Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

If there truly is no expectation of privacy in what is called "historical cell data" (where you were, as opposed to where you are right now), then there would be no problem with retailers' collecting this data about their customers with or without the knowledge and consent of those customers, pens Legal Columnist Mark Rasch. Just as video cameras in the mall capture images of customers (and their locations), retailers could use cell data to find out where their best (and worst) customers are. Accepting the government's argument before the federal court, there would be no privacy violation for a retailer doing this.Read more...

But even Kantor admitted PayPal could fix the problem with a simple change in its merchant terms. A much trickier problem for retailers post-settlement may be deciding what price to put on each item—or whether there even is a single official price.Read more...

The answer to that question, in some cases, might be "No." Instead, writes PCI Columnist Walter Conway, based on the PCI Security Standards Council's revised guidance on when encrypted cardholder data may be considered out of scope, it might be possible that existing vendor offerings could potentially bring some merchants the same benefits with less work and without waiting—and paying—for the first P2PE products to hit the market.Read more...

This is just not Walmart’s week for price management. On Tuesday (Sept. 25), a Walmart store in China was slapped with almost $16,000 in fines for a “discount hoax,” according to China Daily. In May, the Walmart in Wuhan changed its price for a bottle of liquid soap from 47.6 to 48.8 yuan (a 19-cent increase), but called it a discount price. Not so, according to the local government price watchdog: “When the promotion price is higher than the traceable lowest price of the period of seven days before the campaign, it is a price fraud,” said Zhang Jianmin, vice head of the Hubei Provincial Bureau of

Commodity Price.

It may be true that what the Chinese call a hoax, everyone else calls marketing. But with 370 stores in China, Walmart should know how this game is

played. And with its fanatical tracking of its own and …

"It undermines the strategy," said Finish Line CIO Terry Ledbetter. "But quite frankly, it was hard to imagine how resistant customers would be to telling you who they are. 'You don't need to know who I am,'" he said, adding that the chain is exploring using an opt-in feature on its mobile app that would broadcast to all associates when a customer walks in the store.Read more...

Among the largest retailers, only the Amazon, Home Depot, McDonald's, Kohl's, Apple, JCPenney, Gap and Overstock Web sites showed up in a tablet or full-screen version. Staples.com showed up on a seven-inch tablet with slightly more content added to what was still clearly a site designed for a phone screen. But Walmart, Target, Walgreen, CVS, Lowe's, Best Buy, Sears, Macy's, Rite Aid, TJ Maxx, Nordstrom and even eBay served up exactly the same screen for a tablet as for a phone with a screen a small fraction of the size. On the phone, those compact, minimalist sites help usability. On even a small tablet, the result is vast expanses of blank space that all but drives away customers.Read more...

It used to be only chains that kept detailed databases of competitors' prices. Now every coupon or rebate Web site has data that's even more current, which makes beating a chain's price-match promotion trivial.Read more...

This marriage could be a very low-cost proposition, with the app asking for the cart's number or, better yet, the cart presenting a QR or barcode that the app can scan. The app—with its capabilities and its CRM history—could use a cart equipped with a simple radio beacon for navigation purposes.Read more...

For the Amazon sales tax haven to be an issue, you first have to believe that the only—or even a main—reason why people shop at Amazon is to save the sales tax. There are quite a few reasons why that is absurd. But the fact that shipping charges are typically many times the sales tax is a pretty good place to start.Read more...

No major advances in mobile location technology have emerged. In the last couple of months, however, quite a few very different approaches to location tracking have emerged. These range from leveraging the earth's magnetic field to piggybacking the data already used by mobile ads, tracking a combination of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signals, and riding the audio signals from existing music speakers. One app even reacts to light patterns from specially enhanced LED bulbs.Read more...

What's impressive is that this approach is three levels deeper than what RedLaser has been used to. It goes beyond limiting its results to Best Buy, focusing instead on what that specific Best Buy store sells and then limiting the results to what that specific Best Buy store has in stock. This means Best Buy's APIs are sharing real-time inventory data.Read more...

The 1,100-store chain's CEO, Ron Johnson, admits that JCPenney is still figuring out the workflow for checkout. He'd better work fast—this is a lot more complicated than anyone assumed.Read more...

But the social program of its stores, during the same timeframe, has gone nowhere, according to a report slated to be released Thursday (Sept. 20). The reason? Just about nothing that corporate is doing right—dedicated social resources, rules about the number and frequency of posts, people dedicated to responding to shopper comments—has been replicated at the store level. The stores have been left to do whatever they can fit in, which the report said seems to be pretty much nothing.Read more...

