Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Managed service company Verio on Tuesday introduced a new version of its small E-Commerce business shopping cart package, integrating payment processing services including PayPal, GoogleCheckout, eBay auction, Authorize.Net, WorldPay and FedEx realtime shipping quotes.

Like the earlier versions of the software, ShopSite 8.1 does not require any software to be installed on the retailers because it’s an outsourced service, which all computations happening on Verio servers.…

One credit card processor has issued a list of the characterics of typical fraudsters, including seeking accelerated delivery and purchasing four items at once.

Putting aside the fact that I typically engage in those suspect behaviors (but for honest reasons: I’m impatient and impulsive. I find maturity to be way overrated), the stats collected by Retail Decisions are rather interesting. Beyond the typical well-known fraudster profile elements—such as using free E-mail domains, living in densely populated areas and spending 2.5 times more than typical consumer—the group reported that 56 percent of fraudulent orders seek next-day or two-day delivery “whereas only nine percent of genuine customers ask for next day delivery online.

The company also reported that fraudsters often “bundle their purchases with an average of four items at a time (while) legitimate customers typically purchase one or two items per transaction.”…

Reports out of Malaysia have the government wanting to embed into every car license plate an RFID chip with vehicle and owner information.

My favorite comment on this move came from a Wired blog post: “It’s not exactly clear how this will help since Road Transport Department Director-General Ahmad Mustapha was quoted by New Straits Times as saying ‘The first thing thieves do after a car theft is change the registration plates.'”

Perhaps it could help catch thieves in the first minutes after a theft? It would also force the thieves to defeat the RFID chip. Depending on the sophistication of law enforcement, they might then simply search for any license plates that do not generate working RFID signals and label them suspect. At the very least, it would force the car thieves to either fabricate RFID chips to send out false signals or–frighteningly–steal cars in such a way that it’s either not reported or at least not reported for a very long time.…

U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer is formally petitioning the Federal Reserve to crack down on contactless payment, requiring consumers to be warned about privacy risks and preventing retailers from offering incentives for the cards to be tried.

"If you are using a no—swipe credit card, when you put your card in your back pocket or in your pocketbook, you might as well print your credit card number across your back," Schumer said. "Holiday shoppers need to be extremely careful with their credit cards, and these companies need to step up their efforts to protect people from identity theft."Read more...

With E-Commerce leaders getting more sophisticated in the ways of online fraud schemes, criminals are increasingly turning to auction forums. In those forums, the cyber crooks can use the site's prestige to add to their credibility while they sidestep that very same site's anti-fraud safeguards by selling directly to consumers.

Major auction sites—most notably EBay—often use community policing as a defense, where members who do not deliver honorably are given low ratings by fellow members, which theoretically warn members to avoid them. The fraudsters have tried countering by using a series of fake names, which are quickly abandoned once bad ratings are filed.Read more...

A new survey finds that teenagers plan to scale back on their purchases for others this holiday season, but the conclusions to draw from this trend are unclear. The online poll from Junior Achievement conducted during October and November interviewed 1,512 teens. (The JA people volunteered that participants were aged 13-19, which we pretty much figured out from the word “teen.”)

The survey found the lower-gift-spending from teens consistent with the last three JA surveys, which all found teens pledging to spend less than the prior year. The average amount the surveyed said they would spend for gifts was $75.

But there are a few concerns with the survey. First, it’s results fly in the face of several other national surveys, which have been predicting greater overall spending this year (although few have isolated the younger shopper so it may not be contradictory). The online survey–as opposed to one where a professional conducts the interview–is also notorious for giving skewed results. Lastly, it’s unclear if the surveyed teens plan on spending less overall or merely spending less on gifts for others. Does this suggest teen miserliness or selfishness? JA issued a statement interpreting the results as “a positive indication that (teens) are learning the importance of spending within their means.” Ahhhhhh, such optimism escapes me.…

As retail RFID mandates promise to force more small- and mid-size manufacturers into the RFID business, NCR has put together an IT Cliff's Notes for RFID, featuring basic software, an RFID printer, bar-code scanner and "a startup supply" of Gen2 RFID labels.

The NCR RFID Retail Compliance package will sell for about $12,000 to $15,000, depending on options selected, said Terry Massey, an NCR sales and marketing director. The $12,000 versions will have just the printer and software "to do the basic retail mandate," Massey said, while the $15,000 version "starts getting into handheld readers and fixed readers."Read more...

When it comes to the meat-and-potatoes of the RFID retail business—the tagging of pallets and cases—2006 is going to go down as a very disappointing year. A new report out of London from IDTechEx paints a sad but realistic portrait of frustrated suppliers and very isolated pockets of ROI examples. It does, however, hold out hope for a somewhat brighter 2007.

