Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

NEC is preparing to sell its next-generation of tag readers/writers at a price more than 90 percent lower than current pricing, according to a report in Japanese business publication The Nikkei.

“The tags are compatible with all of the six worldwide radio communications standards. NEC is ready to accept orders beginning as early as this July,” the story reported, adding that some “10,000 of the new tags will be available for approximately (the equivalent of) $100.”…

The scenario of consumers using their smartphones to barcode scan for everything from price lookups to quickly gathering more product information via the Web is nothing new. But despite all the talk, it hasn’t progressed much beyond being in a lot of hypothetical scenarios.

Is Google’s entry into the space likely to change that? U.S. and U.K. owners of mobile devices running the Google Android operating system can now download from Google a “Barcode Scanner” app that allows them to use their phones to scan UPC/ISBN codes with the phone’s digital camera. The application has been integrated into Google Product Search for Mobile. …

As part of a settlement for having violated the federal Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (FACTA) by leaving too many payment card numbers on printed receipts, the 670-store Italian restaurant chain Olive Garden is giving consumer victims vouchers for $9 appetizers. But they are going out of their way to point the finger of blame at their POS vendor.

Granted, offering coupons good for just an appetizer sounds more like something that the chain’s marketing department would pay for than a punishment, but to the extent that there is any shame involved, Olive Garden issued a statement that it wasn’t their fault, but it also refused to identify the POS vendor involved. “We at Olive Garden take our guests’ data and our legal obligations very seriously. There was a mistake in a vendor-supplied system that produced receipts for the sole use of individual guests,” said the chain’s communications director, Mark Jaronski. “The problem was promptly remedied when it was brought to our attention and there is no indication that anyone has been harmed in any way by this error.”…

There has been no end to the list of the bad impacts of major retail data breaches, from fines and card-reissuance costs and paying for cleanup and forensics investigations, not to mention the inevitable legal fees. (Note: If law firms were really smart, they’d be underwriting the best cyber thieves. Come to think of it ….) But here’s an interesting one: a sharp drop in subscriptions (software, services, organization memberships as well as publications) facilitated by cards being reissued.

It’s a delicious unintended consequence example. As noted in The Washington Post, this trend is partly influenced by the recession. Most consumers won’t necessarily take the time to cancel subscriptions when times get tough, but if the issue is forced upon them—as would happen when they are issued a new credit card number because of a breach, forcing them to take action to continue the auto-billed service—they’re much more likely to choose to let the subscription lapse. It’s just another bullet point for that lengthy list of data breach financial costs. …

Similar to rulings from cases fellow data-breach retail victim TJX, Hornby said he couldn't allow almost any of the defendants to continue with the case because the consumers hadn't suffered out-of-pocket financial losses. In an ironic sense, this all stems from the card brands' zero liability programs. Those programs guarantee that consumers will have all fraud losses wiped clean. (The one defendant who can continue is a consumer whose fraud loss costs—for reasons unknown—were not covered by her bank.) It's ironic because the programs to created to make consumers feel safer about their payment security. Today, that program is preventing consumers from successfully suing retailers that mishandle their data, which in turn makes it more difficult for retailers to justify spending more than the minimum on data security.Read more...

Beyond focusing on avoiding "Beyond PCI Lock-in," pens GuestView PCI Columnist David Taylor, retailers also need to focus on ensuring that these new security efforts don't break their existing applications. Some of the tokenization and end-to-end encryption approaches currently (or soon to be) on the market don't always play nice with existing ERP, CRM and other enterprise applications.Read more...

Like everything in retail payment security, the issue is much more nuanced than it initially seems. But the micro-payment version is clean: We materially improve security, proprietary hooks are needed. That said, retailers will soon have a lot less negotiating power than they've gotten used to.Read more...

Given that prior judges have ruled that a benefit to consumers is helpful in establishing the need for a subpoena to overcome retail privacy policies, Wright told Superior Court Judge Fred Rotenberg that "it is hard to imagine more of a benefit than allowing Macy's customers to take a toxic substance away from their children. (Macy's) is playing a dangerous game of hide the ball and the only one who loses are the children it puts at risk." The case is important because it raises many critical retail IT issues, including how private--or proprietary--the courts should consider data, including purchase histories from CRM/loyalty and POS payment files.Read more...

