Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

But the real problem—Visa's death-grip on payments—isn't one any lawsuit will solve. Big retailers abandoned their store cards because taking Visa was cheaper than maintaining their own credit infrastructure. Now Visa is holding all the cards, and chains are unenthusiastic about any of the alternatives.Read more...

If this approach works—it's already been tested with much smaller merchants—the potential is for payment cards to be associated with anything that the full-blown digital wallets have promised: giftcards, loyalty programs, stored value, etc. Read more...

Walmart was sued on Wednesday (July 25) by a California advocacy group for the disabled, who complained that the retail giant isn’t meeting federal or state laws because its PIN pads are too high for customers in wheelchairs to use. The complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, said Walmart has wheelchair-accessible PIN pads in some of its 200-plus California stores but hasn’t deployed them for the rest of its checkout lanes, forcing some customers to “stretch and strain”—or tell the cashier their PINs.

It’s not clear exactly what the solution would be—two PIN pads at each checkout lane? A swinging arm or mini-elevator that brings the PIN pad up from wheelchair height to a level where a six-foot-four customer can use it without a backache? But realistically, there’s a bigger problem: Most PIN pads are designed to be compact and secure, not easy to use for anyone. They’re hard to read, hard to use and miserable to sign for all customers, not just the wheelchair- and scooter-bound. If this lawsuit can force Walmart to find and deploy a truly usable PIN pad, it could actually make all its customers happier—wheeled and non-wheeled alike.…

Every four years, Americans elect a President, enjoy Leap Year and watch the Olympics. And the last time those things were happening—four years ago—Amazon may not have been perfect at thwarting D-DOS attacks. But even then, it was pretty good at protecting its card data. This comes from federal documents recently unsealed, documents that described three successful D-DOS attacks against Amazon, eBay and Priceline. The first Amazon attack happened on June 6, 2008, at 10:23 AM California time and continued for about four-and-a-half hours, until Amazon fought it off. “During the attack, the bots involved in the attack requested large and resource intensive Web pages on a magnitude of 600 percent to 1,000 percent of normal traffic levels,” according to the newly unsealed federal indictment of a pair of Moscow-based alleged cyberthieves.

Three days later, starting at 10:06 AM California time, the second D-DOS attack against Amazon began. This time, it took Amazon three days to fight it off. The filing also said one of the accused was found with data for more than 28,000 credit cards. But Emily Langlie, a spokesperson with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Washington, said none of the cards were from Amazon, eBay or Priceline, suggesting the payment-card protections did their job.…

Turns out the call center rep, Youlanda Rochelle Wright, was collecting Social Security numbers as part of RadioShack's then deal with Dish Networks. Given the bad publicity coming from this 6.5-year prison sentence for a onetime RadioShack customer service rep accused of ripping off her customers, it might be time to call for strict IT rules on refusing to store ultra-sensitive data, such as Social Security numbers.Read more...

Until PCI 2.0 kicked in in January, ASVs never had QSAs closely reviewing their findings and comparing those results against what they are supposed to be looking for—namely, the specs from the ASV Program Guide. The problem here is beyond having the PCI assessment not pass. Retailers will now have to go back to their ASVs, explain the problems and get them to work with chains to fix it.Read more...

That theory is crucial to the century-old chain's makeover, which Johnson said will also include all-RFID sales ticketing within six months, elimination of cashwraps by the end of 2013, and a plan to combat showrooming by making 75 percent of its inventory JCPenney-only products to make direct price comparisons impossible.Read more...

Behind this approach is a deal Shopkick cut with Mood Media, one of the largest retail in-store music providers. What this means is any chain that happens to use Mood for audio has a quick-and-easy way to offer mobile marketing. But there's a lot more to this. Those speakers can also offer in-store geolocation.Read more...

That means no signage telling customers about it, no references on the retailer's Web site (and certainly not its homepage), no marketing, no reference in E-mails to customers and no associate training so that at least they can tell customers. The mobile map app itself doesn't even have Walgreens' name, so if a customer using either an Apple or an Android smartphone went searching for Walgreens, he or she wouldn't find it. The only way to download the Walgreens map app is for a shopper to happen to know to search for the vendor's name.Read more...

The problem with this needle match is that what sticks in the minds of consumers is a PIN pad playing Pong—and with that image, who can take payment security seriously?Read more...

There are a lot of interesting twists involved in this same-day delivery strategy—including some unusual ways one Amazon insider said the master site could deploy it—but there's a bizarre trend here.Read more...

A lot of Amazon sellers will have a lot of cleanup to do, but there's a bigger issue here. Customers who go to Amazon had their orders canceled and, third party or not, that's going to undermine their faith in Amazon. Buying from a third party on Amazon's site is supposed to be the best of both worlds: a chance to give business to small players while enjoying the security and reliability of the Amazon environment.Read more...