"The pallet/case market for RFID tags became the nearest thing to a black hole in the RFID universe in 2006," said IDTechEx CEO Raghu Das, who attributed the problems to "reluctant mandated customers, technical problems and pricing for volumes that never came despite retailers reporting excellent paybacks. Tagging the display unit is very different from tagging the pallet and cases."Read more...

As giftcards have soared in popularity in recent years—some $25 billion in giftcards are expected to sold this holiday season alone—the attempts to use them fraudulently have also soared. But some of the theft techniques being described to consumers are woefully out-of-date.

Does this mean that giftcards are secure financial tools for retailers and consumers? Not necessarily, but today's giftcards are certainly no less secure than traditional credit cards, with most retailers and issuers willing to be flexible with consumers who have been burned.Read more...

Survey results released Wednesday officially report what virtually all E-Commerce execs already knew: It doesn’t take very many bad online experiences to send a consumer to a rival site.

Web-traffic-tracking firm Gomez surveyed 1,173 people in the U.S. last month and found 24 percent will abandon a Web site after the first failed transaction, while most consumers—53 percent—will come back a second time, but will ditch the site after they are burned a second time. About 17 percent of consumers will come back a third time and it will take a third purchase failure to turn them away. (I want to get that last group into a poker game.)

The survey also suggested that 75 percent would immediately jump ship if a site loaded too slowly. Beyond the official reality disclaimer that consumers tend to tell surveyers what they want to tell the sites and not necessarily what they’ll actually do–and that Gomex charges retailers to track online performance so they may not be the most non-biased source for how quickly consumers will abandon slow sites–the results here are likely fair. But if an E-Commerce exec needs a survey to learn that customers will be unhappy if their transactions fail, that exec should probably rethink their dayjob.…

The 1,400-store chain Toys “R” Us is adding identity verification software to 832 of its U.S. stores, according to documents filed with the SEC on Tuesday, the Associated Press has reported.

The software, revealed in an SEC filing from the software vendor (Intelli-Check), will start being used at chain’s customer service counters, but will then move to POS lanes, the AP story said. Intelli-Check typically uses government identification–usually military IDs and state-issued driver’s licenses–to authenticate consumers.…

The problem of Internet accessibility for the visually-impaired is global, with a United Nations study finding only three leading web sites around the world--out of 100 studied--meeting the needs of "persons with disabilities," according to a U.N. statement issued Tuesday.Read more...

This is a different kind of blurb. Received an E-mail from a reader that I'd like to throw up to the group for advice. Any takers?

Here's what your fellow reader/fellow retailer wrote: "A customer places a order for a Laptop through our eStore. The order was rejected due to the store not being able to verify his billing address. The customer was upset and continued to contact us over a months time. As it turns out, he is from Costa Rica, in the US working."Read more...

Transaction processor Debitman officially changed its name this week to Tempo Payments, in part to support non-debit transactions but also to get away from a name that the CEO dubbed “fairly polarizing.”

What were the objections to the six-year-old name? “One was that it sounded like a superhero, which in some sense was the intention,” said CEO Mike Grossman, adding that it showed his company “struggling against the evils of interchange” but was also viewed in some circles as not serious. The other concern? Some apparently found the name sexist as “a lot of the cardholders are women.”

The core reason, though, was to signal to customers that the company wasn’t limited to handling debit networks, Grossman said.…

Reporting its best holiday season ever, Amazon.com is touting impressive sales figures, but what is behind most of those numbers is good old-fashioned delivering on promises. Sadly, that's a rare E-Commerce attribute. Amazon.com this week touted sales figures that make the 2006 holiday season its best, with one day (it was Dec. 11th, for those who track such trivia) ringing up more than 4 million items.Read more...

Just in time for the holidays, data thieves are giving big brightly-colored wrapped gifts to Visa, MasterCard and AmericanExpress every time they seal their steal.

The traditional credit card companies are fighting for their lives against a plethora of new alternatives, ranging from debit cards, non-credit-card contactless payment, cellphones, eCheck, PayPal and Bill Me Later, not to mention new-fangled hybrids that merge loyalty/CRM, giftcards, incentive coupons and POS card, such as a pilot at the Subway chain.Read more...

Despite consumer—and even some IT executive—beliefs that E-Commerce poses a much greater security risk than store-based point-of-sale systems, a new Gartner report concludes that the opposite is true.

Gartner is reporting that, by 2008, most attacks will be on physical point-of-sale systems and that even by 2009, only one out of three such systems will comply with current security standards. "Device vulnerabilities are often overlooked by enterprises, who tend to focus on enterprise servers and systems when securing their environments," wrote Gartner security analyst Avivah Litan, adding that data transmissions are also closely monitored and "typically ignored by many companies are the devices that hang off of corporate networks where data are either collected or output, particularly point-of-sale devices and printers located throughout enterprise systems."Read more...

