Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Being able to move data around your enterprise gives the most flexibility in using that data, and data portability also future-proofs your system by letting you bolt on new technology quickly instead of slowly and oh-so-carefully making changes to what you've already got.Read more...

In Donahoe's case, he has been trying to predict what major retail chains will do. Back in July 2011, he confidently told investors that eBay would have 20 national retail trials in 2012. Last week, Donahoe slashed that figure almost in half, now saying that 10 to 15 retailers will be offering PayPal in-store this year.Read more...

Due to the (strange? pyschotic? drug-induced?) unusual policies at Amazon, publishers have no idea who their Kindle subscribers are. That puts us here at StorefrontBacktalk in the awkward position of having to make a plea to our Kindle subscribers: Please reveal yourselves, and tell us how you find the Kindle subscriptions. We’re considering some changes to the service and any customer feedback goes to Amazon—and it’s not sharing. Therefore, we’re begging for whatever feedback you want to share to please share it with us directly.

For you Kindle people who have not yet subscribed to our Kindle feed, it’s not bad for convenience when traveling, when you’d like the latest on retail tech and E-Commerce beamed into your Kindle when you’re not looking. …

That suggests the fallout from all that lost learning during Target's Amazon years goes a lot deeper than it earlier appeared. And any advantage in Target's latecomer-to-E-tail status may have been lost in the struggle just to get the site working properly.Read more...

What if your system could look for hints about specific purchases that could be flagged for likely returns? Perhaps a customer who purchases three of the identical shoe, but each one in a slightly different size?Read more...

The coincidental number that was the program's weak spot? The required information-gathering with a customer took about 10 minutes, which is also roughly the same amount of time it takes most associates to make a new sale. They receive commission for those new sales and nothing for filling out the forms. Wonder why the program didn't work well?Read more...

In our attempts to battle the never-ending assaults by Spammers, StorefrontBacktalk had to do something this week for which we need to apologize. Our direct discussion forum—Go Beyond The Story—was recently overrun by Spammers. To make the forum useful, we had to wipe out existing users. We then put in place much better security. Now, we are asking our readers who had signed up for accounts in the forum to please sign up again.

We have also cleaned up our discussion forum on LinkedIn. If you want to jump into a discussion on our LinkedIn page, you simply need to first join the StorefrontBacktalk group forum. For you Facebook fans, we have also reactivated the StorefrontBacktalk‘s Facebook page. We love when people comment on the stories, but we need to insist that only comments relating to a story be posted to that story. For comments that do not directly relate to a story or column, the Go Beyond The Story forum is home. And we want it to be a noisy home, with lots of loud arguments and shouting. That’s how retail discussions are supposed to be.…

With cookies already under tighter controls in the U.K. and the European Union, and the near-certainty of some sort of U.S. Congressional hearings, retailers should be making new customer-tracking plans—plans that don't include cookies.Read more...

Believe it or not, writes Retail Columnist Todd Michaud, that's where the money will come from. RIM had the BlackBerry on the market for years delivering E-Mail to business users around the world, but it wasn't until Apple launched the iPhone and that mobile access to E-Mail became ubiquitous.Read more...

The big problem: The most logical and secure technology fix—moving PINs to secure hardware—is something Citi seems unwilling to do.Read more...

"The bigger concern is internal keys, ones they couldn't survey. Without their data of 'weak keys,' we can't be sure we aren't using any," the retail exec said. "All owners of certificates do not know today if their keys are weak or not, and have no way of finding out just by examining them."Read more...

But the number-two card brand also spoke of a near-term future where E-Commerce will be able to use the EMV chip to authenticate and process E-Commerce and M-Commerce transactions. However, will consumers pay more for laptops that can handle such security? And will tablets and smartphones—which can more easily and more cost-effectively handle such technologies—grow quickly enough to make desktop/laptop enhancements irrelevant?Read more...

The timing of the move raised eyebrows. Such shutdowns have historically been done overnight, perhaps starting at about 11 PM or midnight East Coast time, and during the weekend. Also raising eyebrows was why a planned software upgrade required the site to be taken down at all. Given the home repair nature of Home Depot, weekend downtime can be more costly than a Wednesday or Thursday.Read more...

All of this, pens Retail Columnist Todd Michaud, in an area—such as CRM—where the application of technology could directly impact a retailer's top and bottom lines.Read more...

That suggests the Dallas-based high-end retailer made a change in the wee hours—exactly when you'd expect—but then accidentally left test code in the homepage. The result: a Web site that probably worked fine for everyone in IT, just not for all customers.Read more...

You've got to start accepting cloud computing as a method of scaling your computing platform up and down, pens Retail Columnist Todd Michaud. In short, you've got to rip out most of your information architecture and start over.Read more...

But PayPal's approach—which essentially reverses 50 years of payment-card advances by eliminating any physical authentication device—still presents a big challenge when it comes to security. The ability to check out with just a mobile phone number and PIN—no plastic card, NFC-enabled phone or other authentication hardware required—means anyone who can acquire that phone number plus PIN has a free shot at the legitimate customer's account.Read more...

In theory, load times of 3 seconds or more should cost retailers half their customers. If that's true, E-tailers should be going out of business. Maybe it's time to dump those theories.Read more...

It's time to evict Web and mobile app development, and pretty much any marketing initiative that isn't core to your business. Heresy? Certainly, pens Retail Columnist Todd Michaud. But it's necessary.Read more...

On the mobile front, it's the first retail trial of PayPal's mobile payment program and it doesn't use a mobile device at all. (OK, that's more an embryo step than a baby step.) On the payment front, this is also a test of Home Depot accepting a rectangular magstripe card that doesn't say MasterCard, Visa, American Express, Discover or Home Depot on it.Read more...

But the Guess iPad trial is hardly being done to save costs. The flexibility of the tablets and sharp, customer-friendly graphics make the devices a much more effective way to show demos and to locate merchandise, check inventory and do anything else that a kiosk would normally do.Read more...

The good vendors will be able to address all these questions. The not-so-good ones will hand you a carrier bag or a pen instead. Read more...

There is more to protecting sensitive areas than installing video cameras. The second, and possibly thornier, concern for small and midsize merchants is how effective the reminder is likely to be when many of them mistakenly think they won't need to follow the advice.Read more...

The essence of the attacks' success leveraged two weaknesses: different unsecured remote-access packages used by various franchisees of Subway, which enabled easy Internet access to POS systems; and card swipes with minimal encryption. That meant key-capture software installed by the cyberthieves was able to grab data in the clear, as it was being swiped.Read more...

Microsoft has effectively thrown in the towel for Microsoft Tag. On Tuesday (December 13), Microsoft announced that its Tag Reader smartphone app will now support QR codes and NFC. Officially that’s to make Tag Reader a one-stop app so users won’t have to worry about what reader to use with various tags. In practice, it’s curtains for Tag, the multicolored 2D barcode that Microsoft rolled out in January 2009 but that never really caught on (not that the more successful QR code has been a barn-burning success).

In a blog post, Microsoft said it now recommends NFC for retailers to “blend in beautifully,” QR to “grab their attention” and Tag to “raise curiosity”—presumably as in, “curiosity about who’s still interested in Microsoft Tag.”…