Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

The 64-store grocery chain Bloom is trialing a GPS-based shopping cart device, one that uses satellite data to alert consumers to nearby price specials as they browse the aisles. The chain, part of the Food Lion group and a subsidiary of Brussels-based Delhaize Group, operates stores in North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland and Virginia.

The touchscreen devices, known as PAT for Personal Assistant Technology, are being tested in a Fort Mill, S.C., store, reported Supermarket News. …

The frugal Chinese are beginning to more freely open their wallets, and E-Commerce is a big factor behind the loosening purse strings. Online shopping, particularly by young and affluent Chinese, is surging, according to Reuters. Citing figures from online marketing research company iResearch, the story said Chinese E-Commerce sales in the second quarter of 2009 increased nearly 92 percent from the same period in 2008, hitting $8.26 billion in U.S. dollars.

E-Commerce activity far outperformed the 15 percent increase in China’s total retail sales from the same period. The piece also noted that Taobao, the nation’s most popular online auction, predicts its 2009 revenues will more than double compared to 2008. “Online retailing is developing so fast in China that it is quietly changing spending habits, making an especially profound impact on Chinese youth,” said Wang Liang, director of Shanghai Liutong Economics Institute, a government research institution, according to Reuters.…

These two rollouts—from very competitive interests—also happen to agree on something that signifies a maturation of the retail security space. They agree that PCI is likely to insist that retailers deploy some combination of some form of encryption and tokenization, a position that should end months of bickering between the end-to-end vendors and the tokenization vendors. The philosophical differences come down to how retailers want to—or, more precisely, decide that they need to—interact with payment card data. Read more...

But in two recent conversations with a pair of E-Commerce execs from two unrelated multi-billion-dollar retailers, the execs showed some very different perspectives on when to let your people do the magic and when to hire a specialty firm. The technology on which they diverged was M-Commerce payment security and Web downtime monitoring (or uptime monitoring, if you're one of those perky glass-is-half-full people).Read more...

Coville said the chain suspected the thermal-imaging system wasn't too hot when it came to accuracy and, convinced by a pilot project that compared the system's capabilities for truthfulness with those of new equipment that relies instead on analysis of video data, In his testing, video-based counting was 20 percent more accurate than its thermal predecessor. Oh, the CIO added, it's also a lot cheaper, which makes it a hard combo to ignore.Read more...

Macys.com brings in about $1 billion a year, which isn’t overwhelming for the $25 billion chain. But to have four percent of its global revenue coming from online is a continual surprise for CEO Terry Lundgren, according to a speech he gave Tuesday (September 22). Macys.com generated $30,000 in sales the first year it was launched–1996. As of Tuesday, Macy’s “has invested more than $300 million in online infrastructure” and is tracking online sales increases of 13 percent compared with a year ago. Lundgren said Macy’s internal figures show that “every dollar spent online influences $5.77 spent in the store over the next 10 days.

“I, for one, made zero money before 2000 on the Internet,” Lundgren told about 2,000 people in attendance at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center, according to this Las Vegas Review-Journal story. “I truly did not get it. There wasn’t a business model out there that made sense to me, but there was so much interest, it got my attention.” …

PCI Columnist David Taylor suggests that this almost guarantees PCI will have to address tokenization, end-to-end encryption and other “beyond PCI” issues. But it's also going to put severe pressure on payment processors and gateways, push retailers to demand portability answers and add a whole new layer of complexity to merged channel strategies.Read more...

Nobody will argue that when it comes to page display rates, the faster the better. However, we couldn't help but wonder about the accuracy, and meaningfulness, of the report. Did anybody actually measure how many seconds passed before an E-Commerce consumer clicked away from a retailer site? It seems hard to believe that somebody interested in shopping at, say, Macys.com would flee in a huff to Kohls.com if the Macy's site didn't load before three seconds had passed.Read more...

It’s a compelling argument. There is a lot to be said for smaller companies that are hungry and constantly go the extra mile. But there's a reason why national chain CIOs do—and must—often resist.Read more...

The use of NFC technology for mobile payments will hit $8 billion globally this year and will exceed $30 billion by 2012, according to Juniper Research. The researchers said the world’s first NFC devices will be sold commercially later this year by Nokia “and the market will ramp up (starting) 2011.”

