Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

This effort replaced an earlier rewards program where cardholders were given 10 percent off, but the savings could only be used for a subsequent shopping trip. In short, when the discounts were cut in half—from 10 percent to five percent—purchases sharply increased. That's how powerful a difference there exists in consumers' minds between "give it to me now" and "give it to me later."Read more...

His advice to retailers: If an application is not on the list, don't even include it in an RFP.Read more...

When it comes to running a restaurant, investing time and money into learning the store's technology can mean the difference between a money-making hit and a bankruptcy-inducing nightmare. Technology plays a critical role in both the front and the back office. Michaud says he is befuddled by the notion that the same operators who clamor for a Limited Time Offer that may bump sales 1 percent won't invest their energy in systems they already own that could easily save them 3 to 5 percent.Read more...

This payment might be made to the handset manufacturer, but more likely it would go toward a pre-arranged credit or debit card. Let's take this approach one step further. Why not buy from Wal-Mart a Wal-Mart phone—or from McDonald's a McDonald's phone—that allows one-click purchases for anything at all? The consumer would then receive a monthly bill with everything itemized. That's one way to get around interchange and to build some wonderfully deep CRM databases—with lots of your rivals' sales—at the same time.Read more...

Microsoft was rather vague about the reason it's backing off ("After a couple of years of trying, we did not see the broad adoption that we had hoped for," blogged Bing Senior VP Yusuf Mehdi), but there has been a compelling suggestion that the program was simply being gamed by clever consumers.Read more...

The Guitar Center offer is to give any poster a $10 gift credit for submitting a review that other site visitors vote as a top review. The site makes comment posters jump through quite a few hoops to get those $10 gift credits, and it has a ceiling of $50 in credits for any one person. Whether that lengthy list of hoops undermines the value of the program is a very fair question, but the more immediate concern is whether these $10 incentives will work at all.Read more...

This week, China's Alibaba Group opened up a two-way e-tail portal between mainland China and Japan. Alibaba's goal is to make cross-border sales to consumers easy enough for tiny retailers who can't afford all that cost and effort. But the China-Japan portal may also be a model for big retailers to do the same thing.Read more...

When someone sends someone else a gift card, why not first send an E-mail alerting the recipient to the card's imminent arrival and have that E-mail include a password to activate the card after it arrives?Read more...

But which of several approaches each chain will use has yet to be determined, according to the CEO of the vendor (Shopkick) providing the software.Read more...

But what Sam's Club discovered is that it quickly became its own direct revenue stream.Read more...

Sending in senior people to convince the client that it has expertise in the topic and then sending in inexperienced, low-cost worker bees to do the actual work—this somehow surprises the people who run Marin County?Read more...

But the next day (June 2), a self-proclaimed hacker was on Canadian television demonstrating once again that both MasterCard and Visa contactless cards can be read with a $10 commercial RFID reader available on eBay.Read more...

The new PTS specs become effective in one year (May 2011). Although you can buy currently validated equipment up until that time, why would you? If you are looking at a terminal (think kiosk, gasoline pump, vending machine) that combines several individual components, you'll want to check each component (including software) against the Council's list, noting version numbers. Walt also suggests getting something in writing from the seller that indicates every component associated with the PED has been assessed by a PCI PTS lab and is compliant.Read more...

Put simply, Technical Debt is any technology decision that has a long-term negative impact on the business. Although it would seem obvious that companies would want to avoid accumulating Technical Debt, Michaud argues that, in some businesses, as many as 8 out of 10 technology decisions carry some level of Technical Debt. As Technical Debt accumulates, the results can be devastating.Read more...

The big challenge with trying to answer those questions is that the established social sites are moving targets. Facebook, for example, on Wednesday (May 26) announced it will be offering tighter controls over consumer information. Where will this option lead six months from now? Your operation may put in a huge amount of cash to develop a spectacular site on Facebook, only to later learn that the site won't permit you to track user activity--even in your page clicking on your products. Facebook might prohibit you from knowing anything someone does in your site short of making a purchase.Read more...

Then customers, who are used to the niceties of that sales associate interaction or the tactile feedback from inside a high-end clothing store, show no interest and developers are baffled. That's where a bunch of Amazon Kindle developers find themselves today.Read more...

