Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

The action began last Thursday (Oct. 7) at the Wal-Mart in Alliance, Ohio, when two sisters from Cleveland—Katurah and Staniel Petty—visited. The pair went to the back of the store, selected two higher priced pieces of software and "concealed them behind a large purse in the [shopping] basket," said Alliance Police Lt. Kevin Moore, who later saw the pair's activity on the store's video system. The Pettys then tried exiting the store without paying and the theft-detection system was activated. (Stick with me on this one. It gets a lot better.)Read more...

With sites today pushing more advanced functionality and programming, new browsers are regularly released to keep up. But over the years, what should a site do with visiting customers who use really old browsers? Should they be blocked, dismissed with a curt “you need to use a browser this tall to ride this site”? Should they be permitted through, knowing that their experience will likely range from subpar to unacceptable, with some functionality simply not available?

Rite Aid, either through choice or by accident, is sending some customers with older browsers (Internet Explorer 6, in particular) directly to its mobile site. If deliberate (Rite Aid media relations said they didn’t know and the E-Commerce team was being vague), it’s a smart resolution. (Note: AlertBot was the first to detect Rite Aid’s move.) In mobile, the consumer gets full functionality. Well, full functionality by mobile standards. In other words, everything should work and work well. ‘Tis better to have full access in a limited world than partial access in a full one. (Would Milton’s line that it’s “better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven” be appropriate? I didn’t think so.)…

PCI Columnist Walter Conway asks: Can this powerful emerging technique simplify retailers' PCI compliance to the point of it being a minor annoyance? That seems to be one of point-to-point encryption's promises, but how much it and the others are realized depends greatly on each retailer's internal processes and requirements. Read more...

Franchisee Columnist Todd Michaud argues that a chain's commitment to making customer comments public—before knowing what that feedback will be—says so much about its confidence in quality. Isn't showing this transparency through unedited real-time feedback what social networks are all about?Read more...

If Halloween is a mere two weeks away, then it’s time to start hearing about the holiday-themed retail tech rollouts. And on Tuesday (Oct. 12), ToysRUs, Amazon and Debenhams stepped up to the brightly colored—and undoubtedly Wi-Fi-connected—plate. ToysRUs is adapting the wedding registry kiosk for the holidays, dubbing it a Wish List, with gift-givers able to access gift lists as long as they have the Wish List number. A nice touch from the toy chain: “Registrants do not have to worry about keeping receipts in the event they wish to make a return or exchange an item in-store that was purchased from their Wish List. Store employees can look up any Wish List transaction simply by revisiting the purchase history on the registrant’s list for easy returns.”

And Santa’s mobile app developers were hard at work at Amazon and over at Debenhams (the second-largest department store chain in the U.K.). Both retailers Tuesday released the same new functionality for their iPhone mobile app: barcode scanning. Debenhams said its move makes it the first High Street retailer to offer mobile barcode scanning. Amazon’s move is surprising in how late it is. But it’s safe to say that eBay’s June purchase of Red Laser helped to focus Amazon on offering an alternative.…

It’s hard enough to track inventory using RFID tags; read rates are low enough that tags are often misread the first time. It’s even worse in a warehouse, where multiple RFID readers can interfere with each other. The Patent Office is offering one of those good news/bad news scenarios. Good News: A university patent claims to dramatically improve RFID read rates, which sounds like a huge advantage for retailers trying to manage inventory. Bad News: The patented technique cuts interference by automatically shutting down all RFID readers in the area except one.

That makes this approach useless if inventory employees are using handheld scanners. On the other hand, it could still work for warehouse areas with fixed RFID scanners that automatically check inventory. Rapidly turning all those scanners on and off could especially help with frozen or liquid items, where signals are particularly hard to detect, according to inventor Jagannathan Sarangapani of the Missouri University of Science and Technology. But how well the technique actually works in the real world is unknown; no RFID vendor has yet licensed the patent.…

Todd Ablowitz, payment consultant and president of the Double Diamond Group, suggests that PayPal's check-capture-smartphone move—which puts it following financial old-timers including Chase Manhattan and USAA—makes it not such an upstart after all.Read more...

The program, called FedEx Site to Store (every so often, marketers throw us a curve and go for WYSIWYG naming. PayPal did something similar last week), has been piloted by Wal-Mart for months in Los Angeles and Boston, and this new move sharply expands the trial to New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Washington, D.C.Read more...

The reality is that there are many firms in the tokenization space today, and you cannot count on all of them being around forever. Some will change business focus, go out of business or be acquired. Because there are no standards for tokens across vendors, transferring to another vendor could be difficult, pens PCI Columnist Walt Conway. That means retail CIOs need to address what to do if (when?) the unforeseen happens.Read more...

The glitch happened on Oct. 1, but the ill-fated charges were rung up the day before, as is customary. "Settlement processing was delayed by several hours on Friday due to a technical issue. As a result, some cardholders saw duplicate charges and some merchants received duplicate funding for those transactions," said a statement issued by First Data.Read more...

