Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Fair enough—there was some type of upgrade, techs encountered unexpected problems and the job of getting everything working again far outlasted the scheduled maintenance window. That makes perfect sense, until you think about it for a moment. After all, why would Walgreens schedule an upgrade for a busy time like Monday afternoon? That's the sort of thing you do in the middle of the night over the weekend. And that's probably what Walgreens actually did.Read more...

"Consideration was given to the possibility of providing separate XML interfaces. However, it was decided to provide a common XML interface embracing the requirements of all of the applications, because this was consistent with the historically common practice of integrating applications through POS transaction log files," the new standard said. "It is noted that audit, security, labor productivity and activity analysis applications are very demanding of detail content, [with] all driving the need for an all-encompassing XML schema."Read more...

A major Australian bank has declared its mobile-payments trial a failure. ANZ Banking Group and Visa launched the trial in March, with 50 bank employees in Sydney and Melbourne using mobile-phone covers that added near-field communication (NFC) by way of a MicroSD card. The trial ended in April, but on Monday (June 27) the bank delivered the verdict: “Our participants strongly supported contactless payment as a convenient way to pay, but the MicroSD technology did not meet all of our requirements. At this stage, we will not be progressing with MicroSD as a contactless payment technology platform,” the bank told ZDNet Australia.

A bank admitting its NFC trial has failed—especially when it involves Visa’s pet project, MicroSD cards? That would have been unthinkable even six months ago. NFC-in-MicroSD was the way for Visa and the banks to keep interchange fees out of the hands of phone makers (which control NFC-in-the-phone) or mobile operators (with NFC-in-the-SIM). But now, a month into the Google Wallet era, that’s unnecessary: Visa and the banks will get interchange no matter where the NFC chip sits. Now maybe everyone can stop playing “hide the NFC” and focus on actually getting customers to use it.…

One retail IT line that is too cynical to not share: In an unrelated interview, a senior IT manager discussed working with certain internal clients—business unit heads who had, until recently, been just colleagues.

What’s the difference, he was asked, between a colleague and an internal client? “Simple,” he said. “An internal client is a colleague who’s had his reasonability removed.”…

The Harvard researchers focused their attention mainly on Groupon and its customers. For retailers, most of the risk appears to come from failing to treat vouchers correctly at the POS—usually those vouchers are like giftcards, but in some ways they're like coupons. Getting the treatment right is likely to require some under-the-covers work on POS software, which is nobody's idea of a comfortable project. The alternative, though, is to leave it for associates to handle them correctly ad hoc—and that's just asking for trouble.Read more...

In an impressively creative mobile-payment deployment in South Korea, Tesco has embedded QR codes in actual huge pictures of its shelves and then pasted those photos onto subway walls. Customers use their phones to scan and pay for the captured images, thereby selecting their groceries while waiting for their trains. The groceries are then delivered by the time they return home. In South Korea, Tesco markets itself as Homeplus.

This approach is brilliant on so many levels. Not only is it replacing the cost of putting up new stores, but it addresses the relative smallness of images on a mobile phone. The images exist in these beautiful—and gigantic—high-resolution full-color pictures. All the phone’s screen does is display the text and thumbnail of the purchased item. Signal repeaters guarantee excellent speed and connectivity. And Tesco, and its customers, is leveraging the dead time of waiting for a train and turning it into productive shopping time. True technology leaders merely deploy quickly. They think through how the technology could work. There’s no rule that says mobile images must appear on the mobile screen.…

But Kroger—a 2,449-store chain in 31 states—is always a fan of experimentation, so this change might be more about trialing a new checkout approach and the removal of self-checkout might simply be a matter of freeing up space in a tightly designed store in an urban Houston, Texas, location. More meaningfully, though, it also reflects a POS approach conflict, with grocers today ambivalent about not only self-checkout but (both old and new) express lanes. It's an age-old argument, but one that is still valid: Why not reward and incentivize your best customers, rather than those who buy the least?Read more...

