Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Linda Shea, the polling firm's senior vice president and global managing director of customer strategies, said the inability to answer questions was particularly telling, and it was the result of an E-Commerce double-whammy. It reflects a rapidly increasing set of consumer expectations when it comes to E-Commerce sites at the exact same time that retailers are slashing customer service budgets, she said. Read more...

One of the most annoying parts of many a casual restaurant outing is at the end, when you just want to say “Check, please” and all wait staff seem to sense this and decide instead to join the Waitress Relocation Program.

Microsoft has decided to help (OK, they smelled money in those missing food servers) and created a device that permanently sits on the table. Redmond is backing this hardware that can take payment, print out a receipt and do it all without having to catch anyone’s eye. It allows the tip to be added (minus a deduction for subjecting you to the machine), and it can show various promotions. (OK, so having mandatory TV commercials when you’re dining out is probably not a good thing.) It also has a button to summon a manager if there’s an issue.…

The National Retail Federation’s Shop.org is lobbying the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to not flag consumers when their shopping behaviors are being tracked online, arguing that it would merely serve to frustrate those consumers.

In considering voluntary guidelines for E-Commerce behavioral advertising, the FTC is considering asking sites to display a “pop-up” notification whenever information is collected. Wrote Shop.org: “We all know how frustrating pop-ups can be when you are simply trying to read the latest headlines on a newspaper website. Now transfer that experience to a retail website where customers have come to expect a seamless experience from homepage to checkout. These types of ‘hiccups’ could be devastating.”…

In case there are two or three of you who are still skeptical about whether Web video will have an impact, consider these new figures. In February, U.S. Internet users viewed more than 10 billion online videos, which represents a 3 percent gain versus January (despite February being two days shorter) and a 66 percent gain versus February 2007, according to ComScore.

Google/YouTube was overwhelmingly the top source (at 35.4 percent), following by Fox (5.8 percent), Yahoo (2.9 percent), Microsoft (also 2.9 percent), Viacom (2.2 percent), Time Warner non-AOL (1.3 percent), Disney (1.3 percent), AOL (1.1 percent), ABC (1.0 percent) and Comcast (0.9 percent).

One more stat: Nearly 135 million U.S. Internet users spent an average of 204 minutes per person viewing online video in February.…

The PCI Security Standards Council on April 15 officially rolled out version 1.1 of the Payment Application Data Security Standard (PA-DSS). The specifics of the standard were spelled out last November and this is just the expected formal unveiling.

This fall, the group said it will maintain a list of validated payment apps. Also this fall, the group is likely to introduce an entirely new version of the PCI specification. But that version is not expected to have any impact on which apps are considered compliant.…

Any security consultant will tell you that it's important to have a data classification scheme. Although it makes a nice spreadsheet, we have seen only a few leading-edge merchants and banks that actually attempt to enforce it and use it to drive access controls. Why? Taylor has concluded that it's for a single strategic reason: "Data classification is boring." Read more...

A DVD rental kiosk outfit has rolled out a kiosk that keeps track of orders and awards free videos for frequent shoppers. The idea of a kiosk that has a long-term memory and an active CRM component is a wonderful next step (OK, a baby step) for intelligent kiosks.

The new units from DVDPlay use E-mail addresses in lieu of a loyalty card. “By entering an E-mail address during the rental process, the stand-alone DVD rental machine’s patent-pending software recognizes the number of customer rental transactions and, after every tenth rental, generates a promotional code for a free movie that is automatically sent to the customer’s E-mail account,” said a statement issued by the company. …

RFID vendor Mojix has rolled out a new RFID system that it says can read passive, Gen2-standard tags from 600 feet away; cover 250,000 square feet of area; and pinpoint tag location in 3D, according to this intriguing RFID Update story.

The move is interesting, because it shows a vendor’s willingness to play with the assumed RFID rules to try and generate a little retail ROI. The story quotes company officials saying that the claims are based on advances in digital signal processing, RF antenna design and computational processing power. Mojix’s STAR 1000 differs from traditional RFID systems by using separate components to power and read tags. “There is no rule of physics or regulation that says the receiver and transmitter have to be in the same housing,” said Kevin Duffy, Mojix senior vice president of sales and marketing.…

Wal-Mart is pushing to create online communities for its customers, where Wal-Mart employees can sit on the sidelines, take notes and be influenced, or so suggests the chief marketing officer for online operations at the world’s largest retailer.

“Consider 130 million customers in a community sharing information on products they buy and use,” said Cathy Halligan, in this Marketing Daily story. “We learned you need to listen to these customers and implement the top-requested features.” …

"A good QSA would ask not only if an antivirus package existed or if a firewall appliance was installed or if a unique user ID policy was followed, but also how these were designed, architected, implemented, configured and monitored," Weise wrote. "A good QSA would ask to what security policy must applicable operational procedures adhere and whether anyone looks at the alerts and logs generated by the antivirus or firewall products."Read more...

In a thinly veiled threat of a potential hostile takeover attempt, Blockbuster's statement said "Blockbuster is making its proposal public because it believes the shareholders of Circuit City should have the opportunity to participate in determining the destiny of the company." Read more...

With the exception of in-person pickups and cash-on-delivery, plus a handful of large-ticket items (specifically cars, motorcycles, aircraft, boats, caravans, trailers, commercial trucks, services, real estate and businesses) for sale, sellers will be required to offer eBay-owned PayPal as a payment method by May 21, in anticipation of the June 17 ban on anything else. Said eBay: "If we think these changes will significantly improve the buyer experience, we may expand them to additional segments of sellers or categories." Read more...

