Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Although Amazon proposed this back on Sept. 30, 2008 (the patent was issued May 29, 2012), the problem it was trying to address still exists today. That would be giftcards that are never used, robbing the gifter of cash, the giftee of the gift and the retailer (depending on whether it was that retailer's giftcard) of the revenue and upsell potential.Read more...

The retailers who shelled out $185,000 per name to buy their E-Commerce sites' domain names all over again include Macy's, Gap, TJX and Home Depot. But Kroger, Walgreens, CVS and Lowe's gave the vanity domains a pass.Read more...

Debenhams, a $4.2 billion chain with 167 stores across the U.K. and Ireland, sees it differently and argues that free Wi-Fi—which the chain will shortly announce chain-wide—is crucial. Is this a U.S.-U.K. difference or a difference in strategy?Read more...

The piece quotes former Amazon Principal Engineer Darren Vengroff saying, "mountains of data and hundreds or thousands of experiments" are behind every new Amazon play, no matter how small. Chains have much of the same data, but they leverage it to hand out coupons one customer at a time. Amazon does it wholesale, slicing and dicing to identify whole new lines of business to invade. Read more...

Well, Google is preparing some major changes to a relatively small merchant area of its site. The fear is that, despite whatever assurances Google offers, the Domino Effect of this decision will impact Google's main search listings. And where Google goes, Bing and Yahoo are sure to follow.Read more...

But 337-store apparel chain Eddie Bauer is going against the trend, deliberately opting for a minimalistic approach. No Wi-Fi in its stores, no in-store product location, no geolocation to locate stores and no mobile app at all. With a primarily female demographic aged 35–55, Eddie Bauer Digital Marketing Director Michael Saracino talks up his chain's new mobile site and said he is focusing on what he calls mobile's "practical features."Read more...

What's unusual isn't that Oracle is stepping up to defend its customers. It's how the database giant is doing that: by using its initial court filing to list dozens of previous patents that, Oracle says, prove the Patents-in-Suit should never have been issued.Read more...

It’s certainly not unusual in federal cybertheft cases for the feds to use honeypot tricks to get overseas suspects to bring themselves to the U.S. And in the case of the massive data breach that hit the Subway fast-food chain last year, the Secret Service acted no differently. But this particular tale of extradition—involving a made-up millionaire woman who waited tables at Hooters for the benefits and the enjoyable customers and one suspect who brought into the States “three very large boxes of grape-flavored Romanian” (protection, he said, for the benefit of avoiding SPAM filters. Suffice it to say, they were rubberized)—is a little odd.

The story, from KrebsOnSecurity, tells the strange tale of getting two of the accused Subway cyberthieves to come to the U.S. without needing to be extradited. One was tricked with the offer of a free casino weekend; he left the plane carrying some clothes, money, jewelry and those fruit-flavored tax-deduction preventers. Asked if they were really grape-flavored, the suspect’s lawyer, Michael Shklar, confirmed they were. How was he so sure? “They’re sitting in my own damn file room,” he offered. As for the millionaire Hooters waitress, not sure what the Secret Service was thinking. Maybe, “He’ll believe it, because it’s such a ludicrous thing to make up”?…

But when those same shoppers worked with the same retailers using an iPhone, iPad or Android device, 67 percent of them opted for alternative payments.Read more...

On at least three occasions over the last several months, the chain's site suffered a non-trivial outage. It happens. But Delia's cleverly turned these outages into a marketing opportunity by sending an E-mail to all of its customers, where the chain apologized for the outage and offered to show its sincerity by offering free shipping on all products—but only for a couple of days, if that. It's almost as though this was a promotion that Delia's had always wanted to run and simply used the outages to make it seem more special.Read more...

At first glance, this looks likely only to expand the problems self-checkout already generates: theft, slowdowns when associates have to verify age for alcohol or tobacco, and equipment that's simply frustrating to customers. But opening up all unstaffed lanes as self-checkouts might actually make self-checkout work better.Read more...

Flashy customer-facing technology is fine, but it’s nice to see a retailer giving employees something shiny to look at, too. U.K. online grocer Ocado is now using what looks like a 3D animated video game to give managers a better view of highly automated warehouse operations. Managers can “fly through the warehouse and see what’s happening in bright video-game-like colors,” a Bloomberg report said.

