Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Amazon has dressed up that court ruling as a big victory for customer privacy. But now Amazon will have to cough up the customer data, and North Carolina will begin to go after Amazon's North Carolina customers to collect the taxes due—and you can bet that the revenuers will mention Amazon's name when the tax bills go out. Amazon is already collecting sales taxes in five states where it has physical operations. Therefore, a few more court victories like this one, and Amazon might be better off just collecting all state sales taxes itself.Read more...

The story behind the numbers also gets into some definitional questions. Consider a 19-year-old who poses a question to a Facebook forum about which car to buy. Does that consumer think of such an inquiry as mobile research or merely talking with friends? Retailers are likely to see it as quintessential M-Commerce research, but the consumer—who is answering these survey questions—is more likely to see it as hanging with friends and say "no," said Pam Goodfellow, a senior analyst with Big Research, which managed the NRF survey.Read more...

The short version: You can expect to spend more time at the beginning of your assessment, and some of the approaches and technologies you may recently have put in place may no longer make the grade. Read more...

That's why the announcement from Kindle that it will, "later this year," introduce "lending for Kindle" is so potentially significant. The concept is a direct steal from the physical world. A person who purchases an e-book can loan someone a copy of that book, with restrictions. If a consumer today buys a book from a physical store, that consumer owns that book and is therefore free to sell it to someone else, for whatever price the market will bear. Instead of prohibiting that in the digital world, why not encourage it, albeit for a cut.Read more...

Let's look at what the world's largest E-tailer said. Amazon—and tons of retailers—has made lots of ports to new platforms. You create a dedicated app and it has your brand on it. Or you craft a version of your product to run on the new platform. But Amazon, owner of one of the strongest brands in retail today, opted to give its iPad version an entirely new name: Windowshop.Read more...

We're coming to an inflection point that will have some scary repercussions for the mobile industry. Until recently, criminals have had very little incentive to attack the mobile channel. But this is changing, and fast. There are three reasons for this shift.Read more...

Background in "store systems would also be interesting" for this position, said DSW CIO Carlos Cherubin. "This is a new position, born of the fact that our organization is growing," he said, referring to its current 210-person IT operation (internal IT staff of 170 plus about 40 IT contractors). "We're a 200-person shop day-to-day," Cherubin said.Read more...

Starbucks, which is one of the very few national retailers running any kind of a mobile payment trial, has sharply expanded its initial West Coast run, announcing this week a planned move into its almost 300 stores in New York City and parts of Long Island. (Target, another M-Commerce-interested retailer, has already been accepting the mobile payments at the Starbucks in their stores.)

One of the reasons for the urban move is a discovery from the 16-store test in Seattle and Northern California that “dense office building environments” worked out much better than “more neighborhoody environments,” said Chuck Davidson, the category manager for innovation on the Starbucks Card team. He theorized that word of mouth in those office parks was the cause (and the lunch crowd, as opposed to the suburban tendency to solely do morning coffee). And even though the barcode scans are taken directly from the mobile device screens, Davidson said testers found few problems with glare that other chains have experienced. He credited high-end 2D imagers and asking that customers turn their phones’ brightness to full. He added that the chain has yet to experience any fraud in the trial. True, but the Big Apple may test how long that will be the case.…

One of the most frustrating truths in retail security is that, by definition, it has no meaningful return on investment—at least not in the sense that CFOs and board members view ROI. There’s no chance at improving revenue or profit; at best, it’s risk avoidance. Even that’s dicey. If security is in place, how do you really know that you would have been breached otherwise?

One way to squeeze out ROI: Flip an unsexy security expense like PCI by upgrading to a POS system that also moves lines faster or displays ads while customers are waiting. Or what about training cashiers to encourage debit-card users to key in their PIN—thus improving security and reducing the cost of card transactions at the same time? We explore these and other ideas in the latest StorefrontBacktalk podcast on security. To listen to the podcast, please click here.…

In a recent financial statement (it involved declaring a quarterly dividend), Visa CEO Joseph Saunders made an interesting comment. Well, it should prove interesting to retailers who are steaming about their latest interchange fight. Said the CEO: “This is the second consecutive year that the board has authorized a meaningful increase in Visa’s dividend, demonstrating confidence in our business and our commitment to returning excess cash to shareholders.”

Excess cash? Yeah, that’s exactly the phrase you want to publicly use with retailers who are already screaming about charges that they see as profiteering. If you feel the need to return excess cash, why not return it to the customers you overcharged in the first place? Just a thought.…

It's hard to imagine a better illustration of how far behind the curve everyone is when it comes to tracking E-Commerce. The industry is literally still deciding what words mean. Yes, it's helpful to have consistent terms for trade groups and analysts across Europe to use, so no one has to guess whether E-Commerce is supposed to include gardening supplies (yes) or online gambling (no). But at this rate, it's going to be a while before everyone in European E-Commerce is speaking the same language.Read more...

Like most media outlets these days, we here at StorefrontBacktalk get deluged with PR people pitching stories about their clients. But also like most media outlets, very few of those pitches are appropriate for us.

To help, we have crafted a page with our best-kept secrets about how to successfully pitch a story to us. It starts with understanding our audience and how we try and differentiate our stories. (Note: This particular blurb is a horrible example of what our typical stories are like, but it’s a pretty good example of an irony, so at least we have that.) So for PR professionals only: Please check out our PR tip cheat sheet, and your chances of getting a story placed will soar.…

It seems that a short time before the "my water broke" incident, that same store had a shoplifter who was almost caught, so he ran off and hid in a trash dumpster. It would have been a good move, had the collection truck not arrived and dumped the container's contents—including our intrepid shoplifter—into its compressing machinery. Yep, he was repeatedly squashed until he phoned a friend and then used his cell phone to call police and confess, begging that they somehow find and release him. Read more...

