Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

As Best Buy itself said: "While the updates are occurring, customers will be unable to search or browse products, place orders or check order status on BestBuy.com, m.bestbuy.com (mobile or tablet), BestBuy.com/espanol and store kiosks." Customers also "will not receive E-mails regarding orders while the updates are in progress" and checking order status—plus, of course, making online purchases—"will also be inaccessible to store employees, call center agents and online support representatives."Read more...

And the thing that made the systems interact was something that Nordstrom's software developers had no control over: the homegrown system that the affiliate site used to handle Nordstrom orders. That's what couldn't be tested until a problem actually showed up.Read more...

When Amazon on Monday (March 19) announced its $775 million cash deal to buy Kiva, a popular robot automation fulfillment center player, it put many of its existing retail clients in a bind. This includes current Kiva clients—Walgreens and Saks, among others—plus other recent (and possibly current) customers, such as Gap, Crate & Barrel, Staples, Dillard’s, Toys’R’Us and Office Depot. How will all of them feel about systems in their warehouses—which know everything about product flow and, even worse, can control speed, accuracy and efficiency of product flow—being owned and controlled by Amazon, a direct rival? Granted, Amazon would have to be crazy to risk being caught using that information or deliberately slowing down operations. But will the latest technology get shared quickly? Or will Amazon hold onto it for extensive testing in its own warehouses?

And what about the psychological impact of having execs at Walgreens or Toys’R’Us having to write checks to Amazon (or to a Kiva account, fully owned by Amazon)? The devices themselves are impressive little robots, capable of carrying a half-ton of products and knowing where to fetch and where to return. For any sci-fi fans out there, we’re talking about intelligent powerful robots controlled by a corporate empire and working in the inner operations of its rivals. What could possibly go wrong?…

Ironically, it's Starbucks—which was one of the first to try mobile payment and intrinsically understood the social media concept years before Facebook launched—that has embraced sending giftcards (for customer birthdays, which is another clever CRM touch) through the hail/sleet/dark-of-night people. This issue actually combines two marketing devices popular throughout the 20th Century: snailmail and plastic giftcards/loyalty cards.Read more...

One answer: Nothing—in fact, TJX has been doing E-Commerce since 2009 in Europe. A different view: TJX really doesn't want to be the next Target.com.Read more...

It's a powerful idea, but it has some serious limits. First off, Facebook, Twitter and tons of gaming blogs will see to it that the need for Birds fans to go into a Wal-Mart and hunt around will likely only last a day or two. After that, the full sets of clues will be published by early fans (the store campaign begins March 25) and the incentive will quickly diminish. Suddenly, the advantage of Wal-Mart versus rivals disappears.Read more...

The incident prompting the statement was Tesco's offering the new iPad (a version with 4G and 64 gigabytes) for £50 (which is about $80 in U.S. dollars). That is a tiny fraction of what the price was supposed to be, especially when considering that U.K. prices for U.S. consumer electronics are typically much higher.Read more...

Maybe Android phones are more secure for mobile payments than we thought. Earlier this month, an FBI forensics lab was unable to unlock a Samsung Galaxy W smartphone after it got a warrant to examine the phone belonging to a suspected pimp in San Diego. According to Ars Technica, the phone was locked with Android’s “pattern lock,” which involves dragging a finger along an onscreen keypad, rather than specifically punching in a PIN. That seems to have been enough to keep out the feds, who had to get a court order to ask for Google’s help to access the phone.

Four-digit PINs are notoriously insecure, but they’re still the default security mechanism for both payment cards and alternative payment schemes—in part because they can be entered using a POS device, computer keyboard or phone keypad, and in part because they’ve been around for 40 years. The total possible choices for four-digit PINs are 10,000, while the pattern-lock options could top more than 150 million. Considering that smartphone screens and many POS devices can now handle pattern-lock style security, maybe it’s time for a new default. If it’s hard enough to keep out the FBI, it might be good enough to lock a mobile wallet.…

This did more than give this guy his first police record. It set in motion a complicated series of legal problems for Best Buy, along with other retailers trying to sell Wi-Fi-accessible televisions.Read more...

A month after you pitch, writes Retail Columnist Todd Michaud, you're back, and the marketing chief is talking about how your brand needs a new, leading-edge loyalty program. You offer up that there is new technology in place that will enable your brand to create a loyalty system without forcing customers carry another plastic card, tag or smartphone application. Read more...

