Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Industry shorthand is intended to be an efficient way to communicate frequently used phrases. Sometimes, however, retail tech drops its guard and ends up with multiple identical terms to refer to very different things. Some 15 years ago, “Web server” was the classic example, referring to both software and tower hardware. It was often impossible to tell which was being referenced, even in context. Today, M-Commerce is giving us a 2011 example.

If I reference Best Buy Mobile revenue, am I referring to the chain selling phones or what people buy using their phones looking at Best Buy’s site on those phones? The same can be said of just about every major chain that happens to sell phones, but Best Buy is an especially severe offender. It actually dubbed one of its divisions BestBuy Mobile—and it’s the chain’s M-Commerce group. Here’s a Merriam-Webster brain-tease: What do you call revenue that Best Buy earns from people accessing the chain’s M-Commerce site on their iPhone and then using that connection to purchase an Android phone? (Was going to ask for the name if those same people engaged in this M-Commerce Android effort while riding the LAN at a local Mobil gas station, but thought better of it.)…

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...

One of the great things about mobile-marketing efforts today is that they can sometimes take the seemingly innocuous—something that always has been truly innocuous—and turn it into a little-noticed CRM bonanza. Consider a contest announcement made on Wednesday (June 15) by an American Eagle Outfitters brand (Aerie), where consumers were asked to use an app (Pose) on their phone to shoot pictures of people wearing that chain’s clothing.

The winning pictures would be displayed on the chain’s 25-story Times Square LED screen, and the photographer would get a $150 Aerie giftcard. The real prize goes to American Eagle, which can analyze and leverage the metatag data associated with each photo, revealing brand, store location, where the photo was shot and price. Shortly, such images could report back with much greater detail, including SKU, and, with near field communication, data could even include CRM history of both the photographer and the person being photographed. When they wrote that a picture’s worth a thousand words, they may have been frighteningly accurate. …

Example: Section 4.2, the guidelines' advice for "mixed-mode environments." That means cases where a single server contains some virtual machines that are in-scope for PCI, while other VMs running on the same hardware are out-of-scope. If you're accustomed to PCI's usual generalized, loophole-laden language, you're in for a shock. The bottom-line recommendation for mixed-mode environments comes down to three words: Don't do it.Read more...

Her comments come on the heels of our report last week that the elimination of the Google AdWords badges for Google Checkout likely meant the beginning of the end for the alternative payment system. The executive shall remain nameless for the moment because, well, there's already too much unemployment in this country. Asked if Google Checkout will be killed or whether it will simply get a lot quieter, the exec laughed and said that, in recent years, "we've spent zero time on marketing [Google Checkout] and zero dollars on consumer awareness. I don't know how much quieter we can get."Read more...

It's easy to knock Sears, with its long history of making customers unhappy with out-of-stock items, whether they were actually out of stock or not. (In a comment to The Consumerist post, a Sears representative blamed the associate for being unable to find the item in stock, then lied to cover his incompetence.) On the other hand, maybe the problem isn't as human-centric as that. It could be that Sears' dueling inventory systems are to blame.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...

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...

Probably because testing IPv6 E-Commerce for 24 hours is all risk and no reward. If anything went seriously wrong, a retailer's site could have become unreachable for the day. That's a hefty price to pay for participating in what for retailers is essentially a publicity stunt, because virtually no customers have IPv6 connections they could use for shopping in an IPv6 online store. But that doesn't mean big retailers didn't benefit from the day—even if they didn't show up.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...

Big retailers that handle groceries are theoretically ready to handle DataBar coupons at POS, but the reality is that there has never been a large-scale, full-on test of these coupons with no UPC-A codes to fall back on. And no one from the barcode's sponsoring organization seems to be offering practical advice on cutting the risks—which could lead to unhappy customers and a backlash among grocers.Read more...

If Apple, PayPal and others opt for their own approaches, which seems inevitable, the fragmentation will make it even harder for consumers to embrace mobile payments and for any retailer to get enough traction for mobile to be profitable. Indeed, the Google exec who handled much of the rollout—Google Payments VP Osama Bedier—used that event to lay out the case for why multi-platform support is so crucial. At the time, though, he was making the case for openness everywhere other than mobile platforms. Still, his argument works.Read more...

In the middle of a live demo of the product, Google Payments VP Osama Bedier told the audience that he was going to use his personal phone and his personal credit card to complete a transaction and that it would all be viewable on the TV screens around the room. He knew the entire event was going to be posted to YouTube, too. But he also should have known about Murphy's Law and that he was tempting fate to then tell the audience he was a "security freak" and there was no way he was going to show them his personal card data.Read more...