But is that necessarily true? Given the various target audiences for different categories of retailers, is it not realistic to assume that site management has already matched functionality and visuals to target customers? Read more...

On Wednesday (Oct. 20), Starbucks launched another campaign to get customers into its stores and, again, it has nothing to do with coffee. Called the Starbucks Digital Network, the program provides free access to a wide range of entertainment and news content that requires a fee elsewhere. The catch: Content can only be seen when customers are within the wireless LAN range of a Starbucks store. It gets better. The plan is to soon integrate the Starbucks Digital Network with loyalty cards, which opens a whole new world of customer data. With Yahoo as its partner, that information could find its way almost anywhere. They'll know not only customers' latte preference, but their preferences in news and entertainment, too.Read more...

That poses a problem. With those rich interactive features, it's simply a way to get additional information about a product. But it doesn't meaningfully go beyond 2D barcodes and NFC efforts. Some chains are frightened to even experiment with systems that are not only IT intrusive (they need to integrate deeply into many back-office programs) but may raise privacy issues. Without such trials, though, retailers have no way of assessing whether the privacy concerns are real or simply imagined. Consumers might love the advantages, if given a chance to try them.Read more...

It's always a challenge to get employees to correctly use a computer system that stops them from selling—even when it's enforcing the law. That's the kind of conflict retailers increasingly face in cases where, for example, loyalty programs clash with privacy concerns. No manager is going to get a bonus for pushing customers away. As such, it may fall to IT to make sure employees don't cut corners, especially when those shortcuts could result in an expensive legal bill. Trouble is, that can be an impossible task.Read more...

The purpose of the questions often is to locate the "unknown unknowns" or to make sure contingencies are addressed. As such, the questions may sound obvious or even silly at first—at least until they succeed in actually uncovering a problem you didn't know you had. Read more...

It doesn't take a brain surgeon to see that the now-defunct new logo was pretty dowdy; it looked like a subway sign that someone defaced with a square blue sticker. But Gap made use of one very good E-tail practice: It launched the logo on its Web site a month before it was scheduled to appear in stores or marketing materials. And when it turned out to be a catastrophe with customers, Gap was able to delete it so completely that we couldn't find a sample anywhere on Gap's site to show you what it looked like.Read more...

On Tuesday (Oct. 19), Wal-Mart agreed to pay the State of New Jersey $775,000 to settle charges that it sold infant formula and non-prescription drugs beyond their marked expiration dates and that items on sale scanned at incorrect prices. The chain also agreed to try really hard to not get caught doing it any more.

Even though Wal-Mart is one of the few businesses that could honestly consider a $775K payment a nuisance settlement (one where its legal and related costs would far outdistance the cost of just writing the darn check), it underscores the ROI value of automating price-check and expiration dates This is one of the areas where the upcoming G2 barcodes should help: By adding the expiration date to a product’s data, expired items will be caught at the POS. Until then, consider the size of this fine—and the fact that it covers only one state, with 49 more in the U.S. alone. (Note: Target was also a defendant in this action, but it settled last year for a mere $375,000.)…

Surveillance video isn’t just for spotting what happens inside a store these days. It can also be used to establish what didn’t happen. This month, a Burger King franchisee used footage to knock down a lawsuit claiming that an unwrapped condom had been included in a Whopper. Carrols Restaurant Group was sued in 2007 after a customer claimed he bit into his Whopper and found the condom. But after Carrols came up with video tracing the burger’s assembly—with not a condom in sight—the customer dropped the suit.

In fact, “what didn’t happen” might be the next big thing in retailer video. Amazon has a patent on using digital video to make sure shipments aren’t mispacked, and several chains have tested video systems that let store security quickly spot missing children who haven’t been abducted (they’re usually just lost or hiding). But what about reviewing video to identify displays that don’t attract shoppers’ attention? Or to spot products that multiple customers put in their carts and then decide to return to the shelf? Catching shoplifters in action is fine—but video of what’s not happening could end up being even more useful.…

The Macy's crash itself was unremarkable, having lasted barely an hour on a Sunday morning (Oct. 17), which is how all well-mannered outages should behave. Site visitors were shown a screen with a headline warning of a "temporary shopping jam" and a message that blamed the difficulties on "heavier traffic than normal." More interestingly, though, the screen had a striking 10-second countdown animation, with visitors instructed to wait 10 seconds and then refresh. But that refresh might need to be done a few times.Read more...

Let's open this strange-fest with Domino's Pizza. Domino's is no stranger to unorthodox campaigns, such as the one the chain launched early this year declaring how stunningly horrible its products had been just weeks before. On Monday (Oct. 18), Domino's announced that its Web site's Pizza Tracker feature will be more customizable. "Depending on the theme, Pizza Tracker might sing, cheer or even sweet talk the status of customers' orders from the moment they are prepared to the second they are out the door or ready for pick up," said a company statement. Sing? Sweet talk? Can you say Pizza Train Wreck?Read more...

At first glance, the Best Buy Commerce API program doesn't look that different from its earlier API efforts or from API moves by other chains. And even Best Buy's official line about the program—"we'll connect with customers wherever they are"—has a deeply innocuous element. But there's much more to it.Read more...

The problem for alternative payments isn't just doing the things that conventional payment cards do at lower cost. It's also breaking through the lack of familiarity that customers, banks and even retailers have with new payment approaches. Visa and MasterCard remain in the POS driver’s seat because of their network, but also because they're a known quantity. And as much as retailers want cheaper alternatives, the Bling Nation/Fifth Third deal illustrates how much of a challenge it is to buck the current infrastructure.Read more...