 in France,” Gerd Wolfram, managing director of MGI Metro Group Information Technology, is quoted as saying to RFID Journal.

“As the pallets are loaded onto trucks, Sirit or Intermec RFID interrogators capture their tag ID numbers—reading them even in instances where a tag is obstructed by cases of goods—and send those ID numbers, along with a date and time stamp, to software running on Metro Group’s server,” the story said. “The software, designed and integrated by MGI Metro Group Information Technology, includes a database of pallet RFID tag ID numbers linked to the bar-code serial numbers of the products loaded on those pallets, enabling the software to interpret the RFID data and track when a pallet was shipped.”…

The move is part of a plan to move the state stores from IBM software over to an Oracle package and the contract anticipates--and prohibits--the kiosk company from making money from combining the payment card data and blood-alcohol levels and selling. (A little blackmail potential? If it weren't for that prohibition, it has all the potential for a nice business plan.)Read more...

A statement from Visa said that a "temporary programming error at Visa Debit Processing Services caused some transactions to be inaccurately posted" and that the glitch "has been corrected and erroneous postings have been removed. "It simply posted the wrong amount into online statements and it was corrected within hours," one Visa official said, adding that the specific amount varied slightly from consumer to consumer, but that they were all "equally large amounts" and were "in some cases identical amounts."Read more...

When Oracle Tuesday (June 23) announced its quarterly earnings, Wall Street was excited as it was to mark the first major tech player to announce earnings that included May. That excitement quickly melted as Oracle posted its first revenue decline since 2002. New software licenses plunged 13 percent and services revenue fell 16 percent.

Given that Oracle is arguably the world’s largest software vendor, those are not encouraging hints that the recession is about to be over. “Oracle isn’t just competing against SAP, they’re competing against companies delaying purchases,” David Rutchik, a consultant with Pace Harmon LLC, told The Wall Street Journal. Rutchik was also quoted as saying that sales of Oracle’s software take a long time to complete and that companies budgeted for many of the purchases made earlier this year before the stock market collapsed in October. That’s both true and even more discomforting.…

Ahold Information Services Vice President of Applications Development Alan Williams argued that a January replacement of the current UPC-A barcode with the DataBar "would create a significant hardship for a large number of retailers." Ahold, a Netherlands-based grocery chain operator with sales of $40 billion, has about 1,400 stores in the U.S. including Stop&Shop and Giant.Read more...

To be clear, the credit- and debit-card data sharing that Sears is accused of sharing happened between Sept. 9, 1995, and June 22, 2001, long before PCI even existed. But such a thing could never happen today, in our PCI-compliant environment, right? Think again, Breach Boy.Read more...

According to officials involved in the case, Macy's is saying that it has only been able to locate about 40 percent of the data involving some 2,900 tainted necklaces sold. Let's set aside for the moment the possibility that Macy's officials are being less than candid with the L.A. officials because they simply don't want to reveal the data. If we assume that they are being absolutely candid, what does it say about their data management?Read more...

Sure, we can do news stories and columns on these documents but we thought some some readers might want a database of all of these documents as they evaluate new issues. We're not sure if we have the right answer, but today we're launching our best shot: StorefrontBackground. StorefrontBacktalk and StorefrontBackground are linked and share many of the same resources (such as our image library, some of the editors, shared servers, etc.) but are, editorially, polar opposites.Read more...

But analysts were less than impressed, pointing out that the Motorola units were actually larger than many other major RFID readers today, despite being smaller than other Motorola RFID readers. "I definitely classify this as 'ho hum.' ThingMagic and Impinj as well as some others have much smaller form factors and more functions," said Pete Abell, a longtime RFID analyst (used to be with IDC) who today works as an independent consultant.Read more...

Most of the products that are likely to be at play in the merger talks—including Java, MySQL, Sun servers and workstations and Oracle's Retail suite—will either be unchanged (Oracle Retail seems to have no redundancy and is likely to be not impacted at all) or the changes will be irrelevant (MySQL operates so far below the database size and needs of most major chains that it is likely to be irrelevant). Although Java has attracted a lot of attention and debate, it's unlikely that Oracle would handle it much differently than did Sun. But if one looks a bit further down the road, things could get a lot more interesting for the typical retail chain CIO.Read more...

This all raises the issue of "should retailers wait for the PCI SSC to 'bless' or integrate so called 'beyond PCI' technologies into the standards?" GuestView PCI Columnist David Taylor's answer is a profound "no." Read more...

Chains are just starting to see the business ROI potential of POS—especially when working with CRM—to fuel upsells and to legitimately increase loyalty. But few look at POS as a potential protector and a protector against some potentially very large expenses. Consider four items from the last few days.Read more...

One of the more pervasive challenges today is that remote site access has been around for decades, but the security needs have sharply changed. No longer, for example, does a firewall have to be pierced to permit remote site access. StorefrontBacktalk held a podcast this week on PCI and remote access, with LogMeIn's George Hamilton as guest. To listen to the podcast, please click here.Read more...

Could these be coincidences? Might they indeed be isolated debit card incidents? Absolutely. But this also might be an initial heads up that the debit card system relied on by major retailers today has inherent flaws. What happened, with both Macys and Best Buy, with software specifically designed to look for and prevent these kinds of multiple identical charges? What about the systems at the card processors and the banks?Read more...

In addition to monitoring--audio, video and even key logging--call center employees, call centers are sometimes classified as "sensitive areas" (per PCI 9.1.1), but GuestView PCI Columnist David Taylor argues that that has caused some companies to build walls and erect partitions to physically isolate the call center or those specific agents who have privileged access to card data or other confidential data, an approach that may cause as many problems as it fixes.Read more...

New stats coming from research at RISNews.com are suggesting that, as suspected, homegrown packages are losing their home. IT execs saying that their "preferred IT deployment philosophy" is "deploying packaged applications with few modifications" came in at 53.8 percent, almost twice as popular an answer as "best of breed" at 28.8 percent. Even though RISNews has seen that trend for years, the difference had never been so stark. While the packaged response has been right around today's 53.8 percent figure for years (ranging no farther than from the low- to mid-50s), best-of-breed has suddenly plummeted. It was at 46 percent in 2006, 45 percent in 2007 and 47 percent in 2008, before plunging to 28.8 percent this year.Read more...

Having gotten that off our product lifecycle management chest, the Tradestone effort does have quite a few things going for it. First, it's A Team list of retailers—including Macy's, Kohl's, Lowe's, Urban Outfitters and Pacific Sunwear--forces it to be taken seriously. Secondly, there has been so little truly accomplished with PLM standardization that practically any effort should be applauded.Read more...