Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

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.…

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...

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...

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...

StorefrontBacktalk has always prided itself on analysis and context, but the essence of our site is surprising our readers. Although we do that through depth, it’s also based on simply telling you what is going on long before other media outlets ever even hear about it. Whether it’s reporting first that Target.com was cut off due to expired security certificates or that American Eagle Outfitters’ site was crippled for eight days because of errors by IBM and Oracle, we bring you information that you’re simply not going to get elsewhere.

Some of our firsts and the media that acknowledged them as such include:

About Men’s Warehouse change in leadership. “It’s the difference between having many customers who want to be in the stores and who enjoy getting clothes that they like and customers who find shopping for clothes one-quarter notch more pleasant than dental surgery,” notes Evan Schuman, editor of StorefrontBacktalk.com.”

“The Albertson’s supermarket chain is getting rid of self-checkout at all locations, and Kroger is experimenting with no-self-checkout stores as well, reports StorefrontBacktalk.”

“Kroger, the largest grocery chain in the U.S. (with some 2,500 outlets), is experimenting with removing all self-checkouts in at least one Texas store, reports StorefrontBacktalk, an industry publication.”

“Bill Bass, who used to run e-commerce operations for Sears and Lands End and now overseas the Charming Shoppes chain online initiatives, recently gave an interview with StorefrontBacktalk that describes perfectly the conundrum facing brands — or specifically retailers — that base a campaign around getting a Facebook Like.”

“And it has to make sure Target’s new website doesn’t crash, as it has several times since it rolled out in late August, including a five-hour malfunction in September when shoppers stormed online to buy Missoni clothes and housewares. ‘It’s a very cutting-edge site that wasn’t sufficiently …

Retailers aren't usually hit with patent lawsuits. Those are usually reserved for manufacturers, although the ways retailers handle debit cards, gift cards, micropayments and site accessibility have attracted litigation in the past. This time, though, it's their Web sites that have the office stores under legal attack. But there's nothing special about these Web sites that make them dramatically different from other large E-tailers. That means if these retailers lose in court--or settle the case--every other major retailer will soon be looking down the barrel of the same legal gun.Read more...

The reality is that Wal-Mart's gradual deployment makes a lot of sense. The media-repeated cries of privacy invasion are simply silly, based on ludicrously unrealistic assumptions of how easy this data would be to access, assuming anyone had any reason to even try. The most interesting part of the rollout, though, is the tag disposal question.Read more...

This Russian spy case, though, has two key elements impacting retail IT: their use of steganography to embed images on public Web sites, plus some blatantly bogus retail purchases that no store detected.Read more...

That's mostly because the chief goal of many acquisitions is to deny the product/service/technology to key rivals. With RedLaser, though, eBay chose to go out of its way to make the app much more available to competitors and to do it for free. Making such a move at this stage of Mobile Commerce is a decision that could ultimately prove brilliant or insane.Read more...

There's no small amount of irony that Amazon—which has a well-earned reputation of leveraging every piece of customer information in any way possible to boost sales—is the one making this privacy argument. It's as though Amazon is channeling a classic line from Animal House: "He can't do that to our pledges. Only we can do that to our pledges."Read more...

Walmart.com has consistently deployed helpful technology and has been at the forefront of shop-online-pickup-in-store as well as showcasing in-store inventory. Those are excellent features and shrewd uses for the Web site. But both techniques also use the Web to drive sales to the stores. From a shareholder perspective, that's fine. A dollar's a dollar, and a dollar spent in-store will likely yield several more dollars in-store, as long as the consumer is already there. But it also means that when the company's E-Commerce revenue is isolated, it delivers a misleading picture.Read more...

The new defendants are Nordstrom, JCPenney, Macy's, Blockbuster, Lane Bryant, Fashion Bug, Cabela's, Guess, Panera Bread and Starbucks.Read more...

Last Thursday (March 11), Google made a major—albeit extremely preliminary—move into local inventory search through a deal with a handful of major chains: Best Buy, Sears, Williams Sonoma, Pottery Barn and the Vitamin Shoppe. But instead of working out this process internally and then bringing in retailers—or the reverse, with retailers figuring it out first—Google's objective is to run the earliest stage tests with various chains "so we're both learning how to do this in parallel," said Paul Lee, Google Product Search's business product manager.Read more...

This problem is likely going to get much worse as the efficiencies of cloud computing tempt companies to place the contents of server after server on the cloud for faster and easier access. Easier access is certainly right, but for whom? But cloud computing is not the only new target for security holes. Mobile computing and especially M-Commerce have an even greater potential for issues. Beyond the inherent breach possibilities with anything wireless, retailers are going to feel the need to push more functionality onto these consumer devices.Read more...

In its examination of 10 major E-tail sites—Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Best Buy, Costco, Dell, Foot Locker, Musician’s Friend, Sears, Target and Walmart—the very fastest site (Best Buy) averaged more than twice Keynote’s acceptable slow estimate, crawling in at 8.3 seconds. Again, that was the fastest mobile site. The slowest site delivered its average page in 34 seconds. Keynote officials steadfastly refused to identify which site was the slowest. That said, points made by Keynote while discussing the study pretty much eliminated all of the tested retailers other than Costco from being candidates for the slowest performing site.Read more...

