Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

The $24 billion 5,000-store pharmacy chain joins an expanding list of national retailers who have agreed to make such changes, including 7-Eleven, RadioShack, Safeway, Trader Joe's and Wal-Mart. The most prominent retailer who has fought such efforts is Target, whose legal battle continues. Read more...

As retailers continue to experiment with mobile commerce, one potential problem is when mobile customers prove to be truly mobile. Let’s say a national chain sends an E-mail blast to the cellphones of 10,000 Boston-area customers, inviting them to visit the store for a free sample on Wednesday. The chain limits the offer to the Boston area through area code and other data.

But it just so happens that there’s a huge convention in San Jose that day of the Society Of People Who Live In Boston. Your San Jose locations get flooded with people asking for their free gift, leading to a lot of baffled employees and angry customers. This observation comes courtesy of a colleague who has far too much time on his hands to think up such things.…

This wonderful piece comes courtesy of that time-honored daily newspaper tradition, the police blotter. You really should read the details in this story in New York’s Saratogian newspaper, but the essence is that a woman walks up to an ATM at a Hannaford’s grocery store. (Just what Hannaford needs right now. More police-oriented publicity.)

She connects a laptop to the ATM until an alarm goes off, at which point she packs up and leaves. Turns out that she worked for the ATM company, but the story asks why no one bothered to ask her what she was doing. Indeed, it’s a fine question. How many retailers have strict file access procedures, but would likely let a stranger plug a laptop into equipment without any questions? No, please, don’t answer that question. It’s too depressing to hear. …

Like it or not (place this father defiantly in the “not” category), children are using the Internet’s social network sites at a younger age, with retail marketers hovering close by. How young?

New stats show 17 percent of boys aged 10-12 used such sites last year, which is more than double the 8 percent who used social sites in 2006, according to the Harris Poll. For 10-12-year-old girls, the figure is 27 percent, more than 2-and-a-half times the prior year’s 11 percent. In the 13-15-year category, boys jump to 46 percent and girls jump to 54 percent. Oddly enough, that 54 percent for 13-to-15-year-old girls actually dropped three percent from 2006.…

With an eye on retailers having to juggle payment systems between many varied environments–far beyond merely online and in-store–a National Retail Federation division this week introduced a set of guidelines called the Retail Transaction Interface, which it has dubbed “the first service-oriented architecture service interface schema and technical specification for the retail industry.”

“By making existing POS transaction functions available as SOA Services, RTI will enable the business logic behind these services to be easily reused for other customer and associate touch-points such as self checkout, fuel at grocery stores, kiosks, shop on the web, store within a store, portable shopper, mobile line buster and other complementary store solutions,” said a statement from the NRF’s Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS). Execs with Big Lots and BJ’s Wholesale Club represented retailers in a committee dominated by tech vendors.…

With a privacy invasion trial about to begin, Best Buy’s IT department will be conducting more frequent remote audits of the chain’s Geek Squad tech support department.

“Using powerful mainframes at Best Buy’s headquarters in Richfield, the company now scans several hundred Geek Squad computers each night to see if customer data is stored appropriately,” said a story in the May 1 edition of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. “Previously, these audits were done only several times a year.” Best Buy is also setting up a system where customer files can only be viewed by the file names, without personal content. In addition, the retailer has now banned thumb drives by its Geek Squad technicians.…

Microsoft is “leaning toward going hostile in its pursuit of Yahoo,” with an announcement “likely” on May 2, according to a report in that day’s edition of The Wall Street Journal.

Although such a move would not likely have a direct impact on the IT side of E-Commerce with major retailers, it could sharply impact tens of thousands of smaller merchants that rely on Yahoo to sell their wares.…

Examples abound: Intrusion alerts that are ignored due to lack of staff, firewalls with rules that are out of date, intrusion detection systems that have not been tuned to minimize the false positives, encryption keys that are never changed, privileged users who have permissions left over from prior projects, terminated employees who still have logins and policies that are not enforced. Fixing this stuff is not expensive, but it's not fun either.Read more...

The British retail group used the opportunity to beat up banks and card brands for overly high interchange fees. (Then again, retail lobbying groups need no special occasion to make such points, as they often volunteer them when asked about the weather.) But the question remains whether the consumer reactions that are pushing cash usage in the U.K. are likely to be replicated in other parts of the world. Read more...

Google says it has concocted a better way of searching for Web images, one that involves image-recognition to “see” what the image depicts as opposed to just reading the accompanying text.

This technique, called Visual Rank, has tremendous potential to shake up E-Commerce, which heavily relies on product images. The details were discussed by Google last week at the International World Wide Web Conference in Beijing, where two Google scientists described Visual Rank as “an algorithm for blending image-recognition software methods with techniques for weighting and ranking images that look most similar,” according to this New York Times story.…

Homa called a news conference to detail some of those planned security improvements, including Triple DES PIN encryption ("customer card information is now encrypted from the PINpad at the store register and remains encrypted while it's in our own internal network"), host and network intrusion prevention systems ("to proactively prevent malware from being installed in our systems") and better payment segmentation. Read more...

