Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Books-A-Million doesn't appear to be trying to reduce its need to stock inventory with the machine. Instead, it's going after sales of books it wouldn't normally stock anyway. The idea is that instead of sending customers away to order an out-of-print book from Amazon (or theoretically have the store order it and wait a week, but how likely is that?), the kiosk will be able to download and print the book in a matter of minutes. The reality is likely to be a little more complicated.Read more...

Retailers have tried quite a few creative tactics to get shoppers to participate in the chain’s social media efforts, but none have the clout to do what the Vatican just did when it was trying to boost social media presence: a promise of an afterlife upgrade. (Yes, the Pope—the real Pope—actually did this. We triple-checked because it really does sound like something The Onion would come up with.)

The Vatican offered that a shorter stay in Purgatory—if not full salvation—was in the cards for anyone who followed him on social media. Specifically, the Sacred Apostolic Penitentiary announced that indulgences will be given to those who follow the Pope on social media and specified following the Pope’s Twitter account as one such means. (To be fair, the Vatican said that following Twitter on its own was insufficient, as confession, prayers and Mass attendance were also expected.) Getting out of purgatory for some Catholics is worth quite a bit and following a Twitter account seems a small price to pay. That’s really hard for Target or Home Depot to match. Then again, if the Church slipped up and didn’t deliver the promised indulgences to some followers, they’re likely to not learn of the oversight until it’s too late to complain. …

But such a program will quickly fail—and fail in such a way as to be counter-productive—if the points are not set properly. In other words, if the number of points needed to get a reasonable prize and the number of points offered for non-purchase activities are set such that it's impossible to redeem those rewards in a reasonable period of time, this campaign won't work. The initial stats suggest that Gilt.com may have fallen into that particular trap. One incented behavior--visiting the site five days in a row—will deliver 100 points. And what will that 100 points buy? Well, a gift certificate (valued between $80 and $100) requires 25,000 points. A loyal shopper could perform that quintuple-consecutive-visit chore 249 times in a row (that's visiting the site every day for 1,245 consecutive days, which is almost visiting the site every day for 3-and-a-half years) and still not qualify for that gift certificate.Read more...

First Victoria’s Secret’s (NYSE:LTD) mobile website choked during the last week of June, resulting in slow content delivery, failed connections and damaged or missing content. The next week it was fine, according to web monitor Keynote, with no clear explanation for the change. And the week after that, the site choked again—but this time Keynote has an explanation. It seems the lingerie retailer revamped its home page, and many of the new images were in PNG format instead of the JPEGs the site had been using. Result: The home page ballooned to almost five times its previous size.

Yes, those PNG images look great to site designers, and they should: They use lossless compression, so they can be repeatedly manipulated without losing image quality. JPEG, on the other hand, degrades if it’s resized too much. That doesn’t mean designers shouldn’t use PNG. It means IT should be converting those files to JPEGs as the very last step before a new page goes live. (IT should also have tested that page with actual phones to discover it took nearly 20 seconds to load and frequently timed out.) When it comes to images on a mobile website, less really is more. We’d have thought Victoria’s Secret, of all retailers, would have figured that out.…

With all of the bitter retail rivalries and customer-stealing efforts, I found this story out of Syracuse, NY, refreshing. Seems that an LP officer working for Abercrombie & Fitch (NYSE:ANF) noticed a shopper shoving jeans in a white bag. Fearing the worst, he reached out to his counterparts at neighbors JCPenney (NYSE:JCP) and Lord & Taylor and they then jointly subdued the thief.

Can you imagine IT workers at Walmart asking counterparts at Target for help with a programming challenge or Treasury people cooperating on a payroll snafu? Loss Prevention often gets the most dangerous duties and they always wonder if corporate will have their back in case things turn ugly. (You need not worry. The answer is almost certainly “nope, not for a second.”)And with all of this, they have enough focus on just getting the job done that petty corporate rivalries are irrelevant. I know it’s naïve and impractical, but it’s probably not time poorly spent to look at what these dedicated souls for JCPenney, Lord & Taylor and Abercrombie were able to accomplish one day in Syracuse and to think about it.…

From the Department of What’s The Worst That Can Happen?, Vanity Domains division: ICANN, the organization that’s selling do-it-yourself replacements for .com for $185,000 each, is meeting this week in Durban, South Africa, and hopes to start letting the vanity domains go live by late summer. Critics say the untested new domains could cause problems, but the Washington Post on Monday (July 15) quoted one of the most specifically chilling predictions about the rollout from Jeffrey Moses, ICANN’s own chief security officer.