On Tuesday (May 25), MasterCard announced it plans to release Open APIs so developers “will be able to create a new wave of E-Commerce and mobile payment applications.” The only problem: Why would it? MasterCard officials spoke of the power of M-Commerce and E-Commerce platforms, but failed to explain why an Open API approach would help. Unlike PayPal and Apple, where developers have expressed strong interest in creating their own apps to sit atop those platforms, there is little such enthusiasm surrounding Visa and, given its smaller marketshare, even less for MasterCard.

It’s hard to look at this MasterCard statement and not envision Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer whitewashing his fence by tricking every other kid in the neighborhood into doing the hard work for him, while he made the money. Tom gave them the tools and let them finish the job. To paraphrase MasterCard’s current tagline: There are some things money can’t buy. But custom apps and marketshare ain’t among them. Use that plastic and pay for your own development. Don’t see the development community whitewashing your fence for you this time.…

On his site's blog, Hsieh wrote that the current software—which is all homegrown by Zappos—was so complex it was difficult for non-programmers to feed it information. "Unfortunately, the way to input new rules into the current version of our pricing engine requires near-programmer skills to manipulate, and a few symbols were missed in the coding of a new rule, which resulted in items that were sold exclusively on (Zappos partner site) 6pm.com to have a maximum price of $49.95," he wrote.Read more...

The brand was having a somewhat good day in that it learned of the glitch, fixed it and republished the form in less than four hours. That's impressively fast, even in Web time.Read more...

The exact number of retailers in Level 1 was 360 chains in the figures released this week, which is the exact same number that Visa reported last month. Last month's report covered activity through Dec. 31, 2009, and this week's figures are current as of March 31, 2010. Those results suggest that four of last year’s compliant chains no longer are, bringing the number of non-PCI-compliant major chains up to about 18.Read more...

Visa has given ExxonMobil branded retailers an extension from July 1, 2010, until Dec. 31, 2010, to update their EPOS systems. This change is a big part of the perception problem with PCI enforcement. Deadline exceptions need to be rare. But when they happen, they should be announced by the card brands—not via a leaked letter—along with the specific reasons for the extension.Read more...

Wal-Mart isn't in the trucking business any more than its suppliers are, and just squeezing out a little savings in fuel costs would be a wasted opportunity. By stretching its supply-chain perimeter though, Wal-Mart will get much better control over the inventory coming in: when it arrives, how it arrives and how quickly it can be turned around. And that's all about IT.Read more...

Conway can imagine a few scenarios, but none seems to be the answer. This issue is important to every retail CIO, so we need to understand what Chip-and-PIN will and won't do, in addition to what the business case, if any, is for the U.S. and other markets to convert from magnetic stripe to Chip-and-PIN cards.Read more...

But now comes news of this unusual response from the plant's management. The Guangzhou-based Southern Metropolis Daily newspaper is reporting workers are being required to sign letters promising they won't kill themselves and agreeing to be institutionalized if management thinks it's needed. The employee who died, Li Hai, was 19 years old when he killed himself. That's the exact age of Steve Jobs' son. There's a lot more at stake here than a lower-cost iPhone.Read more...

On Monday (May 24), Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz took to the stage in New York City at a TechCrunch event and participated in an on-stage interview. The exchange was lively and interesting, with Bartz speaking about Yahoo’s plans and innovation efforts. But near the end of the interview, when asked again about Yahoo’s innovations versus Apple, Bartz answered in a way not typical for the CEO of a $6.5 billion publicly held company: She told interviewer Mike Arrington to “f-ck off” and then added “this time, I meant it.” (That particular exchange happens near the very end of this video clip.)

Bartz has a well-deserved reputation for direct (some might say salty) language, but most CEOs pull back a little in a videotaped interview in front of a large audience. Her remark wasn’t made in the heat of anger, so we can assume it was a calculated comment. If you look at shorter clips from the event, Bartz comes across as defensive. But in the context of the complete interview, her unhappiness is clearly based on repeated comparisons with Apple and despite her having given a lengthy list of Yahoo’s innovations.…