The new feature—dubbed Virtual Waiter and introduced by the fast-food chain on April 24—is based on "technology that gathers data from millions of online orders and suggests menu items that best match customers' orders." But a demo showed that the technology was much more sophisticated than that suggested.Read more...

Wal-Mart executives this week promised Arkansas legislators that any product with a radio tag would be clearly labeled, as the retail giant tries to put the inventory-tracking devices on all products sold at Sam’s Clubs by 2010, according to this BusinessWeek story.

After checkout, customers would have the option of removing the labels containing the tags, Wal-Mart told the state legislators. “If a manufacturer installed the tag inside a container, workers would be able to deactivate it before a customer leaves the store,” the story said.…

Police near Canton, N.Y., are investigating a payment card data breach at a local retail chain that sounds oddly similar to the Hannaford and other related recent breaches. Is this a coincidence or a gang focused on retail data?

The new information on the Canton WiseBuys breach has the data being grabbed during a system changeover between December 5 and December 20, 2007, according to this WWNYTV story. …

A difficult to duplicate RFID chip? That’s the claim of an RFID startup, which is using MEMs resonators to create a unique signal, or “voiceprint,” which can’t be cloned and can be used to authenticate the chip, according to this RFID Update story.

“Each voiceprint is unique but falls within a defined band so separate readers do not have to be developed for each chip,” the story said. “However, MEMflakes can’t be read with RFID readers currently on the market.” …

EBay’s PayPal is following the path set by other alternative payment players and is starting to appear in physical stores.

It’s not a huge chain, but it’s a start. Moosejaw Mountaineering and its seven stores will now accept PayPal and the chain is also starting to use in-store kiosks to display online customer reviews, according to this Internet Retailer story. Neither move is a first. BillMeLater is already inching into online payments, and the Fair Indigo chain in Wisconsin already started the kiosk-search-through-Web-customer-reviews effort last year. Still, any movement toward Merged Channel is welcome.…

This question comes to mind when looking at some recent earnings reports. Wal-Mart's been faring well, but it points to increased grocery and other low-cost items, suggesting that they may be taking sales away from higher priced grocery rivals. That might be a recession sign. But this week's Amazon figures raise questions about such analysis. Read more...

Starbucks on April 23 cut back its financial projections for the year, citing continuing declines in its store traffic, especially in California and Florida. This is announced just a few weeks after Starbucks said it would shake up its Web presence.

But as we’ve noted before, Starbucks has always had an unusually weak Web presence, especially for a chain that for years dominated social networking buzz among younger consumers long before MySpace, Facebook or YouTube were factors. Is this the price that must be paid for years of Web neglect? Could an enthusiastic Web site have helped in-store sales?…

Because many organizations create policies specifically to comply with PCI standards, there are some policies that specifically single out cardholder data for special protection. These need to be rewritten to reference a data classification policy. If that doesn't exist, then it needs to be created, and some examples of data in the "confidential class" other than cardholder data need to be provided. Read more...

The E-Commerce folk over at the National Retail Federation–Shop.org–are not so quietly putting out feelers for a new VP gig to pull in other e-tailers.

The position details are what would be expected–overseeing research, coordinating with government lobbyists, developing best practices, etc.–but if there are any readers who want to try and shape how E-Commerce players are treated, it might be interesting. Scott Silverman, Shop.org’s executive director, is begging for interested folk to drop him a line at hr-shop@nrf.com. …

China POS shipments soared some 19 percent last year, figures that show China’s retailers quickly becoming some of the biggest POS purchasers in the world, according to a new global POS report from consultancy IHL Group. How fast are China’s retail purchases growing? Last year was the first time China blew past Japan in POS purchases and it also had more than 25 percent more shipments than Germany, said IHL President Greg Buzek.

One key reason is that retailers in China tend to have much smaller real estate footprints. That delivers a lot more retail locations, each of which is quite small. Buzek puts the number of today’s Chinese retail locations at 12 million, compared with 2.1 million in Japan, 363,000 in Germany and 2.25 million retail outlets in the U.S.…

The key argument of the report is that none of the three groups of companies involved—the card brands, the issuing banks and key retailers—is spending the dollars to create true incentives to make contactless payment work, said lead report author Bruce Cundiff, who is Javelin's director of payments research. "There is no effective value proposition for merchants and for wireless carriers," Cundiff said. Read more...

With that in mind, StorefrontBacktalk has been asking retailers, lawyers and other experts (and gadflies) for their favorite credit card security issue brain teasers. How many can you figure out? (No, there are no right answers, other than accepting cash.) Read more...

Those North Face executives are far from alone. As retailers and consumer goods manufacturers have been watching—mesmerized—consumers watch more than 10 billion U.S. Web videos in February, they have tried to figure out ways to make it work for them. Read more...