That's reason to worry. Physical tampering with PIN pads is typically local because it's labor intensive. Thieves have to physically modify or replace the card terminals, which is why hacked terminals are usually found in a local cluster. This time there are clusters, all right—10 of them, stretching from Illinois to Georgia. Meanwhile, part of what made this $70 billion global grocery chain so successful could be playing a key role in making it a cyberthief target today: The scarcity of employees in the store.Read more...

We are witnessing a race that will determine the success or failure of many Quick Service Restaurants' rewards programs, pens Franchisee Columnist Todd Michaud. On one side, we have the socially enabled "check-in" applications like Foursquare and GoWalla, where friends share their location and compete to earn badges. On the other side, we have brands trying to offer perks through these applications. Today, these perks are inconsistent, in terms of both which locations offer them and the value they provide to customers. If the industry as a whole doesn't start to provide consistent value to the consumer through these new tools, I think the social aspect (the game) may pass by as nothing more than a fad, leaving brands right where they started.Read more...

That's a key problem with tying your loyalty or rewards programs to an outside company, especially a quickly rising startup with inevitable growing pains. From the point of view of your customers, when they check in with Foursquare at your store or restaurant, they're checking in with you. And if Foursquare is unresponsive, you're the one who will get blamed.Read more...

Frustrating for contactless proponents, the more trials that happened, the further in the hole they found themselves. Even retail participants were often resistant, having to be have been bribed into doing the trial at all. But a pair of recent mass transit uses of contactless—an existing trial in New York City and an imminent changeover in Chicago—have a surprisingly good shot at finally giving contactless payment a real shot at success.Read more...

The only price in this Faustian deal: You need to let your customers take the signs home with them, after they've paid you $40 or more for the privilege.Read more...

Gap crashed at about 11 AM East Coast Monday and was down for anywhere from 21 minutes (according to Alertbot) to 45 minutes (according to Pingdom). "HTTP Reply Timed-Out. The server responded very slowly and was unable to send the entire HTTP page within the 30 sec. limit," Pingdom reported.Read more...

In an tactic that we'll refer to as the nesting doll attack—named after the Russian nesting dolls, which include increasingly smaller dolls hiding yet smaller dolls—one Nevada would-be-shoplifter decided that a legitimate barcode matching to a legitimate product was sufficient to escape suspicion.Read more...

Wal-Mart won't explain exactly what happened. That's partially because the chain itself hasn't completely determined what happened, with an internal investigation underway. Whatever precisely caused the glitch, it had two elements. The first was an electronic system problem. But that wouldn't have shut everything down had it not been compounded by an employee's ill-fated—albeit well-intentioned—attempt to manually fix the issue.Read more...

According to the draft of the PCI changes that the PCI Council has been circulating for comment, there are indeed no major changes in next month's updated standard. But as they say in Purchase, the CVV devil is in the details. Read more...

Critics of Chip-and-PIN have raised questions about whether EMV is honestly that much more secure than mag-stripe. These concerns mushroomed back in February when a Cambridge University report publicly detailed many security holes in the current implementation. Even worse, some have suggested the U.S. shouldn't embrace Chip-and-PIN because it will likely be years-beyond-obsolete by the time it's fully launched.Read more...

Eddie Bauer, for example, completed the transaction, took the money and never sent the card. Two others also never sent the card, but at least had the decency to not charge for it. RSR Managing Partner Nikki Baird said Eddie Bauer's people admitted that they never shipped the card.Read more...

How can you make sure you don't get round dusty minerals that are overpriced and provide about as much true data security as a Jack-O-Lantern? PCI Columnist Walter Conway, in an eerie voice, bellows that it all comes down to knowing which houses to go to and which to avoid. Even more importantly, it's about knowing which questions to ask.Read more...

A good social strategy is simply a different lens on a good business strategy. A few "tweets" and a few more "fans" or "friends" are not going to produce bottom-line results. Michaud believes IT needs to take a leadership role in a company's social strategy, helping the business partners avoid shooting themselves in the foot. The new world of everything "social" will absolutely be a game-changer for business as we know it. But it will absolutely not happen overnight. And it certainly won't be cheap.Read more...

The real danger here, he writes, is that the larger NFC value proposition might be poisoned if NFC is pigeonholed as just another card replacement. If that happens, it would effectively kill retailer and consumer adoption.Read more...

For example, Best Buy's new promise for the buy-online-pick-up-instore option is that the order will be ready "in as little as 45 minutes after placing it."

Despite one prominent retail media outlet reporting that the pledge was a guarantee of product availability in fewer than 45 minutes, Best Buy's pledge is actually the opposite. It promises that an order will not be ready in 44 or fewer minutes. Guaranteed! Might be as few as 45. Could be 3 hours. But it absolutely, positively, won't be fewer than 45 minutes.Read more...