“It’s not like it’s a runaway train without recourse,” Moss told the newspaper. “We’re not going to do anything that harms the security or stability of the Internet.” Well, except that some internal corporate systems will malfunction as new domains are created, Moss added—and that will be their problem to deal with, not ICANN’s. “We want everything to work, and we’re going to try to make everything work, but we can’t control everybody’s networks on the planet,” he said. However, the number of domains likely to cause problems is a “really, really small number.” Note: It’s the number of problem-causing domains that will be small, not the torpedoed corporate systems, which are potentially unlimited. Thanks—we feel so much better now.…

Everything went fine except that she apparently did a one-character typo in the e-mail address. I didn't discover this until a half-hour later when no confirmation note ever arrived. Using the order confirmation that she gave me, Customer Service was able to identify the order and spot the e-mail typo. Great! Except that Best Buy's fraud procedure locks them out from changing the e-mail address. Wait a second. Best Buy now knows that the address is wrong and further knows that my sensitive order information is going out to someone else (assuming that typo-ed address belongs to a real person). Not only can't they fix it, but they tell me that additional mails will go out to that incorrect e-mail address no matter what. Oops!Read more...

Late last year, the chain decided to move its data center from an in-house facility to a purpose-built data center campus in another part of the United States. The goal was to gain additional raised floor space, energy efficiency and to avoid significant natural disaster risks with the location of the existing data center. In the QSA's review of the new data center, it was seen as a model of energy efficiency and modern design of data centers. So far, so good. But when the QSA returned for the annual PCI assessment, a review of the core switch and the layer 3 ACLs (Access Control Lists) revealed that all of the switch’s ACLs have been disabled—commented out—for both data centers. The formerly segmented network was totally flat with no segmentation.Read more...

The argument for the shopper speaks to the intent of the original legislation—or, more precisely, the intent of the legislators who crafted that initial legislation. Did they not indeed intend that if shoppers must go to public stores to make purchases, those stores must allow in and support all shoppers equally? The counter is that the law understandably makes no reference to e-commerce and that if Congress wants to pass such a law, great, but until it does, courts must assume that a law means what it says and nothing more.Read more...

As a result, if potential customers know what they're supposed to do with a QR code, they can easily do it. But how are they supposed to know that there's any special significance to the image in an ad or porter or brochure?Read more...

That's too bad, because the problem of all the incompatible, vendor-specific data formats for shopping carts, product identifiers, transactions and customer information is costing retailers money to integrate and maintain E-Commerce sites. It also locks chains into specific vendors' formats—and vendor lock-in is very much a dollars-and-cents issue in retail IT. Any retailer's E-Commerce group that doesn't start tracking this effort now may soon either be paying or playing catch-up.Read more...

Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) has given up its fight with Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) over app stores—specifically, its trademark lawsuit over the name “App Store” for an online store where customers can buy apps. All Things D reported this week that on Tuesday (July 9), after months of settlement talks, Apple finally asked the judge in the case to dismiss the two-year-old lawsuit. There wasn’t much explanation—an Apple spokeswoman grandly pointed to

900,000 apps and 50 billion downloads, while Amazon just said it was relieved the legal ordeal was finally over.

But it’s not really such a mystery. In March 2011, when Apple filed its lawsuit, the iPad was less than a year old and the Kindle, introduced in November 2007, looked like a better-established competitive threat. (And it was, just not to the iPad.) Two years later, the iPad is a solid winner, the lawsuit is a waste of money, and the whole thing probably looks silly even to the Apple executives who helped gin it up. A name, however generic it sounds, can be a critical success factor for an unfamiliar element of E-Commerce—but once customers figure it out, they don’t need the name any more. Now will somebody please explain that to the

Think it's because Barnes & Noble is in the dead-tree book business? So is Amazon. Besides, at last report the brick-and-mortar bookstore business was still holding up (if only barely). It's the Nook and the chain's efforts to merge physical book and E-book retailing that have been a bottomless money pit. So why did Barnes & Noble—having lost its biggest physical-store competitor when Borders went under—fail to gain any merged channel traction?Read more...

To be fair, after more than a year, 552 vanity TLDs (out of 1,930 applications) have actually made it through the process to the point where there are no objections and they don't match other applicants. That includes retail-related terms like .camera, .clothing, .market, .markets, .pharmacy, .shoes and .toys, along with 23 actual retailer names. They're ready to start getting their contracts. Everybody else still has hurdles to climb.Read more...

