Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

The patent case against those chains—as well as Microsoft, Cabela's, Dell, Newegg, Hewlett-Packard and Audible—was brought by Kelora, which said it had patented a way to let shoppers isolate search results by color, price, date, brand, size, etc.Read more...

On the down side: Police said they found "hundreds of unopened boxes of Legos" at the VP's home, strongly suggesting that he had had considerable success using switched barcodes. On the plus side: Target's loss prevention team coordinated with various stores and shared pictures of the VP, enabling him to be identified and followed before a barcode swap.Read more...

One vendor is arguing that by visually making the screen image look identical to whatever card shoppers are using, the shoppers will be more inclined to enter their PIN. The company has added a nice security twist: rotating the key position so anyone sniffing the communication—or using keygrabbers or spyware—can't easily determine the numbers entered. But that twist has its own twist: By scrambling the number positions with each click, some consumers will take a lot more time to enter their PIN, because they have memorized it based on the ATM, retail in-store and computer keypads they are used to.Read more...

This came to mind because of an interesting product rollout on Monday (May 21) by a vendor called Passware. Its launch involves a means of grabbing passwords from within any Excel spreadsheet or Word doc by quickly locating encryption keys in memory.Read more...

What is the "price" of an item? New technologies enable the prices charged, and the display of those prices, to change instantly. Ask anyone trying to purchase a plane ticket from New York to Detroit what the "price" of that ticket is. Read more...

That's not a bad turnout for a normal technology trial. But ISIS is promising just hundreds of locations in cities with a total population of nearly a million—and considering the weak consumer response so far to mobile wallets, anything less than an overwhelming assault may already be doomed.Read more...

The result: It costs JCPenney at least $600 million per year more than it should to run the chain—which explains a lot about the quarter's $55 million operating loss. "I can think of no other thing to say about our systems and our IT infrastructure, and I have seen a lot of them: It's a mess," Kramer said.Read more...

One online payment vendor is preparing to sell tons of youth purchase data—apparently, this is the first time anyone has tried—avoiding immediate legal problems by offering the data in aggregate.Read more...

The irony is that Macy's may already have the answer to its product-finding problem—by leveraging a completely different in-store IT initiative.Read more...

Under the old system, the site would tell customers that an item was in-store when it was at that store, not differentiating between a product at a lower level and one at a higher level. The problem: Because IKEA safety procedures prohibit forklifts from being used when customers are in the store, customers would come in to purchase their reserved sofa or table, only to be told that it can't be accessed and that they must return some other day.Read more...

It's a question that makes perfect sense to stock watchers—but it completely misunderstands how merged-channel retail works.Read more...

Beyond encouraging shoppers to use over-the-air access that chains need do nothing to facilitate, what if apps used the mobile device's memory to play those demos and to look up those barcodes, and then waited to update until the device was reconnected? Shopkick is using one version of this modified store-and-forward mobile strategy, as of an update deployed last month.Read more...

Russo said the training will be an online course so nobody should have to travel, Conway writes.Read more...

Logs that are created by physical machines can now be analyzed en masse to look for information to help advance a business. Data from social networks can now be mined for customer sentiment. These problems were too big and too complex before. But now, answers are within reach.Read more...

With more than 3,000 stories, columns and GuestViews in the content database here at StorefrontBacktalk, we thought it was time to do a little upgrading. Starting this week, readers (both free and Premium) can search for stories by limiting the search to just the story’s headline—as opposed to the headline and the full text. (Note: Right below the search bar, readers can choose HED Only or Story And Hed.)

The ability to isolate a search to the headline can be useful in two ways. If you happen to remember that the headline mentioned Target, for example, you need not see every story that mentioned Target (or even used the word “target”). The second way is practical. If you want a story that is primarily about tokens—and not a story that merely mentions the word somewhere—the headline-only search can be helpful.…

The most striking thing about those stats is that they are less than 50 percent. That means the opposite it also true; namely, that 54.2 percent of that chain's biggest fans do not find that the app makes them go to the store more.Read more...

