Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Almost all retail marketing efforts are based on the not-so-simple premise of getting people to purchase from them, either online or in person. The problem, pens Retail Columnist Todd Michaud, is likely a mesh of old-mentality thinking with a heavy dose of channel conflict.Read more...

The good vendors will be able to address all these questions. The not-so-good ones will hand you a carrier bag or a pen instead. Read more...

But it is clear that Amazon is drooling over its vast CRM files and trying to figure out how much money it can make off them.Read more...

With so many consumer devices using the same wireless frequencies, it was bound to happen: Just before Christmas, a U.K. family in a village 50 miles southwest of London lost the use of all wireless devices—everything from key fobs for unlocking vehicles to a wireless thermostat and a digital shower—until the problem cleared up without explanation several days later. The BBC reported that faulty wireless equipment had caused similar incidents in the past, including a street in northern England of homes whose wireless was jammed in 2010 by handheld wireless devices used to take orders at a nearby restaurant.

Retailers get understandably worried about customers who might intentionally or unintentionally block store Wi-Fi that’s used for POS, associates’ handheld devices or free customer wireless service. But there’s a risk the other way, too—the newest Wi-Fi access points have a range of more than 200 feet indoors and 800 feet outdoors. That’s easily enough to jam neighboring stores’ Wi-Fi in a mall or interfere with homes near a standalone store. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to know whether a store’s Wi-Fi is causing problems in the neighborhood—at least not until the FCC shows up to investigate a complaint.…

Legal Columnist Mark Rasch wants to call it a bait-and-switch coupled with a breach of contract. The Uniform Commercial Code Article 2 for the sale of goods says that if there is an offer (PlayStation for $150!), an acceptance (click here!) and consideration (here's my credit card), then voila! A contract is formed. Read more...

Although Best Buy has yet to spell out how this happened, the most likely scenario is that it was the so-called perfect storm of bad timing and possibly a quantity typo. How much of a delay happened while employees desperately tried to find the—unknown to them at that point—non-existent merchandise? In a $50 billion chain, news can travel upstream very slowly. When the news is bad, it travels upstream even more slowly.Read more...

Age verification is something mail-order vendors have struggled with for years, and mostly given up on. But E-tailers can no longer use impossibility as an excuse. A recent federal law requires age-verification for tobacco sold online—and other age-controlled items can't be far behind.Read more...

What started this holiday dogfight was an Amazon promotion, where it was offering a tiny discount (5 percent, with a ceiling of $5) for people who scanned barcodes and then purchased the item on Amazon. eBay's response was what it billed as a $10 in-store coupon, with three retailers: Toys "R" Us, Dick's Sporting Goods and Aéropostale.Read more...

The age-detection part uses an optical sensor to consider the customer's face shape, along with distance measurements between the eyes, nose and ears.Read more...

The good news is that this approach, in theory, will be free to retailers, because it will not necessitate any store IT changes at all. The problem—and it's a deal-killer—is timing. With the mobile onslaught, quick is almost certainly going to trump free.Read more...

The store does have a policy: Don't take sides. If the customer wants to call police, let the police handle it. If police aren't called, treat everyone as a legitimate customer.Read more...

There is more to protecting sensitive areas than installing video cameras. The second, and possibly thornier, concern for small and midsize merchants is how effective the reminder is likely to be when many of them mistakenly think they won't need to follow the advice.Read more...

The essence of the attacks' success leveraged two weaknesses: different unsecured remote-access packages used by various franchisees of Subway, which enabled easy Internet access to POS systems; and card swipes with minimal encryption. That meant key-capture software installed by the cyberthieves was able to grab data in the clear, as it was being swiped.Read more...

As obvious as that seems (after all, how can a gift recipient review a gift until it's actually opened?), there may be a few more subtleties in when retailers can expect reviews—and what type of reviews they can expect.Read more...

Microsoft has effectively thrown in the towel for Microsoft Tag. On Tuesday (December 13), Microsoft announced that its Tag Reader smartphone app will now support QR codes and NFC. Officially that’s to make Tag Reader a one-stop app so users won’t have to worry about what reader to use with various tags. In practice, it’s curtains for Tag, the multicolored 2D barcode that Microsoft rolled out in January 2009 but that never really caught on (not that the more successful QR code has been a barn-burning success).

In a blog post, Microsoft said it now recommends NFC for retailers to “blend in beautifully,” QR to “grab their attention” and Tag to “raise curiosity”—presumably as in, “curiosity about who’s still interested in Microsoft Tag.”…

Booksellers were up in arms about Amazon encouraging people to go into their local stores to buy on Amazon, despite the fact that consumers have been doing the same thing for as long as Amazon has been around and the fact that—to be nitpicky—books were excluded from the program. U.S. Senator Olympia J. Snowe (R.-Me.) issued a statement that "incentivizing consumers to spy on local shops is a bridge too far." That may be true, but the price-sharing part—the spying the senator is referencing—was excluded from any incentives.Read more...

Why? Because although what it was doing to those physical stores was likely legal, had those stores tried doing the same to Amazon, it would have been illegal, thanks to Amazon's posted policies. That policy phrasing is not even universal—or even common— among major E-tailers, pens Legal Columnist Mark Rasch.Read more...

As is our tradition, StorefrontBacktalk shuts down for the last two weeks in December, due to the fact that y’all are far too busy (a) supporting the biggest selling weeks of the year until December 25th, (b) supporting the biggest returns-and-exchanges week of the year after December 25th and (c) closing the quarterly books until December 31st on what everyone hopes will be a bigger year than 2010.

That means our next regular weekly issue will arrive on January 5th, 2012. In the meantime, everything else will still be live (the Web sites, our Kindle version, our Twitter tweets, our mobile sites, etc.). And we’ll, as always, send out breaking news alerts if circumstances merit. …

By the way, after much effort, PCI Columnist Walt Conway thinks he has finally found a real-world example of what a high-value token should be. Let's say shoppers want to use a payment card at a merchant, but they do not want that merchant to have their PAN, for whatever reason.Read more...

But Google also stores far too much customer information unencrypted on the phone—and if the phone is malware-infected or stolen, that data becomes far too easy for a thief to get at.Read more...

A message from our beloved business side: As the NRF Big Show happens next month, StorefrontBacktalk has a couple of last-minute slots for anyone wanting to communicate with NRF attendees. In mid-January, as our readers leave their postmortem holiday shopping meetings with the list of everything that went wrong, every feature management wants to add and a wishlist of products to make it all, it’s a nice time message.

We will also be adding several content channels next year—including several new weekly podcast series, more monthlies, events in addition to our usual weekly and monthly newsletters, and Web sites—and if your marketing people have any interest in getting involved, we now have new opportunities. Some of these new channels were specifically created to enable smaller vendors, with much more limited resources, into our community. If your marketers want to get your brand in the middle of these discussions, please drop us a note.…

And although there's nothing to stop Verizon from adding the necessary hardware for lots of mobile wallets, that's not likely to happen unless Google opens its own corporate wallet.Read more...

If enacted with enforcement teeth, this could be huge. Not only are the threatened amounts (at least the ceiling) orders of magnitude beyond what major U.S. chains have been threatened with by card brands and processors, but the threats are far more realistic.Read more...

The Home Depot partner app quickly responded: At the Lowe's store three blocks away. It's becoming clear that retailers need to be thinking about—and asking—a lot more questions about in-store maps and mobile navigation.Read more...

Much of the concern may have little foundation, because Amazon has low-balled the incentives to such an extent that it's unclear if many consumers will even bother to try it.Read more...