A “first-person grocer” may sound silly, but consider a typical software dashboard—nothing but numbers and acronyms. Even if a problem flashes red, it still takes time for a manager to identify what the numbers mean. Ocado’s system uses analytics to flag any efficiency problems in the 295,000 square foot distribution center; the game graphics are then used to render views of the problem. Like Kroger with its self-checkout tunnel, Ocado built this system itself, because no vendor offered the type of software it needed for DC management. No word on whether Ocado, like Kroger, plans to market its homegrown system to other E-grocers. (Or maybe just polish it up and sell it to video gamers. If they’ll buy baseball and auto theft, there’s gotta be a market for warehouse operations.)…

Just a reminder that StorefrontBacktalk now has five free monthly newsletters, each one focusing on a different key area for us: E-Commerce, Mobile, PCI/Security, In-Store and CRM. The Monthlies—see the descriptions here—are available to anyone via a quick E-mail sign up.

The Monthlies publish the first half of each month, and they are a great way to catch up on all of the news in a given area. So before you miss the June Monthlies, sign up for your free copy. …

But the merchants' victory may be a Pyrrhic one, pens Legal Columnist Mark Rasch, because consumers may use the same rules to invalidate arbitration provisions and file class-action lawsuits against the merchants themselves. Read more...

The more interesting PayPal mobile capabilities, such as displaying a headshot to confirm customer identity and alerting the store as soon as a registered customer walks in, are only being offered for much smaller retailers, typically one-location boutiques.Read more...

Yes, everyone hates the last-generation E-mail king, which on Tuesday (May 29) announced an operating loss and layoffs. But earlier this month RIM also finally agreed to let carriers and banks use NFC-enabled BlackBerrys for payments in Canada—without coupons, ads or a cut for RIM.Read more...

When Shell Oil got fed up with the soaring fraud rate at many of its gas stations, it prioritized deploying better security. But faced with the franchisee conundrum that Shell didn’t own the systems it wanted to upgrade, it took the unusual move of paying the owners $400 per station to install new locks. It initially offered only $250, but franchisees weren’t moved.

This followed Shell having created “its own test lab to replicate fraud and try out new deterrents,” according to a report in CSPNet. StorefrontBacktalk Retail Columnist Todd Michaud, who has managed IT for several franchisee chains, said the resentment of franchisees regarding IT is legendary. “Most franchisees feel that IT spending belongs in the same level of hell as the IRS. Even if the spending shows to have significant benefit attached, too many failed projects, broken promises and over-inflated ROI tied to past projects haunt the decisions of today,” Michaud said. “Many times, franchisors are left with no options but to incent or even fund the technology investment to make it happen. Unfortunately, most franchisors feel as strongly about not paying for franchise IT as the operators do themselves. In this case, my guess is that the incentive to the jobbers far outweighed the” damages from continued fraud.…

Gartner said: "Worldwide mobile payment transaction values will surpass $171.5 billion in 2012, a 61.9 percent increase from 2011 values of $105.9 billion." Within minutes, a statement from IHL said: "Mobile in all aspects of retail is now a $5.5 billion market worldwide."Read more...

MasterCard on May 23 released formal guidance giving retailers a roadmap to implement MPOS using smartphones, tablets and other devices equipped with a "card reader accessory." The problem? The recommended best practices may not be PCI compliant and they conflict with MasterCard's own rules, as the card brand acknowledges.Read more...

Remember those pesky privacy policies that say, "We will never give out your information without your knowledge or consent?" Well, not so much.Read more...

One of the biggest reasons CIOs fail—and, as a result, have such a high turnover rate—is the ghosts of decisions past.Read more...

As chains become more merged-channel and outright encourage customers to fly back and forth between mobile, in-store, online, call centers and Twitter interactions, the lack of visibility into real-time inventory is going to create headaches much worse than mere out-of-stocks.Read more...

What's particularly alarming about this exercise in budget-cutting theater is that data from the ACS couldn't be accurately generated by private-sector surveys. At a time when retailers can finally sift through huge datasets cost-effectively, this one could disappear.Read more...

The irony is that opening new store brands online is easy, once a chain has its E-Commerce presence up and running. Infrastructure can be shared, and the challenge is mainly making the new brand distinctive. But if anything, going the other way is actually harder than opening a completely new physical-store brand from scratch.Read more...

That's unlikely—if widely deploying a technology was the problem, contactless cards would have wiped out magstripes years ago. But will Apple use Bluetooth for payments? We may know by the end of the summer.Read more...