It’s been almost two years since Sears become the first U.S. retailer to embrace 2D barcodes, a move that launched a tidal wave of, well, pretty much nothing. This week, Google said it was trying to breathe life into these barcodes by mailing 200,000 2D barcode stickers to small businesses throughout the country. Such a move could allow these mom-and-pops to offer in-depth marketing information to anyone at the click of a smartphone.

The Google initiative, first reported by Techcrunch, is proactive and therefore feels much more powerful than Microsoft’s efforts to market its “Tag” code idea. And Google is sweetening the potential adoption-rate odds by giving away 40,000 Quickmark 2D barcode reader apps for the iPhone. Just like contactless, which is also suffering from a heart-pounding string of apathy, 2D needs three things to happen in parallel if it is to succeed: A huge number of places that are showcasing 2D barcodes; a very strong percentage of consumers carrying phones that can easily read 2D barcodes; and plenty of publicized incentives to get those consumers to use the 2D barcodes from those retailers. The phones are well on their way, and Google’s initiative seems like a good faith effort to jumpstart the other two points.…

Still, the Shopper app, published by ReachEverywhere, suffers a variety of odd restrictions, such as limiting the recall data to two food-oriented agencies—the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the U.S.. Department of Agriculture (USDA)—while excluding recall-friendly agencies that would impact far more products, such as the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). It also only flags recall problems when the purchase is being made. So a customer who buys a product that gets recalled an hour after the purchase is completed will, by design, not be notified. Read more...

Making these figures all the more interesting is that they happened on the much ballyhooed Black Friday and not the National Retail Federation-created Cyber Monday, which is supposed to be the grand day of E-Commerce. Not that it ever was the highest E-Commerce day, but it has typically made a bit of online noise. This year, though, beyond a handful of small tech glitches, Cyber Monday was hardly noticeable. I think About Retail put it best when it opened its story with this lovely poem: Twas the night before Cyber Monday and all through the 'net, hardly a new special was posted - did the e-tailers forget.Read more...

The most significant initial glitches of Black Friday seemed to be owned by Staples and Kohl's, though. Staples was down much of the morning, displaying a screen that said "Oops, you're too early. Staples.com will be unavailable until 6 AM ET. Come back then and save big!" That clearly seemed to be a deliberate shutdown, but the site went down again throughout much of the day, bizarrely displaying the same "come back after 6 AM" screen, although the 6:00 AM time had come and gone. In fact, the screen was seen in mid-afternoon and, when the site was up, page loads were quite slow. Setting aside the post-6:00 AM glitches—which were clearly unintentional—the strategy of bringing the entire Staples site down is intriguing. Why cut off access to the entire site?Read more...

Many of the Supreme Court justices expressed significant skepticism about whether the current system should be maintained. Questioning one attorney about a financial approach patent, Justice Anthony Kennedy raised a Congressional intent argument. "In your view, clearly those would be patentable: the explanation of how to compile an actuarial table and apply it to risk. It's difficult for me to think that Congress would have wanted to give only one person the capacity to issue insurance." The newest member of the court, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, asked how far process patents could go. "How do we limit it to something that is reasonable? Why not patent the method of speed dating?" Read more...

Tom Emmons, the mobile team leader at Sears Holdings, said that while the Sears and K-Mart mobile sites offer third-party payment options, including PayPal, he couldn’t envision adding Amazon as another way for Sears2Go or Kmart2Go customers to pay for purchases.Read more...

In March, Western Union cut a deal with Amazon to let the E-Commerce giant's customers use the 44,000 Western Union locations with fees ranging from $3 to $8. Then Bank of America and Citi got into the act with a one-time use card, another tactic to make sure the payment is only used for the immediate purchase price and nothing else. Last Thursday (Sept. 3), eBillMe offered its version, where the payment company is working with MoneyGram—and others—to offer cash-only options at about 75,000 walk-in locations, for a $5 fee. Read more...

But what does any of this have to do with M-Commerce? A lot. If they finally get around all of the technical and logistical hurdles of M-Commerce, they will be trying to get millions of consumers to interact with their sites—via their phones—and see product lists, read reviews, watch multimedia demonstrations, interact with social sites, download PDF instruction manuals and even ask their peers for feedback on their shopping choices before consummating those purchases. That's all great, but—if successful—will it turn the Home Depots, Walmarts and Targets of the world into examples of what may become known as "The AT&T Factor"?Read more...

Instead, the U.S. M-Commerce space is floundering as merchants drag their feet deploying purchase-capable mobile sites or find their mobile initiatives stalled by an avalanche of obstacles beyond the anticipated mountain of incompatible platforms and mobile browsers. The problems encountered are legion. They include a vacuum of standardization for everything from design, programming, payment processing and even URL naming to fears about carrier conflicts over the types of permitted content and a Catch-22 business strategy about how much, and when, they should embrace M-Commerce.Read more...