To be clear, what Shopkick said it did is quite impressive. To what end, though? Are these shoppers who went to the local large mall and simply hit store after store to accumulate the points? The much more meaningful figures would have been sales numbers, to indicate that this rush of manipulated foot traffic did something beyond running to the next store.Read more...

It's more evidence that customers use apps and the mobile Web differently. And if you don't leverage that difference, you could lose a sizable portion of your M-Commerce customers.Read more...

The initial test used the shopper's physical location, but no other personal data (such as purchase history, other apps on the phone, Web search logs, personal demographics). However, personalization will likely be the subject of upcoming trials, said Dave Etherington, the SVP for marketing and mobile at Titan, the advertising firm that executed the Gap trial.Read more...

ISIS has faced criticism for being overly vague and unable to articulate any significant differences—let alone advantages—over rivals such as Google Wallet and PayPal. Add the fact that ISIS is the only one of those three that hasn't done a public trial, and the sensitivity of not appearing substantive should be huge.Read more...

But Sears clearly wants it—like Neiman Marcus and every other big retailer. The challenge now isn't doing it, but figuring out how it can fit in with what customers expect.Read more...

What if the customer could tag an item in the retail store so that it automatically was added to their online shopping cart for future purchase? This would enable people who like what they see to purchase it later. "Honey, I really like the looks of this new washing machine, but wanted to let you check it out before I purchased it."Read more...

Depending on how those unrelated businesses process their card transactions, they will expand the retailer's own PCI scope and risk. If a retailer stores, processes or transmits card transactions for an unrelated third party—and that includes merely allowing that business to use the retailer's LAN and to send payment data through it—that retailer becomes a PCI service provider and it needs to validate its compliance as such.Read more...

That ability, plus new detailed maps to customers within Facebook, and Wal-Mart has bought itself quite a gift. The magic comes when those millions of gift-giving events—birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, graduations, baby showers, etc.—are merged with Wal-Mart's new social media files and its not-so-new customer purchase histories.Read more...

But the group has the same hurdles that have weighed down so many industry consortium: potential infighting among the leading players; legal obstacles; the need to build a massive infrastructure, given the intent to shun current networks; and the tech questions, such as whether this new approach will have any better luck at mastering security than today's efforts.Read more...

That's not a big surprise—POS hardware refreshes happen all the time. It's how the news came to light: a Wall Street analyst who took the opportunity of an earnings call on March 1 to complain that his breakfast at Wendy's took too long because it was freshly cooked.Read more...

Apple was issued a U.S. patent on Tuesday (March 6) for an interesting way to deal with the transfer of copyrighted multimedia content from one device to another. Digital rights management security techniques often do a good job of screwing up the music, video, podcast or book so that the transferred file won’t work. Apple’s technique not only permits security while a Wi-Fi connection is available but enables the file to be transferred when no wireless connection exists, because it puts the file in a locked area. It’s then unlocked once a connection is established.

The patent envisions using a device’s NFC to transfer the file and to then alert the copyright holder, so the recipient can be charged. Once the NFC transfer is complete, “a gift file created using DRM keys associated with the giftee’s account may be downloaded to the giftee device. If a network connection is unavailable, the giftee device may transfer a locked gift file and a corresponding gift license to the giftee device using a peer-to-peer connection. The giftee device may authenticate the license and unlock the gift file once a connection to the online provider is available.” Of course, a thief could still trick the app into thinking that the copyright holder had been contacted when no such contact happened.…

Retailers have been trying to get that right for years, using a variety of technologies. But if Neiman Marcus' approach works, it may mean that associates and store managers will have to exercise much more discretion and discipline—and that chains will have to change they way they hire associates.Read more...

The implication of the comment was to associate such savings with self-checkout, but the Wal-Mart CFO was careful to not go there. One of the many reasons is that the savings being hinted at are almost impossible to prove, assuming they exist at all.Read more...

Being able to move data around your enterprise gives the most flexibility in using that data, and data portability also future-proofs your system by letting you bolt on new technology quickly instead of slowly and oh-so-carefully making changes to what you've already got.Read more...

But when Vons customer Robert Rivera sued the grocery store after he allegedly slipped on spilled yogurt, the supermarket in litigation called up Rivera's purchasing habits, determined he had purchased "a lot" of alcohol and questioned his sobriety at the time of the accident, pens Legal Columnist Mark Rasch.Read more...