"Having the terminal request the nonce from the issuer adds another full round-trip message, which is a lot of extra time. Nobody wants that," said one security manager with a major chain. "It's an extra pass through the payment network. That raises the question of cost. Will payment providers carry them for free? Will that impact their peak season throughput?"Read more...

An Apple surprise might have forced the mobile-operator consortium to rush into its launch. That's not something ISIS wants to do, especially now that Google has already tried and abandoned ISIS's chosen technical approach and the number of ISIS-supporting retailers still isn't up to what ISIS wants it to be. And that's not the worst of it: There's still no leadership in mobile payments.Read more...

Yet another video-related shopping patent was issued last Friday (Sept. 14), and it’s not for retail chains—at least not at first glance. U.S. Patent 8,244,594 describes a personal shopping service in which a customer can use video to actually see the shopper-for-hire collecting the shopping list in real time, so it’s possible to reject or swap out items as they’re being grabbed from the shelf. That’s not a likely candidate for a service from a big chain, but it raises an interesting question: Why aren’t chains already using video this way in-store?

After all, customers have long called stores to ask if a particular item is in stock. Associates can check the shelves to confirm, though they

don’t always get it right. Now that camera- and Wi-Fi-equipped phones and tablets are so cheap, it’s practical to let customers watch online as associates check those shelves to see exactly what’s there. That’s at least as compelling a use of video as Amazon’s “watch while we pack your order” approach—and in this case, it could actually save customers time and avoid associate mistakes. Besides, half the retail battle is getting that customer into the store—even virtually.…

There have always been only two reasons for seeking opt-ins—supposed legal protection and to negate future customer backlash. As a practical matter, opt-ins help out in neither situation. Let's start, though, by admitting there are two types of opt-in: knowingly/deliberate, and what retail chains use.Read more...

Currently, retailers have a choice. They can use their smartphones and tablets, sticking on a dongle that reads a payment card's magnetic stripe, and be cruising down the mobile commerce highway. Or they can be PCI DSS compliant. Unfortunately, the PCI Council has stated that smartphones and tablets are not secure, pens PCI Columnist Walter Conway.Read more...

Even more impressive is that the owner of this group of six California (Bay area) Little Caesars said it took him months before he realized that one store had posted no revenue for eight months and another for two months. This guy owns six stores and it takes him months to notice that one-third of his stores are reporting zero payment-card revenue?Read more...

Back when GuestView Columnist Ann Grackin started tracking such matters in 1995, the goal of the key players was that GS1 would be almost ubiquitous by about 2000. Today, some 12 years later, ubiquitous is hardly the move. And Ann conservatively projects that 2017 is much more likely. Now we have 2D and GS1 DataBar for the new world of mobile coupons. So what's been the slowdown? Quite a bit, it turns out.Read more...

Clearly, that's not always the case. Sometimes spending much more is highly beneficial but may not deliver immediately better mobile stats; for example, an infrastructure investment that will provide better uptime and faster performance for many years. That caveat caveated, the fact that Forrester found few, if any, performance gains from spending more money on mobile is deliciously counter-intuitive.Read more...

Unfortunately, the two software suppliers aren't just throwing the usual hissy fits at each other. They're configuring their software as part of the feud, which means retailers and their online privacy policies and, potentially, the Federal Trade Commission are caught in the middle.Read more...

When it comes to merged-channel thinking, customers are already there. E-Commerce execs are getting there. But chain CEOs don't get it yet.Read more...

Becoming a CIO is a lot like running for office. You have to make a lot of promises to get the job. Once you get the job, you have high expectations to deliver on a lot of competing interests (a lot of people to keep happy). You find way more ghosts in your closet from your predecessor than you expected. You get about four years to make everything happen, or they will find someone else to do the job. Sound familiar?Read more...

So you think your team has difficulty making your QR codes work? Try making a QR code out of corn stalks. In one of the more bizarre—and pointless, which is what makes it fun—QR codes we’ve run into, an Alberta, Canada, farmer has created what the Guinness

Book of World Records has concluded is the world’s largest QR code. It’s cut into a cornfield and only visible by a mobile-phone-carrying helicopter pilot. The QR code was verified at 28,760 meters, according to Guinness spokesperson Sara Wilcox.

One of the farmers, Rachel Kraay, said they had some IT lawnmower work to do when the code

initially didn’t work: “Did some figuring and figured out that the contrast wasn’t quite good enough. So then we got in there with the Rototiller and dug up the paths …