Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

The retail chains, which hold most of the important cards in this game, are quite content to sit back and let the process take time. Cutting deals with whoever remains standing makes it slightly less risky anyway. We spoke with a few senior retail IT execs about their mobile-payment vendor discussions and the comments from two were the most illuminating. Dollar Tree CIO Ray Hamilton said he sees the tech limitations issues as already resolved ("I would prefer to pay with my smartphone than with a magstripe card—a crude, historic technology invented during my youth. Smartphones will have more than sufficient processing capabilities to encrypt data during the NFC transaction."). No, it's the standards issues that are his greatest concern, especially given that there are really hardly any significant mobile standards yet.Read more...

Costco, Kmart and Kroger took the top dishonors, with each chain responding to zero of the complaints lodged against it during the review period (five working days in September). Wal-Mart ignored 41 percent of all legitimate complaints, Macy's ignored 35 percent of its complaints, Bloomingdale's ignored 20 percent, Nordstrom ignored 20 percent, Sears ignored 11 percent and Safeway ignored only five percent.Read more...

Macy’s is testing a merged version of its brick-and-mortar and online inventory systems chain-wide, and it expects to go live with the new system early in 2012. On Wednesday (Nov. 9), Macy’s CFO Karen Hoguet told an earnings call that “we’re going to be able to do [chain-wide merged inventory] very soon. We’re testing it right now. And early next year, I think we’re going to start doing it more and more, with the systems we have today. Having said that, we are going to invest over time in better systems that allow us to maximize the inventory easier without as much manual intervention, but it’s not going to prevent us from doing the site to store to door.”

That merged inventory will presumably be the base for Macy’s item-level RFID efforts, which are slated to go chain-wide by 2013. Merged inventory could also smooth out some of the kinks in Macy’s Search-and-Send program, which lets one store access inventory from another store and have items shipped directly to a customer. That’s currently in only a few dozen stores, but it should be easy to roll out chain-wide once the merged-channel inventory is in place.…

The shortsighted payment limitations aside, this Toys "R" Us trial is quite clever and it showcases what eBay can do in the mobile space. Consistent with the mobile wallet pitch PayPal itself is making to retailers, parent company eBay's trial showcases the strength of being platform-agnostic. This trial can work just as well on an iPhone or an Android. (Note: eBay's information seems contradictory on how multi-platform it will initially be, however.) On the flip side, Google Wallet can work just as well on Visa and MasterCard. Therein lies the frustration of the Toys "R" Us trial.Read more...

Shoulder surfing is an unavoidable problem with smartphones in a crowd, but 14 feet away feels like enough distance to be safe from video eavesdropping. And although there are workarounds to block the attack—turn down the screen brightness or turn off the pop-up keypress confirmation that makes the iPhone's virtual keyboard so much easier to use—it's unlikely that customers will be willing to do that. Store associates, on the other hand, might want to do both those things, along with being careful to guard their screens and watch for customers who happen to be using video cameras nearby. The biggest question is whether they can be convinced to do anything.Read more...

For many retail IT execs, it's more than a little uncomfortable. Store managers are on the same side as IT. Setting up systems to see who's underperforming—and exactly how, in near-real-time—can feel, well, a little dirty. Maybe that's why so few chains are doing it—and why most of the systems offered by vendors for using RFID data aren't built for that type of visibility. "Our number-one fight with software vendors is, your software doesn't do enough," said American Apparel VP of Technology Stacey Shulman. "'Well, it's what everybody else uses.' Well, it's not enough."Read more...

If this was just another marketing survey that over-hyped its results, it would be one thing. But there's a serious issue at play here. The holiday shopping season of 2011 is going to be a crucial one in retail M-Commerce, the one where meaningful purchases start to happen and where millions of consumers will try—or consider trying—M-Commerce. And it is where they will be satisfied or dissatisfied. Even more crucially, there is a critical expectation issue at play. What will your CEO and board expect from mobile? Surveys will create the bogus impression that a huge number of mobile transactions will happen this month (the 61 percent from this survey's headline is a perfect example), and when that doesn't happen, you're going to be blamed.Read more...