This might return us to the "Wild West" days of selling personal information to anyone for any reason, writes Legal Columnist Mark Rasch. Then again, it may not. But for now, at least, the case will provide something of a backstop legal defense to retailers that use personal information for marketing purposes when someone has not explicitly given their permission.Read more...

That gives Zoosh instant appeal for retailers that have been showered with alternative payments wannabes, all of which seem to have brilliant business plans that contain just one hole: the part where a customer's payment-card number gets into a merchant's POS system with a minimum of fuss. That's the part Naratte has figured out at a time when anything more complicated than a magnetic strip appears to be beyond the reach of most customers—and many retailers, too.Read more...

Before downloading the Twitter Commerce app, a user must agree that the vendor can read the consumer's tweets (including private direct messages), "follow new people," "update your profile" and—my personal favorite—"post tweets for you." Yeah, what consumer would have any problem with any of that? A third-party wants to send tweets out under my name? No problem. "I don't think it's the best choice of words," said Harrison Lee, the Tweetalicious co-founder/chief marketing officer, who also dubbed the warnings "intimidating." But, he added, it's not his firm's fault; Twitter dictated that wording.Read more...

That may be an inevitable consequence of globe-spanning E-Commerce. Here's another: Those stricter, faster breach-notification requirements will also hit U.S. retailers that have handed off European order-handling to third parties and even retailers that don't officially serve European customers at all. The less connection a retailer thinks it has with European customers, the more of a mess it's likely to be.Read more...

How strict are these new rules? They require rapid notification of data breaches—but the rules also require getting express written consent from customers for using their data; getting consent if you want to have third-parties handle the data; providing consumers with contact information about every party who has access to their data; and allowing consumers to have their data purged from all your systems.Read more...

The point-to-point advice "will talk about the ability to encrypt at one point and decrypt at another point and the transmission between those two points being completely out of compliance scope." That is the first time the council has been that publicly explicit about point-to-point applications being out-of-scope. Even more intriguing was when Leach tied it back to mobile devices: If a retailer associate "is swiping the card or dipping the card into a peripheral device that plugs into a mobile phone, now we're talking about devices and not applications. If they can do that and the mobile phone is simply a conduit for transmitting cardholder data that is encrypted," then PCI compliance could be had through standard means without waiting for the council's formal mobile guidance next year.Read more...

The actions of the vendor—TF Payments, a unit of ThoughtFocus Technologies, which is marketing the product as FocusPay—highlight some of the challenges involved when planning a retail mobile-payment strategy in an environment where the rules have yet to be established. And as a result, vendors are feeling pressured to promise capability with non-existent standards—and hoping no one notices. This time, however, someone did.Read more...

The report comes from cloud networking vendor Meraki, but its methodology seems legitimate enough. How surprising is this result? It's certainly expected that tablets would suck in more data; their larger screens make them ideal for full-length streaming video, which is certainly one of the most data-hogging applications. But a five-fold increase in bandwidth? Couple that with projected soaring sales of tablets—lead by the iPad—and those bandwidth projections are going to need serious work.Read more...

Industry shorthand is intended to be an efficient way to communicate frequently used phrases. Sometimes, however, retail tech drops its guard and ends up with multiple identical terms to refer to very different things. Some 15 years ago, “Web server” was the classic example, referring to both software and tower hardware. It was often impossible to tell which was being referenced, even in context. Today, M-Commerce is giving us a 2011 example.

If I reference Best Buy Mobile revenue, am I referring to the chain selling phones or what people buy using their phones looking at Best Buy’s site on those phones? The same can be said of just about every major chain that happens to sell phones, but Best Buy is an especially severe offender. It actually dubbed one of its divisions BestBuy Mobile—and it’s the chain’s M-Commerce group. Here’s a Merriam-Webster brain-tease: What do you call revenue that Best Buy earns from people accessing the chain’s M-Commerce site on their iPhone and then using that connection to purchase an Android phone? (Was going to ask for the name if those same people engaged in this M-Commerce Android effort while riding the LAN at a local Mobil gas station, but thought better of it.)…

In fact, the vast majority of our stories (often 80 percent or more) are deliberately not Premium. We are hoping that these colorful images will make it easier to tell which stories are Premium and which ones can be read in their entirety by non-Premium subscribers. We're hoping that this clarification cuts back on the frustration of non-Premium readers who click on stories that they can't read fully as well as encourages readers to click on a story, confident that it's entirely available to them. This is also a good time to explain how StorefrontBacktalk decides which stories are Premium.Read more...