The $4.8 billion automotive aftermarket parts chain—which dubs itself the nation's second largest such chain, with 3,261 stores in 40 states, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands—said the breach appears to have impacted customers from 14 of its stores in Georgia, Ohio, Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, New York, Virginia and Indiana. Read more...

McDonald's is launching iced coffee as part of some new menu options and "part of our objective was to create additional awareness," especially among the younger consumers who McDonald's assumes will be receptive to a mobile coupon campaign." Read more...

That E-Commerce figure will hit $204 billion this year (when it's percent of total retail will climb to seven percent) and will continue to have major gains for the next several years, hitting $335 billion in annual sales by 2012, Forrester said. But one of the report's authors, Forrester Research Director Carrie Johnson, said that this isn't necessarily cause for retail celebration, as she projected that many of those increased sales are little more than online cannibalizing in-store sales.Read more...

PCI DSS is famous for its level of detail, in laying out for merchants procedures for implementing and testing many different security controls. But PCI DSS does not tell merchants how they should actually manage all these alerts or which of these controls need to be integrated, and which of the procedures need to be automated.Read more...

With reports out this week that Boeing’s much-celebrated upcoming aircraft—the 787 Dreamliner—would be again delayed because of technology problems, some wondered if the delays involved the plane’s extensive RFID experiments.

Boeing spokesperson Nancy Standifer announced Wednesday that the plane’s delays do not involve its experimental RFID capabilities and for a very good reason: the delays have prevented the RFID phase from even starting. The plane is slated to be among the first to truly have RFID tags on thousands of individual parts. And those tags have to work in temperatures that ranged from 40 degrees (Fahrenheit) below zero to 1,200 degrees above zero.…

The Web world defies prediction—or does it? Conventional wisdom would have the new up-and-coming retailers faring better online, while the old-style bigbox merchants lag behind. And yet, Starbucks has had far more online troubles than it should have while Sears, according to this intriguing Chicago Tribune feature, is soaring online.

The number of people who visited Sears.com and Kmart .com at least once in February—an industry metric known as unique visitors—rose 20 percent, to 14.7 million, from the same period last year. That makes Sears’ Web business the second-fastest-growing site among mass merchants in 2007. Sears clearly has some serious challenges, but go tell that to the company’s Web people.…

Saying only that a TV station’s news coverage of its data breach was too “aggressive,” the Hannaford grocery chain has canceled its commercials from the Portland, Maine, CBS affiliate. The station, which announced Hannaford’s decision on its own news site, said the chain declined to cite any errors or problems with the coverage.

This is a baffler. You have a media outlet in your community that is saying accurate but not nice things about you. What’s the response? Make sure you give up the one way you can give your side of the story by pulling your ads.

I always get in trouble when I say this, but a better approach is to pull your ads from media that are already saying your side of the story for free and use that money to buy twice the ads on the other sources. That way, you get your message aired where it needs to be heard most. But that’s a lot less fun than punishing people who stay stuff you’d rather not be said.…

When Best Buy removed annual fees from its bonus card, the company yielded about 10 times the number of shoppers opting to sign up for its rewards program, according to this Forbes.com story.

A location that gains a reputation as a “flat-screen store,” for example, is identified as one frequented by more people with disposable incomes. Hence, salespeople are trained to pitch complimentary products, like sound systems and attachments. Interesting story…. …

The European Commission is cracking down on search engine data-retention, with a new proposed rule that search engines should delete personal data about their customers within six months.

The BBC News site said this recommendation is likely to be accepted by the European Commission and could lead to a clash with search giants like Google, Yahoo and MSN. “Google and MSN anonymise user data after 18 months, while Yahoo does the same after 13 months,” the BBC reported.…

ISPs have been quietly expanding their use of deep-packet inspection. They are capturing everything a user does–to the point where “at least 100,000 U.S. customers are tracked this way, and service providers have been testing it with as many as 10 percent of U.S. customers, according to tech companies involved in the data collection,” said a new report in The Washington Post.

The service providers exploring and testing such services have largely kept quiet–“for fear of customer revolt,” according to one executive involved who was quoted in the Post story. Each company allows users to opt out of the monitoring, though that permission is buried in customer service documents.…

Focusing on recent improvements in refrigeration technology, the 115-store Piggly Wiggly is pledging to radically revamp its stores. The grocery chain is shaking up product positioning issues—all frozen foods are kept together, for example—that have been considered sacrosanct for decades.

“When you enter the Piggly Wiggly at The Market Common, you don’t see check-out lines. You don’t go down five aisles to get ingredients for one meal,” said Piggly Wiggly CEO David Schools. A statement said the chain will now “arrange food items based on how customers naturally look for them. Fresh, frozen and canned vegetables and fruit, for instance, will be in the same location, as will cereal and milk. One stop stations will offer complete meal solutions with items such as ground beef, hamburger buns, chips and beer grouped together for backyard grilling.” Will it work? Possibly. Then again, this is the same chain that strongly touted it’s support for biometric payment.…

Such claims are commonplace, but the VeriShield Protect from Verifone is making claims that—if ultimately proven true—would significantly advance retail payment security. The new unit uses Hidden Triple Data Encryption Standard (H-TDES) from a company called Semtek Innovation Solutions Corp.. It's hardware unit is designed to deactivate if anyone succeeds in opening the case, making the planting of physical data-capture devices more challenging. Read more...