The problem: Links in the letter that customers were supposed to use to reset their passwords—but those links clearly weren't going to bestbuy.com. The irony: In trying to fix a situation where customers' passwords were stolen for bad purposes, Best Buy's letter was inadvertently crafted such that it looked like an attempt to steal customers' passwords for bad purposes.Read more...

Apple's billion-dollar third-party payments business takes a larger than Visa cut, sets less flexible than Visa operating rules, and then offers less help than Visa in securing transactions. And this is the company that's supposed to rescue retail from Visa's interchange rates?Read more...

Moments after the settlement was announced on July 13—by the way, the deal being announced on Friday The 13th was just the first of many bad omens—all of the players had their say.Read more...

Just about everyone involved in E-Commerce knows deep down that social media “Likes” are not indicative of anything and that even most consumers are not impressed with lots of Likes. But it’s nice to see concrete proof every now and then. And so a report on July 13 was quite interesting. The BBC piece described an experiment where a reporter created an entirely non-existent business, which he called Virtual Bagel, with a tagline “We send you the bagels via the Internet. Just download and enjoy.” The reporter observed, “Seems like nonsense. Surely, nobody is going to be interested in that.”

Well, some 3,318 Facebook Likes later, the BBC found that the Likes were coming overwhelmingly from Malaysia, India, Indonesia and Egypt with almost none from the U.S. and the U.K. “People in certain parts of the world are incredibly keen to click, for no apparent reason, on random” sites such as the bagel “imaginary business,” the BBC report said. When it comes to exposing the absurd claims of social site Likes, I think it’s safe to say I like this BBC report.…

A company called QThru, for example, is making waves with a mobile app that handles product identification and completes mobile payment through scanning an old-fashioned barcode. Its claim to fame: that the app identifies the product within two seconds even when the hand holding the phone (which is taking the picture of the barcode) and the hand holding the product with its barcode are both shaking and when the barcode is incorrectly positioned.Read more...

The purge also sets the stage for the chain's "new technology platform" that CEO Ron Johnson said will be announced in August. From all indications, the focus will be on mobile and in-store, not the datacenter.Read more...

But dig deeper into the vague statements and it's unclear if any of those happy conclusions are warranted. It might be that the only meaningful bonus involved here is the one Best Buy had hoped Wall Street would give it for even talking about customer-service score bonuses.Read more...

Sure, this is chump change to Google, customers don't care much about privacy and you're not Google. But the same dynamic could leave any E-Commerce site with holes in security or PCI compliance, especially because your carefully vetted procedures can get sidestepped as soon as an emergency fix is required—and any glitch qualifies as an emergency.Read more...

The home-delivery problem for E-Commerce is hardly only a British issue; it is an apartment and city issue. But the fact is that a huge percentage of the E-Commerce decision-makers in this country do not live in apartments or urban areas.Read more...

Maybe Apple can’t dominate every in-store device niche after all. A blog discussion at KioskMarketplace this week has kiosk developers debating whether the iPad’s lack of wireless-only connections, relative screen fragility and regular need to be reset makes it a poor choice for kiosk conversion. (The original July 2 post is headlined “iPad kiosks: The cheap, unreliable kiosk solution.”)

As commenters to the post point out, there are workarounds to some of the technical problems (though not to the persistent problem of Apple’s lack of enterprise support). But with a burgeoning crowd of iPad-to-kiosk vendors and given the fact that lots of chains are looking hard at such as approach, it’s worth asking how much of the vaunted Apple experience customers will get from an iPad buried in a kiosk. Customers won’t get to handle it or switch between apps—from their point of view, it’s just another touchscreen running a single kiosk application. Which may make iPad conversions just not worth the trouble for retail chains. But who knows? Maybe Apple has finally found a retail use for the Macintosh: as an oversized iPad emulator.…

As retailers are embracing cloud computing more, they are rapidly discovering there’s plenty of bad to go with the good. And the complexities and unanticipated gotchas are making the cloud experience decidedly less than thrilling. Four recent incidents beautifully illustrate those gotchas.

The cloud is still a wonderful experience. But its nirvana-like reputation is now coming down to Earth a bit, we argue in our July column for Retail Week. The column resides here at Retail Week, but those who have yet to subscribe to the U.K.’s largest retail publication (for shame!), we have a copy here, too.…

Once the bad guy gets in, it's only a few keystrokes to wire transfer all of the account funds to a waiting account in Latvia, Bulgaria or wherever, writes Legal Columnist Mark Rasch. The retailer only learns of the transfer later, when the funds are gone. Who eats the cost of that loss? Read more...

This change generated a lot of discussion and anxious questioning when the Council unveiled it at the 2010 PCI Community Meeting. The Council's intent was to give merchants flexibility in identifying and ranking risks based on their own industry and operating environment. The tone of the questions from the floor, however, challenged whether merchants had the security knowledge, expertise or even the time to assign these risk rankings.Read more...