In a handful of jurisdictions, the mere possession of such devices is illegal. What the vendor, San Diego-based Indyme, is pushing is a silent system that alerts LP that a foiled bag (calling it a "booster bag" is so clichéd) or magnet has entered the store and it flags the shopper and allows the shopper to be tracked, hopefully discretely. It also triggers security cameras to follow the shopper.Read more...

MasterCard lawyer Thomas Sharpe argued to the Luxembourg-based court that "the effect of the commission’s decision is to require MasterCard issuers to continue to provide valuable services to merchants such as guaranteeing payment to them without being able to recover any revenues from those merchants for those services," according to a Bloomberg reporter who attended the hearing. But in an interview right after the hearing, another MasterCard lawyer, associate general counsel Carl Munson, said, “If we win this case, we would be free to set any fees we want." (No need to call your physician, Mr. Retailer. That involuntary shudder is quite normal.)Read more...

Motorola doesn't have any real use for YouTube passwords, of course. But the fact that it's collecting them anyway suggests that whoever designed the software is really unclear on the security problems in slurping up data by default. Ironically, the one kind of data security that retailers are most concerned about, PCI, isn't strictly an issue if a customer uses a Droid X2 for mobile commerce, since the data leak is out of PCI scope—it's on the customer side. But a chain's employees might be sending their passwords to critical systems using a Motorola phone too, potentially exposing all the chain's systems to attack.Read more...

Nearby stores within the Ralph's and Albertson's chains avoid this issue by simply forcing the shopper to close out the order before proceeding to payment, according to a California TV station's report. The Safeway stores had a "finish" button but was it not required that it be hit before proceeding to payment. One wonders how much time was spent watching and fixing these holes and creating and distributing the signs, as well as dealing with customers who were apparently paying for other shoppers. It's also possible that many of those ripped-off shoppers never detected it, but they will now that media coverage has kicked in. How will those shoppers feel about Safeway's "let the glitch happen and we'll fix the individuals who notice later" approach? Compare all that to how much time it would have likely taken IT to simply force that the "finish" button be hit before payment was accepted? Ahhh, the wacky world of retail cost-benefit and analysis.Read more...

This is bad for an infinite number of reasons, but none more striking than the fact that associates are the primary interaction point with shoppers. When they see something new and unfamiliar, the associate is where they turn. When that inquiry is met with a baffled look and a pair of shrugged shoulders, that IT initiative is about to lose any shoppers—and IT may never know why. (They'd know if they asked associates, but if thought about asking associates, they would have had them briefed in the first place.)Read more...

CVS now gets three extremely valuable pieces of data: First, a list of prescription drugs presumably being filled by a rival pharmacy. What a clear chance to argue that those particular drugs should be brought over to CVS, an opportunity that doesn't exist without this information. Secondly, a list of various other things the customer is buying, many of which are likely sold by CVS. Another sales opportunity. Third, given that this is a mobile app, the data is already tied into a specific customer. This sharply enriches the CRM profile for CVS customers—and does it for very few dollars and in a way that seems to be altruistic.Read more...

Over the past decade, Council officials, retail IT people and QSAs have begun to question the quarterly requirement, but the fear was that retailers would simply not do it, as they could never cost-justify it, particularly for Level 4 retailers. The council has always had a strong pragmatic nature, weighing the effectiveness of guidelines against what they could realistically hope for retailers to do.Read more...

The question, then, is whether it has to start in-store. What if this hypothetical chain pushes some attractive incentives to get lots of customers and prospects to download its free mobile app? And buried in the terms and conditions is the right for the app to monitor images? The next selfie or Snapchat that the shopper sends is captured and the facial data points are noted. Here's where it gets even freakier. Once the mobile app has identified the face of the shopper—and has linked it to whatever mobile shopper that customer has done—it can tell the in-store camera databases what to look for. When that shopper walks in, it can connect the mobile activity with any observed in-store activity.Read more...

Slingshot, the third-largest ISP in New Zealand with about 10 percent of the market, last week rolled out its Global Mode service, which lets users block Internet geolocation. That's used by many digital content providers to prevent movies and e-books from being viewed in regions where they haven't officially been licensed.Read more...

In what has become a trend in this area of law, the federal Magistrate ruled that, when it came to bank fraud, the merchant was essentially on its own, writes Legal Columnist Mark Rasch. The answer was for the merchant to have better security, not for the bank to have better alerting procedures. The case involves the interplay between fraud, risk, loss, law and technology. Unfortunately, in this case, fraud wins.Read more...

Personally, I've never met someone who was as personable, intelligent and just plain nice as Walt. He will be missed far more than any words can convey.Read more...