As retailers complain about showrooming—and its posterchild, Amazon—the only meaningful way to fight back is to make the store experience so pleasant, efficient and fun that consumers would much prefer to shop than click away on a phone, tablet or laptop.Read more...

Ironically, while MasterCard's PayPass Wallet for NFC-equipped phones got most of the attention, that's still largely a pipe dream—MasterCard hasn't even talked any mobile operators into giving it access to the NFC chip. But the online payments effort will offer tokenization to reduce PCI scope for E-Commerce. The bad news: You can probably forget about any interchange relief.Read more...

Peapod got the idea from a wildly successful mobile QR trial that Tesco did in South Korean subways. Peapod's attempt is apparently the first to try and replicate the Tesco efforts in the U.S.Read more...

As E-tailers continue their incursions into rivals’ physical stores, the only viable defense is to radically upgrade customer service and the overall store experience. Two of the retailers most known for this are Apple and Walt Disney World Resort. Have you ever heard of an E-Commerce site cutting into the revenue at Disney? What specific tactics can brick-and-mortars steal? Here’s a good one: Disney this month is experimenting with an RFID/iPad combo to upgrade its famous FastPass system—for letting people reserve tickets/times and thereby get much faster access to rides and events. As Disney employees carry iPads, customers’ RFID bracelets will interact with CRM and ride information.

It’s fair to argue that Disney has always been the retail exception. It pushed contactless payment by offering deep discounts, and Disney even successfully got customers to use digital biometrics (fingerprints) for park access. But that’s just the point. With a heavy enough emphasis on experience and customer service, shoppers are willing to do almost anything, including—just perhaps—forgetting all about Amazon.…

Sometimes, we have to wonder how any customers medically survive grocery trips. We’ve reported on germ-laden shopping carts and paper POS receipts loaded with the carcinogen BPA. Late on Wednesday (May 9) came word that one of the nastiest bugs around—the norovirus—infected an Oregon girls’ soccer team and that it was traced to a reusable grocery bag the girls passed around as they shared cookies.

“The latest outbreak of norovirus reinforces the research we have conducted about the propensity of reusable grocery bags to act as hosts for dangerous foodborne bacteria and viruses,” said Dr. Charles Gerba, a microbiologist and professor in the Departments of Soil, Water and Environmental Science at the University of Arizona. “This incident should serve as a warning bell: permitting shoppers to bring unwashed reusable bags into grocery and retail stores not only poses a health risk to baggers but also to the next shoppers in the checkout line.” The scenario isn’t so far-fetched. All it takes is a bag with raw chicken that leaks—or an egg that cracks—and the bag becomes highly contaminated. It then leaves those contaminants on the conveyor belt, which it shares with the bananas being purchased by the next customer. A good hot water washing with a lot of bleach should remove the hazard, but how many shoppers even think to try?…

A Best Buy incident this month, however, is a grim reminder that saved passwords or tokens can expose employees to sensitive data—and capabilities—far beyond the bits and bytes of that device.Read more...

The sales guy says, "Yes. Yes. Yes." You say, "No. No. No." In this surreal world, pens Retail Columnist Todd Michaud, you are watching your hard-fought IT career be dismantled by an onslaught of companies that shake your hand and look you in the eye as they pitch your demise one product and service at a time. And you had better buckle-up, Buttercup; it's only going to get worse.Read more...

With changes as small as 1 percent, it's hard to determine what, if anything, caused the change. The number of Level 2s dropped slightly (from 1,066 to 1,060), so it's possible a couple of the chains that left might have had compliance issues.Read more...

Writes PCI Columnist Walter Conway: Current PCI Council guidance (FAQ 10359) holds that encrypted data can be out of a merchant's PCI scope "if, and only if, it has been validated that the entity that possesses encrypted cardholder data does not have the means to decrypt it." The important word here is "entity." That is, the ability to decrypt the data must rest with some unrelated third party. With the emergence of P2PE, could this scoping guidance be revised to where the only appropriate "entity" is an approved P2PE provider?Read more...