While U.S. grocery chains are struggling with whether they’re better or worse off with self-checkout and express lanes, a supermarket in Espoo, Finland, is experimenting in the opposite direction: intentionally slow checkout. Dubbed the “don’t panic” lane, the slow-track checkout at a store in the K-citymarket chain offers armchairs for people waiting to pay, help putting products on the checkout belt and a generally relaxed approach to paying for merchandise.

The pilot project is being done in conjunction with researchers at Aalto University, who thought mentally disabled customers would prefer a less hectic, more helpful checkout process. But it seems elderly customers and even parents with small children in tow also like the slow lane (those armchairs seem to be a big draw in both groups). Running customers through checkout at top speed may be the most efficient way to do it, but an extra-slow checkout offers plenty of opportunities to hit those armchair-bound customers with digital signage and potential impulse items—keeping some customers happier and potentially paying for itself with increased sales. For chains that have already given up on one-size-fits-all checkout, that slow lane might actually make good retail sense.…

Consider this true story from Legal Columnist Mark Rasch: About a week ago, Rasch's wife's E-mail provider notified her that she was a baaaaad girl. Apparently she had sent out a bunch of spam in violation of the Terms of Service. Of course, it wasn't her, and he notified the provider of this fact. What happened next, or more accurately what didn't happen next, is a cautionary tale about the nature of the relationships between IT vendors and customers (like merchants) and the relationships between merchants and their customers.Read more...

Yes, that's what HP needed. But instead of offering the tablet and sled as a general-purpose in-store mobile POS, HP is positioning it largely as an add-on to HP's own POS systems. OK, that limits the market. So does the lack of a clear advantage over an iPad (HP says being Windows-based will make it "easy for retailers to integrate," though a product manager acknowledged that iPads probably work fine with most retailers' systems too). Then there's the mag-stripe reader, which can work right out of the box in unencrypted mode. Wait, isn't that exactly what retailers don't want?Read more...

With so many chains offering pharmacy services, the debates provide a glimpse into how mobile strategies can slam into privacy rules and, sometimes, technology simply can't get around that. Tim Bell is the director for pharmacy managed care and systems at the 460-store chain operating in Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia and Mississippi. Bell said the issue is that the best approach for sending a quick alert (such as "Your Prescription for Lipitor is due for renewing. Should we renew?") and accepting ("Renew") is the least secure: text messaging.Read more...

If that sounds like an afterthought, it very nearly is, even though self-checkout alone would be a big deal for most chains. What Apple is primarily trying to do is demolish the wall between stores and M-Commerce. It may not work—that 12-minute turnaround promise may just be impossible, and some of Apple's plans for prioritizing customers can collapse when things get busy. But if it does work, it may also represent Apple's demonstration of how it plans to offer mobile payments to other retailers—without either NFC or mimicking a plastic card.Read more...

The problem is that the digital wallet concept—a place where you can cram in every payment method, CRM card and discount reminder—is the same, with trivial differences in partners and technology. PayPal did showcase some differentiators—such as the ability to pay with airline miles or other points programs, in addition to changing the payment method days after the purchase has been finalized—but it also conceded that there's nothing preventing Google or ISIS (or Apple or others) from offering identical services.Read more...

The virtual store is not new. In a much publicized trial this summer, Tesco re-created almost all of the merchandise from one of its stores as a series of high-res photographs with QR codes on the walls of a South Korean subway. But the Debenhams' effort takes it farther than any other retailer. At least consumers arriving at that subway would see pictures of products and could guess what to do. In the Debenhams' trial, consumers were directed to very prominent street corners in London (Trafalgar Square), Manchester (Albert Square), Birmingham (Centenary Square), Cardiff (Cardiff Castle) and Glasgow (George Square). They then loaded a mobile app onto their phones. If the geolocation of the phones matched what the app had been programmed to look for, it would display a ghostly image of a dress.Read more...

Whether such a possibility is good or evil depends on whether you are salivating over seeing your rivals' transactions or envisioning your rivals seeing all of your transactions. Officially, none of the mobile wallet players—including Google, PayPal and ISIS—has threatened to sell peeks at your transaction receipts to your rivals, although no one is willing to rule out future revenue sources. But the smaller vendors that are offering your customers free digitization of their paper receipts—and usually an offer to also store any already-digitized receipts—are the more likely sources of this cross-merchant data.Read more...

