Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

To qualify for the money, a merchant doesn't have to be PCI compliant (although that's always nice). Indeed, it doesn't even have to experience a real breach, said SecureConnect Director of Marketing Kristyan Mjolsnes. For example, if the chain's bank or a card brand suspects a breach and insists the chain pay for a forensic probe, that would be covered, she said. If the chain gets nervous and wants to triple-check on its own, however, that would not be covered, Mjolsnes added, reasonably enough.Read more...

RadioShack and 7-Eleven are among seven new defendants in the latest round of retail chains accused of violating gift card process patents owned by Card Activation Technologies (CAT). Thus far, more than 30 chains have been sued, including Nordstrom, Macy’s and JCPenney, and a significant number of them—including Sears and OfficeMax—have settled, according to attorneys involved in the case.

The five other chains newly named were Giorgio Armani, Caché, Denny’s, Sunglass Hut Trading and the Brown Group Retail (doing business as Famous Footwear). Several of the chains were accused of not merely violating the patent but of doing so willfully because, CAT alleges in court filings, the chains continued to use the process even after they were told they were in Patent violation.…

This story begins with a Pennsylvania consumer's complaint that he was instructed to show identification to make a $100 payment card purchase at the Willow Grove, PA, Wal-Mart. The cashier told him it was Wal-Mart policy to require a photo ID for all plastic purchases of more than $100.Read more...

Is nothing sacred? Those innocuous captchas, the little boxes designed to defeat SPAM bots and force visitors to identify themselves as people, are now being eyed as advertising platforms. At least one vendor is pushing a program that forces people to type in advertising phrases instead of random characters. This approach has the sneaky benefit of burning that ad message into the consumer’s head, which is the logic behind forcing forgetful students to write something 100 times.

But could this become an E-Commerce—instead of an advertising—tool? Could Amazon make visitors type in the name of a popular bestseller? During blizzards in certain areas, perhaps the Wal-Mart message could be “$8 snow scraper”? Maybe the Apple site would require visitors to write “iPhone4 Makes Droid Cry.” Oh, I forgot. It already does.…

The next time you’re stuck on an airplane with just your Kindle and you want to know what other retailers are working on to make your life miserable when you land, fear not. StorefrontBacktalk is now available as native content on Kindle.

It goes beyond the headlines, and the Kindle supposedly updates this content when you’re near a connection so you can read it when you’re not. (I have to trust my Kindle-carrying colleagues to tell me how our content looks. Personally, if something can’t give me a paper cut while reading it, why bother?)…

When we announced our joint PCI/Mobile report with Forrester last week, we expected to see some interesting reactions as we asked people to weigh in on several controversial issues. But the preliminary results were a bit startling. For example, most respondents so far have said they wouldn’t change a thing about the PCI process, which is fascinating given how many nitpick complaints we hear about that process from retailers. (It’s probably the best overall approach available, but you’d make no changes? Really?) The second most-selected PCI response (thus far) has been “making all payment card industry compliance reports public so that competition can motivate my rival chains into doing the same security investments as I am.”

Retail IT execs generally have freaked out at the suggestion that any security reports be made public, which is why that answer startled us. Care to set the record straight by giving us your own answers?? It only takes a few minutes, it’s free and it’s guaranteed to add 11 years to your life. (That’s my favorite impossible-to-prove promise.) On a more mundane level, it will make the results more accurate (well, at least more to your liking) and help push the community in the right direction. Think of taking the survey as one of those adult responsibilities, like voting or eating high-fiber cereal: You know you should do it even though it’s not especially fun. (There’s a reason I don’t work in marketing.) …

The case involves the final litigation surrounding the 2007 data breach against the 165-store Hannaford grocery chain. That breach exposed some 4.2 million payment cards to the cyberthief gang run by Albert Gonzalez.Read more...

This incident, which police are still investigating, raises the issue of associate training. Preliminary information given to police by Wal-Mart did not indicate that the caller gave the associate any reason to believe he really was from Wal-Mart IT. Nor was any reason offered as to why an IT person would make such a request. Was the thief assuming the 1 AM crew might be more accommodating and less suspicious?Read more...

During prime daytime business hours on Wednesday (Sept. 22), Home Depot’s site crashed twice, starting at 11:50 AM (New York time) and ending at 1:25 PM, according to site uptime monitoring firm AlertBot. The site was fully down, with a message telling visitors the site was unavailable.

“It started out with an HTTP time-out error, meaning the server responded very slow and was unable to send the entire HTTP page within the 30 second limit. Then it switched to a 404, page couldn’t be found error,” said AlertBot’s Justin Noll. He added that the daylight timeframe—which makes attributing this incident to planned maintenance unlikely—was “a bad time for it to happen.”…

If retailers could do anything, what would be the top five things they’d change about PCI? What about mobile? Which mobile interactions will be deployed first and which will backburnered? And how far are merged channel (the last element of the multi-channel to cross-channel to merged-channel triumvirate) efforts going to be adopted by June of next year?

To try and get answers, StorefrontBacktalk and Forrester Research on Wednesday (Sept. 22) launched a research project on these issues and we’d love to have you share your views with us. Responses will be published anonymously, in aggregate only. Other topics in the survey include customer service techniques, global distribution, E-Commerce and store investment priorities, and CRM strategies. If you’d like to be included in this study, the survey is the best place to start. We’ll be publishing the results shortly before the holiday insanity begins. …

It could suggest that the site is proving less effective at bringing in new business and is instead being used as a convenience point for existing customers.Read more...