In 2006 alone, retailers lost almost $2 billion because of consumer security fears, with about one-half of those losses ($913 million) coming from people who avoided sites that seemed to be less secure and the rest (about $1 billion) came from consumers who were too afraid to conduct E-Commerce business at all, according to a Gartner survey of 5,000 U.S. adults in August that the research firm will publish on Monday.

The report is startling in the sense that it confirms what many retailers have long feared. It's a frustrating problem because so many legitimate security defenses are invisible and the most visible security features—such as displaying a sign noting security standards compliance—does little to truly secure the site. Also, credit card purchases are overwhelmingly protected against theft so the true risk for consumers is quite small.Read more...

The U.S. government is not alone is trying to push a national ID card program to try and improve security and reduce security fraud. But efforts to do so in the U.K. were set back on Thanksgiving when a prominent British Parliament member published government answers on the true cost.

MP Stewart Hosie on Thanksgiving said that the British government's "claim that ID cards could save up to £1.7 billion of identity fraud in the UK economy was totally false" because "there are no costs calculated for the private sector use of ID cards" and that fact "has totally destroyed the credibility of the Government's claims on ID cards," Hosie said, according to a story in PublicTechnology.net. ""Indeed the admission that there are no costs to deploy the system in either the private or public sector without the Home Office makes any claims of savings meaningless. To read the full story,

Millions of Canadian consumers who have moved to debit cards instead of credit cards learned that no payment system is perfect on Black Friday, when Royal Bank of Canada debit cards wend out of service for nearly three hours. The outage began around 4 p.m. EST and lasted until about 6:45 p.m. EST, Royal Bank spokeswoman Beja Rodeck told the Canada.com news service.

“All I can say is that it was a technical glitch and we’re looking at the root cause,” she said, adding that the problem was mostly at POS systems and did not impact the banks’s ATM network. Debit cards from Canada’s other big banks also appeared not to be affected, the news report said.…

Two key E-Commerce leaders—walmart.com and macys.com—found themselves shut out of the holiday sales rush for much of Friday, as their sites slowed to a crawl starting at about 4 AM in the East.

Keynote Systems, which tracks Web traffic, saw the Wal-Mart site "effectively down" from 4:30 AM Friday (East Coast time) until 2:30 PM Friday, said Ben Rushlo, a Keynote senior manager of competitive research. In the morning, Rushlo said, the site of the nation's largest retailer was eight times slower than normal, with many unable to even reach the homepage. "Every request was either completely down—with an error message—or unusually slow," he said. To read the full story,

More in-store POS-related security reports surfaced this week, with a Mchigan convenience store chain, the latest to apparently be hit. This is the latest in a series of well-publicized retail victims, including OfficeMax as well as Dollar Tree and Sam’s Club.

The latest incident reportedly involves Wesco, a gas station and convenience store chain with 51 locations in Michigan. Computerworld reported this week that several financial institutions canceled thousands of credit and debit cards in Michigan because of fraud concerns related to the retailer’s apparent data compromise. Wesco’s Web site confirmed “the possibility of credit card fraud associated with card use at our facilities” and that the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the Secret Service were investigating transactions between July 25 through Sept 7, 2006.…

The U.S. Census Bureau is reporting that brick-and-mortar retail sales are increasing four times more slowly than their online component. Specifically, E-Commerce sales for the third-quarter jumped 20.4 percent compared with last year’s identical quarter, while all retail sales jumped only 4.8 percent.

Perhaps more telling are the actual quarterly revenue figures, which give $27.5 billion in online revenue and almost $1 trillion ($991.7 billion) for all of retail.

Web sales may be comparitively small but E-Commerce is hardly a startup anymore. If it’s still bringing in this kind of growth after a dozen years, brick and mortar managers better take notice and get their customer service acts in gear.…

Is portable video not the killer app some have touted or is its time simply not yet here? Both questions are raised with new data–from the Nielsen Media Research people who, if nothing else, should really know television–suggesting that iPod users rarely use their video capabilities. This is true even of users of the Video iPod, who apparently liked the idea of portable video more than the real thing.

Nielsen found that less than one percent of accessed iPod content, including content from iTunes, was video. That number increased slightly–but just slightly– for Video iPod users, who opted for video about 2.2 percent of the time. According to The Hollywood Reporter, those numbers improved a bit when the question was changed from the number of items played to the number of minutes player, but not dramatically. “Even measured by duration of consumption, where 30- or 60-minute TV shows might seem to have a built-in advantage over three-minute songs, video comprises just 2 percent of total time spent using iPods or iTunes among iPod owners,” the news report said. “Video iPod users consume video 11 percent of the time.”

Does this mean that consumers are not interested in Web video? Not necessarily. First, laptop and PC screens are much more suitable to video, as least for first-generation efforts. Secondly, those numbers aren’t so bad for this new a media format. If it hasn’t materially changed in one year, then there may be trouble in videoland.…