The security issue cropped up because the chain wanted to do extensive beta testing with customers before offering the final version of the application to the world. Security policies with Apple's iPhone and Research in Motion's BlackBerry, among others, require that only tested and approved apps can be installed on their phones. Android's more lax application security process made it the more desirable platform. "The service is only available publicly to Android phone owners at this time, because we don't want the app in its current state going into the public app stores. Only Android easily offers the ability to install apps from 'Unknown Sources,'" wrote Nick Lansley, who manages IT R&D projects at Tesco.Read more...

Marketers have a penchant for secrecy when it comes to rolling out their products or upgrades. (It actually is a psychological need for control, but let’s not go there.) That secrecy attempt can often crash into the Internet’s openness and crowd-research. Pizza Hut discovered last week, though, that the very nature of Apple’s app store and Google’s Android Market can also derail plans quite effectively.

It all started with plans for the pizza chain to unveil a version of its app for Android and iPad. The chain had a date for the rollout and plans were put into place. But those mobile software shops—especially Apple’s—operate on their own timetables. And Apple posted for the world the actual Pizza Hut app three days before it was introduced. Oops! The problem could have been averted by simply announcing the app as soon as it was submitted, with a “the product will be available this summer” line, but that would have killed the chain’s goal of encouraging downloads. Pizza Hut could have simply waited until the app was live and announced then, but that takes all the secrecy fun out of it.…

Actually, the news reports were based on local-news stings in only two cities, Sacramento and Philadelphia, where reporters specifically bought holiday items at full price and then waited until the items went on sale before returning them with gift receipts. And because Wal-Mart's gift receipts include a barcode containing the price, it seems likely that the training of customer-service associates could be to blame. Besides, why would Wal-Mart sabotage its own CRM and inventory-management efforts by intentionally mishandling returns?Read more...

When you push all rhetoric aside, PCI in-scope simply comes down to this: If a customer hands a payment card to any of a retailer's employees/contractors—or swipes or waves the card into a device inside or controlled by a retailer or types the information on that card into a Web site branded and controlled by a retailer—that retailer is subject to PCI. If customer doesn't, the retailer isn't. What Square's new approach, dubbed Card Case, does is fully take the retailer out of the line of fire of the card information.Read more...

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.…

While this porn kiosk touts privacy, which would seem to make sense, it also requires a driver's license and a payment card. Those two documents certainly are good ideas, especially when arguing to retailers that the machines will not be usable by minors, but both also obliterate the claims of privacy. The issue speaks to all kiosks, but this case is a wonderfully extreme example.Read more...

The centerpiece, from a company called Aetrex, is something the store calls iStep Wave and its claim is that it can go beyond measuring shoe size to examine arch type and pressure points—and do it all in half-a-minute. The store says the device uses "3,744 gold-plated barometric sensors that measure the pressure exerted by your foot every 0.25 cm squared and 1,326 infrared LEDs and receptors that are aligned every half millimeter."Read more...

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...

As a result, it should be easier for Nordstrom to quickly add new devices and new functions to the mobile POS system. Features that the iPod doesn't support, such as contactless payment, might be available on other devices. In theory, with a well-structured architecture, new devices could be swapped in on an as-needed basis. Unlike mobile POS pioneers Home Depot (which uses a highly customized handheld for its mobile POS) and Apple (which can only use Apple, naturally), Nordstrom can exercise its option to do small-scale experiments with devices from multiple vendors in the midst of its big rollout. That will also discourage developers from tying code too tightly to one device—giving Nordstrom the chance to do even more quick-hit experiments in the future.Read more...

Even if the Supreme Court rules that customers don't have a right to privacy in their location, retailers still face a dilemma, writes Legal Columnist Mark D. Rasch. For example, smartphone apps can leverage GPS or other location data and enable new sales and marketing opportunities. But consumer backlash may result in new regulation to restrict the collection and use of this information. If you fail to have clear and unambiguous privacy policies that state what you are collecting and why and then follow these policies, either the consuming public or the government will make you do it.Read more...

Typically, such a PIN pad attack is done physically. However, with this many stores, a network attack from pad to pad is also possible. In a Q&A issued by Michaels, it was the chain itself that first raised the question of whether employees could have engaged in the fraud.Read more...

It's bad enough for retailers that smartphones can't be locked down against software changes. But terms like these (which are becoming the norm) mean payment-card transactions and many types of data that retailers may want to use would violate a mobile operator's contract—and could make smartphones practically unusable for in-store purposes. This assumes, of course, that the telcos opt to enforce these clauses, which were probably crafted with little thought about the likely mobile-payment world of 2012.Read more...