Juniper said payments using NFC or Sony’s FeliCa RFID technology, already commonplace in Japan, will be in the midst of a substantial growth spurt in North America and Western Europe by 2014. Juniper analyst Howard Wilcox is quoted in RFID Update saying “the clear readout from industry analysis is that NFC is going to be a default feature of phones in the future, much like Bluetooth is now.”…

When $1.2 billion Columbia Sportswear launched a new E-Commerce site in August, it gave shoppers the option of having their goods shipped in a used box instead of a new one. It was an initiative the company hoped would resonate with its customers, folks who (being outdoorsy types) tend to have a fondness for trees. According to Columbia, the assumption was on target: About two-thirds of the products purchased since the site went live have been shipped in used boxes.

Adding to the eco-friendly fun, Columbia created another site that allows people to track boxes as they continue to be re-used by others. To make this box tracking possible, Columbia places on each used box a sticker that includes a unique, scannable QR code and a number that can be entered at the A Box Life site. Participants can also “post pictures and stories about their box and periodically return to the site to follow their box’s journey, helping to illustrate the value that one box can deliver in its lifespan,” said the company.…

The difference between wireless in a test lab and wireless in the field has again reared its ugly 802.11 head. The J.C. Penney trial began in December 2008 at the $18.5 billion 1,101-store chain's 103,000-square foot Ft. Worth, Texas, store. The goal was to test the system for a deployment at the chain's first Manhattan store (a much larger 153,000-square foot store), which opened this summer.Read more...

Among the complaints: No guidance, the standards are designed for a bygone era of technology, the standards are anything but standardized, why should banks have to not comply with PCI?, compliance gamemanship and "We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Credit Card Data."Read more...

When it comes to mobile investments, E-Commerce Director Dan Shelffo said "we're poking around" and that his group has made some "site modifications so that we can start to dabble" in mobile communications. But the spreadsheets do not look attractive. "I have to protect the billion-dollar brand. When I look at the dollars that I am going to invest, I look at the return. I know what my ROI is," Shelffo said. "When I look at mobile, I see a lot of investment."Read more...

But in recent years, PCI advocates—especially the card brand executives—have discouraged the practice, arguing that the safest process is to use payment card numbers to process a payment and to then delete it as quickly as possible. Having those numbers lying around—especially spread into marketing and sales departments—was simply increasing the chance that someone unauthorized could access the data. But the guidance is vague and subject to economic considerations.Read more...

Despite those heavy-weight retail brands, only a couple have borne the vast majority of the costs and headaches associated with a breach. Why? Because the first one or two chains have to go through the expense of identifying the breached numbers and having them shut down and reissued. That task's completion makes life so much easier on the others. It's also better for investigative costs, brand reputation and several other factors. Is this fair? Can and should something be done to make it more equitable?Read more...

Today, writes Franchisee Columnist Todd Michaud, his average restaurant has eight to 10 pieces of technology that are complex enough to house their own operating systems. These same restaurants now have five or more vendors providing technical support. With the high level of integration, when a problem occurs the store manager is often hit with the “It’s not us, it’s them” excuse. The store manager, who is typically not an IT administrator, is left trying to decipher cryptic error messages, leaning on a peer group and spending hours if not days on the phone with various support organizations trying to get to the root cause of the issue. Symptoms of this situation usually manifest themselves in screams from the back office: “I have already rebooted it 14 times. I am not doing it again!”Read more...

One approach that has been tried is leveraging services such as Facebook Connect, which lets a user log onto Facebook and then log onto an E-Commerce site (using the same browser) and allow that site to access Facebook names—with the customer's permission—without the customer revealing a Facebook password to the E-Commerce site. But then it runs into the limit of the system's inability to display a friend's shopping pattern without that friend's permission. ("Hi, Brenda! I see that you're shopping at Phil's Pervert Video House, too.")Read more...

The perceived inaccuracy of online depictions of in-store inventory may be at the heart of a new excuse that one Best Buy employee is apparently using to avoid having to hunt up products, according to this wonderful report from Consumerist, a Consumer Reports-owned site with a nice dose of attitude. Seems that a consumer went to Best Buy to purchase a deeply-discounted hard drive after the site said the item was in stock. The shelf was empty, so he asked an employee to help him find it.