Google is finally beginning to tighten the screws on users of its Google Maps. Well, sort of. On October 26, the search giant said that, starting Jan. 1, 2012, it will begin charging $4 per 1,000 views through its Maps API—but only for Web sites that exceed 25,000 map-views in a single day. Because Google is only counting the initial map access in that 25,000, it should be pretty easy for retailers to calculate whether this change will cost them anything at all.

For many retailers using Google Maps just on “find a store” pages, that pricing pretty much wipes out any incentive to jump ship to Microsoft’s or Yahoo’s map offerings—changing and testing the code would probably cost more than paying the overage fee on a few busy days. (If you’re a heavier user, because you have Google Maps in logistics or other geotracking applications, you may want to consider your options.) The actual pain may be trivial this time around, but it’s still a reminder that free Internet services probably won’t stay free forever—even from Google, which really wants retailers to be its new best friends.…

But there's certainly a difference between a marketing event that begins at midnight and one that starts in the middle of prime time on the West Coast. Last year, Kohl's started its Black Friday sales at 3:00 AM New York time, midnight Pacific time, with Macy's and Target an hour later. That didn't make much of a difference online—it was still late-night across the U.S. But wind those times back a few hours, and suddenly it won't just be night owls who are hammering on E-tail sites.Read more...

Conventional wisdom is that consumer resistance to invasive marketing consistently softens over time with each new retail tech innovation. But the friendly shopkeeper demonstrates that's not a linear trend. And there's a school of thought that says mobile technology may break that trend, too. The potential invasiveness of mobile payments is so intense that customers might rebel and resist all privacy-infringing efforts even more—making mobile dangerously likely to blow up in retailers' faces.Read more...

Several states have laws that restrict either in whole or in part the use of certain personal information as a condition of accepting a credit card, pens Legal Columnist Mark Rasch. The trick, though, is whether to write it down or not. (Hint: You really don't want to write it down.)Read more...

The numbers on their own are somewhat of a concern, given that compliance in any group is supposed to steadily improve. That's especially true with a new entry, such as Level 3s, which start at such a relatively low level of compliance. In this instance, though, the explanation for the compliance dip might lie in a recent increase in the number of Level 3s trying to get compliant.Read more...

First off, the world's largest retailer is excluding any online sites. Really? In late October 2011, you're still not convinced that E-Commerce isn't just a fad? Second, it's a clever move in that once customers purchase an item from their lists, they are unlikely to continue researching and looking for it.Read more...

By now you’ve probably seen how easy it is to unlock an iPad 2 without knowing the password. Local TV news anchors are having a field day with this one, because even they can figure out how to exploit the hole Apple left in iOS5. It requires using the iPad 2’s magnetic smart cover and about five seconds of poking buttons and covering and uncovering the screen—a truly impressive security fail.

Apple has come up with a workaround (change the smart cover-related settings) and promises a patch soon, but this should still remind retail chains they need to be doing their own security in apps running on in-store mobile devices. Making sure a custom app automatically locks itself when it’s not being used will cost an associate a few extra seconds for one more password, but you really don’t want a thief to walk off with a tablet running a live application that’s connected with your payment or inventory systems. (And if your in-store iPads don’t have their own smart covers? Let’s just say that thieves tend to come prepared.)…

There are two main drivers behind this move. The first is the recent E-Commerce obsession with local: consider Wal-Mart's local Facebook move two weeks ago. But the second issue is the rapid death of many regional newspapers, which are taking to their graves the local circulars. The Sears local move not only enables the chain to migrate many of those local promotions from dead-tree to pixels, but it also is upgrading the experience. Consider a circular where the ads instantly disappear as soon as the product is out of stock.Read more...

"At the scan, we get a certain amount of metadata as a result of the scan itself—operating system, carrier, cell tower being used, etc. We get all of that," said Scanbuy CEO Mike Wehrs. "We know what that app has scanned in the past." Indeed, Wehrs argues, the app can secure data from the QR code plus the phone plus online data accessed from a retailer's loyalty card database. "If the app integrates with their CRM files, it can give a completely customized experience."Read more...

The potential of this microlocation mobile approach is compelling, because it provides a relatively easy—and somewhat accurate—way to help customers find product. Of course, that's not the goal of all chains. Some chains—such as Costco—depend heavily on the customer stumbling on impulse buys as he/she wanders the aisles in search of the elusive clothes pins or peanuts.Read more...