Another scene shows them wandering through a restaurant kitchen and pouring a drink at the bar. That raises an obvious question: If they could help themselves to the beer, could they—or anyone else—help themselves to the POS?Read more...

One of the great things about mobile-marketing efforts today is that they can sometimes take the seemingly innocuous—something that always has been truly innocuous—and turn it into a little-noticed CRM bonanza. Consider a contest announcement made on Wednesday (June 15) by an American Eagle Outfitters brand (Aerie), where consumers were asked to use an app (Pose) on their phone to shoot pictures of people wearing that chain’s clothing.

The winning pictures would be displayed on the chain’s 25-story Times Square LED screen, and the photographer would get a $150 Aerie giftcard. The real prize goes to American Eagle, which can analyze and leverage the metatag data associated with each photo, revealing brand, store location, where the photo was shot and price. Shortly, such images could report back with much greater detail, including SKU, and, with near field communication, data could even include CRM history of both the photographer and the person being photographed. When they wrote that a picture’s worth a thousand words, they may have been frighteningly accurate. …

Verizon went out of its way to deny that this signals the telecom giant pulling back from its ISIS mobile-payment alliance with AT&T and T-Mobile. Indeed, it trumpeted its denial in the second paragraph of its own news release. Feels sort of like the guy who walks into house and his wife says, "Welcome home," and he shoots back, "I certainly wasn't cheating on you just now, in case you were thinking that." (Second paragraph, Verizon? The telco doth protest too much, methinks.) The denial didn't even—to be precise—refute that its affections for ISIS are cooling. "Our relationship with Payfone complements the part of the mobile-payments equation we're already working on with our ISIS joint venture," said Greg Haller, marketing vice president, Verizon Wireless.Read more...

The Safeway move required a POS system upgrade to accept the very successful Starbucks mobile card, which is not really true mobile payment at all, in that the phone merely displays the barcode of the Starbucks Card.Read more...

Example: Section 4.2, the guidelines' advice for "mixed-mode environments." That means cases where a single server contains some virtual machines that are in-scope for PCI, while other VMs running on the same hardware are out-of-scope. If you're accustomed to PCI's usual generalized, loophole-laden language, you're in for a shock. The bottom-line recommendation for mixed-mode environments comes down to three words: Don't do it.Read more...

The idea is to create experience pages for products that are typically linked with a large number of related products, such as school supplies, a home entertainment system or a backyard grill. The details are still being fine-tuned, but the idea could be a page with a list of all recommended items, each with its own checkbox. One keystroke could purchase the whole package, or selected items could be removed or their quantities changed.Read more...

Her comments come on the heels of our report last week that the elimination of the Google AdWords badges for Google Checkout likely meant the beginning of the end for the alternative payment system. The executive shall remain nameless for the moment because, well, there's already too much unemployment in this country. Asked if Google Checkout will be killed or whether it will simply get a lot quieter, the exec laughed and said that, in recent years, "we've spent zero time on marketing [Google Checkout] and zero dollars on consumer awareness. I don't know how much quieter we can get."Read more...

It's easy to knock Sears, with its long history of making customers unhappy with out-of-stock items, whether they were actually out of stock or not. (In a comment to The Consumerist post, a Sears representative blamed the associate for being unable to find the item in stock, then lied to cover his incompetence.) On the other hand, maybe the problem isn't as human-centric as that. It could be that Sears' dueling inventory systems are to blame.Read more...