“He informed me that they were all out of stock and that the Web site takes about 6 hours to update the inventory, and that that was the reason for the discrepancy,” the customer said, according to the story. “I didn’t trust him, however, so when I got home I logged back onto the Best Buy site and ordered the HDD for in-store pick-up at the same location and about a half an hour later, there was a message in my inbox letting me know that my order was ready to be picked up” and he indeed drove to the store and was given the hard-disk. Added the story’s author: “You have to admit, however, that his ‘the Web site is wrong’ line did effectively get you to go away, albeit temporarily, which we can only assume was its intended function.”…

Ikea, one of the few non-food retailers in Europe to install self-checkout kiosks, "refuses to invest in weigh scales like other stationary self-checkouts have," said Planet Retail's Research Director Retail Technology Bjorn Weber. Weber said he took note of Ikea's minimalist approach because it doesn't seem logical, given the capabilities of today's technology. "It makes sense for retailers to deploy systems that have built-in theft control that is actually part of the scanning and payment process and to avoid the situation where they have to re-scan or double-check customers who've already completed their checkout process, as you have with all these guys doing self-scanning with mobile devices," he said. "Someone has to scan at least some of the products or the whole trolley and that's annoying for the customer, because he's under suspicion and because he was promised to save time by using the self-checkout and now he's not saving time."Read more...

Second Life-like efforts to make 3-D E-Commerce effective–and profitable–have not gone very far. The Tweeter electronics chain was thinking about it–shortly before the chain had to liquidate–and Brookstone actually launched a small project using it.

But Gen Buy, a surprisingly insightful new book about Gen Y purchasing trends, has a line that sounds intriguing: Wii shopping. Unlike the Web, Wii game systems already exist within 3-D and are quite popular with Gen Y consumers (and those who shall soon become Gen Y consumers). Could the concept work if the device and the format are different? …

In Friday's hearing, the government for the first time put a number next to the DSW breach, saying that the $1.5 billion apparel chain operating 300 stores in 37 states (in addition to supplying footwear to 367 leased locations) lost more than one million card numbers in the breach. The government also said that OfficeMax—the $8.3 billion office supplies chain with 939 stores in the United States and 83 in Mexico—played a crucial role, with Assistant Boston U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann saying that OfficeMax's "then vulnerable encryption of PINs enabled Gonzalez (and a colleague) to sell the conspirators' bounty for particularly large profits." The only new data morsel about TJX to emerge was a Heymann estimate that TJX alone "suffered close to $200 million in losses and associated expenses."Read more...

Walgreens has named a longtime banking industry executive, Tim Theriault, as its new CIO and also announced the appointment of a new chief technology officer in charge of the company’s E-Commerce division. Theriault, 49, comes to the $59 Billion 6,996-store Walgreen’s chain—the nation’s largest drugstore group—from Northern Trust Corp. He replaces former CIO and Vice President Denise Wong, who is now the company’s corporate vice president of information technologies and will be “focusing on elevating the company’s in-store retail and corporate shared services IT systems,” said a Walgreens statement.

As CIO, Theriault will be in charge of the chain’s overall IT strategy, including new initiatives that include “developing the enterprise architecture vision, enhancing applications and building the infrastructure,” said the announcement. The new CIO has a background in business technology, having been in charge of worldwide operations and technology and as CTO at Northern Trust. Theriault also “worked in advanced technologies” at S.C. Johnson and Son from 1989 to 1991. Abhi Dhar, Walgreens’ newly hired CTO and vice president in the E-Commerce division, comes to the company from TravelCLICK where he was CIO and SVP since 2006. …

In something that is going to make the day of certain cell phone manufacturers while driving others crazy, the Environmental Working Group has published a very long list of cell phones in order of how much radiation they give off. Now there’s a TV commercial I can’t wait to see: “Our phone will give you brain tumors in twice the time of our key rivals. You want a slow painful death or something quick and merciful with a keyboard for easy texting?”

As consumers use their phones more and more–with retailers preparing to ask them to shop on them as well–it’s yet another in a long line of roadblocks.…

"Let’s say a group of retailers is being chased through the jungle by a tiger named, say, Gonzalez. To avoid being eaten by the tiger, it’s not necessary that each retailer run the fastest, but merely that each retailer should run faster than the slowest retailer," he writes.Read more...