The new groups would be modeled on industry-specific security groups formed in the U.S. in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. One of those groups now puts on real-time security exercises for retailers and payment-card processors, and a handful of large retailers also have participated. But exactly how useful are those war games? It's hard to say, because the participants aren't identified. And that may be one of the biggest selling points of this type of security program.Read more...

In Google's case, the employee reportedly abused his privileges to access confidential user information. In a payments context, a similarly trusted employee at one of your service providers could have access to your payment card transactions and maybe even your systems. But could PCI prevent a data compromise in such a case?Read more...

Actually, fully a third of the 33,000 sites tested by the CMU researchers used that loophole. But most other sites can at least pretend they've done it accidentally. Amazon actually uses its stock symbol, AMZN, to jimmy the system.Read more...

Last Wednesday (Sept. 15), a Pittsburgh-based vendor called Dynamics unveiled a battery-powered device in the shape of a credit card that is capable of mimicking multiple cards by reprogramming its own magnetic stripe on the fly when the user hits a button to change accounts. Instead of replacing all of the credit cards in a consumer's wallet, this device would instead sharply reduce their number.Read more...

It seems that those ducts—officially dubbed heating, ventilating and air-conditioning (HVAC) ducts—snaking through these old multi-level escalator-using buildings are natural signal boosters. "The HVAC ductwork is an excellent conduit for the radio transmissions because the ducts typically consist of hollow metal pipes," the university's report said. "Those pipes can be used to guide the radio waves, keeping the waves from dispersing, and helping to maintain a strong signal over a greater distance."Read more...

That finding has some very powerful implications for both in-store and online retail. Maybe the fact that touch matters shouldn't be a surprise, though it certainly surprise the Caltech researchers. Of course, the in-store experience is different from online or M-Commerce. Some retailers, like Nordstrom, work those high-touch elements of the brick-and-mortar store to the hilt. And even a utilitarian approach—think Wal-Mart or Costco—gives customers a far more sensual experience than a Web site. Shoppers can handle products. Smells, textures and sounds all matter.Read more...

Once that suite is in place, retail CIOs should plan for a risk- and security-based assessment of their log management needs and allocate the resources to make the system work. Otherwise, retailers may centralize their logging but find themselves overwhelmed by the white noise of too much data. Or, IT could distribute log reviews down to the store level only to learn that the individual locations cannot achieve separation of duties, back-ups or daily log reviews conducted by people who know what they are doing. Read more...

This scenario isn't entirely science-fiction, although this particular mobile technology is in its earliest stages. An Israeli vendor called EyeSight Mobile Technologies announced last week (September 7) a set of what it calls Hand Gesture Interface packages, initially designed to control a phone's MPS player. What's important about EyeSight's effort is that it marks a critical new phase for mobile, where developers start trying to get creative with this descendant of Ma Bell. That's what mobile needs to truly take off in retail.Read more...

OK, maybe rational is a reach. But if you’d like to help mobile be closer to rational, you have your chance. The National Retail Federation’s (NRF) Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS) Council is trying to finalize feedback before its conference this week.

Officially, the comments are supposed to be for the Mobile Blueprint ARTS released in July, as the group prepares to release version 2 of that report. Unofficially, ARTS officials are hard at work trying to hammer out mobile specs for all of retail—from barcode scanning to in-store mobile payments to M-Commerce. Have a few thoughts on that topic? (Thought you might.) Executive Director Richard Mader would love to hear from you at maderr@nrf.com. But please keep it clean. Dick’s a classy guy.…

Although an outage is never a pleasant thing, this one was especially untimely for quite a few reasons. First, it was the middle of the day (or the start of the business day, depending on which coast you're on). Second, it was in the middle of a major well-publicized sale. And the coup de grâce of this outage: It was on a federal holiday, potentially meaning a skeleton crew in the office and perhaps difficulty in obtaining replacement parts.Read more...

And it's another reminder of the unintended consequences of Web and mobile site infrastructure changes. "This seems to be a recurring problem with any major site changes. You just never know the consequences until you roll it out and hold your breath to see what happens." said Forrester Research E-Commerce Analyst Sucharita Mulpuru. Read more...

The implications for any chain with a major Web—or mobile—presence are intense; preserving the integrity of comment and customer rating systems is essential to that feature influencing sales. Etsy took several good steps to minimize harm, such as making sure that sellers know the real identities of complainers and, of course, that site admin still knows all. Even though these moves may prevent blatant fraud—when, for example, a rival posts untrue criticisms—they can't prevent two of the most common issues.Read more...

Call it the attack of the Three Letter Acronyms (TLA). When the U.S. Justice Department this month issued a news release saying that a $3.7 billion Ponzi fraud scheme—what the department described as “the largest financial crime in Minnesota history”—was the fault of PCI, it certainly caught our attention. And when it further detailed that the fraud included PCI packages sold to Costco and Sam’s Club, we were fascinated. Turns out, though, we were taken in again by one of the tons of PCI acronyms.

Instead of referencing our favorite payment card industry security group (Payment Card Industry), the Justice reference was to a business dubbed Petters Company Inc., named after its owner—and now defendant—Tom Petters. We’ve been similarly lured by medical stories about Percutaneous Coronary Intervention (PCI), Per Capita Income (PCI) as well as the tech-friendly Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI). (Come to think of it, if any vendor wants to rent a shuttle bus at a major tradeshow to transport IT folk to payment security meetings, calling it “The PCI Bus” would be cool, in a nerdy play-on-words kind of way.)…

Many retailers have tried contactless systems where a customer's smartphone displays a barcode that a cashier scans to complete the transaction. But Cimbal flips that process: The retailer displays a barcode that the customer reads with his phone's camera. That switch means retailers don't need new barcode-reading hardware. It also means customers never show retailers their account information, so it can't be stored—or stolen. Read more...