Although it boasts the ability to mix and match, it literally just moves small thumbnails of the outfits near other. If it generated images of the models wearing those impromptu combinations, that could have been much more meaningful.Read more...

When Stop & Shop was in the middle of a self-service trial, it discovered an unanticipated fringe benefit of the handheld product scanning device: It slightly boosted revenue from customers on a tight budget. Traditionally, budget-constrained shoppers have a specific dollar amount they can’t go over. During a routine shopping trip, these shoppers tend to add up prices in their heads and will quit right before they hit their limit, on the rationale that it’s better to slightly undershoot than overshoot. To do this easily, the shoppers rounded-up the figures, so that a $4.51 package of soup mentally becomes $5.

But when customers had a screen in front of them with a precise count, they felt more comfortable buying more because they knew they’d still be under budget, even if by only a few pennies. For example, a consumer with a budget of $100 for the trip would often spend $91 or $92, which is the result of a couple of dozen items being rounded up. But if the consumer has a precise readout, they might spend a few more dollars to get closer to $99. “The precise pricing can get them to buy more,” said Mike Grimes, an executive VP with Modiv Media, one of the companies involved in the Stop & Shop trial. …

The two Internet-only retailers remained at the top of ForeSee Results' new list of sites in terms of user happiness. Although it was a 1.2 percent decline from the spring 2008 score, the 85 scored by Netflix landed the movie rental site at the top of the consumer satisfaction list for the third year. A perfect score would be 100. Amazon, with a score of 84 (a 1.2 percent increase over last spring) came in second-place followed by QVC with an 81. Wal-Mart's site scored 77, as did the J.C. Penny's, Cabelas and Drugstore.com sites.Read more...

Sure, we can do news stories and columns on these documents but we thought some some readers might want a database of all of these documents as they evaluate new issues. We're not sure if we have the right answer, but today we're launching our best shot: StorefrontBackground. StorefrontBacktalk and StorefrontBackground are linked and share many of the same resources (such as our image library, some of the editors, shared servers, etc.) but are, editorially, polar opposites.Read more...

The 4,308-store Tesco grocery chain, one of Europe’s largest retailers and the largest in the U.K., suffered some sort of a systems glitch during “an IT update overnight” that shut down POS systems for about 100 stores on Monday (May 11), but spared all self-checkout stations, Tesco officials said. Given that a retail self-checkout system typically runs its own application separate from the POS app, said IHL President Greg Buzek, this suggests the problem was internal to the POS software, not the payment application or database.

“Tesco said that all types of payments, including credit and debit cards and cash via normal tills, had been affected. However, self-service systems in affected stores and in Tesco garages had not been affected,” reported ZDNet. “An investigation into the cause of the outage will be launched shortly, the spokesperson said, noting that the problem was probably caused by software updates that had been sent out on Sunday night. The issues were unlikely to have been caused by a hacking attack, the spokesperson added.”…

Data breach victims pushing back against fines is nothing new, but a processor calling out one of the two largest card brands and doing it during a very public investor conference call, well, that's a bit different.Read more...

Making the hardware technology part work will be comparatively easy, compared with the task of getting retailers to buy in, along with getting the backing of Visa, MasterCard, AmericanExpress and other card brands. Heartland CEO Robert Carr discussed the details of his plan for the first time in a pair of StorefrontBacktalk podcasts, with the first of the podcast series focusing on the technology details of the plan and the second delving into the practical industry political realities of getting such a plan widely used.Read more...

"After dozens of failed projects in the last ten years, the time is ripe for payments by mobile phone at retailers' checkouts," said the report. "Powerful initiatives in France and the Netherlands, initiated by the likes of Carrefour, Ahold and Auchan, may be strong enough to set European, perhaps even global, standards for mobile phone payments."Read more...

Sears.com is quietly getting into the social networking space. Well, not quite. Sears’ effort, done under the MySears.com banner and claiming more than 200,000 registered users, is more of a combo FAQ, suggestion box and interactive customer service site. This is a critical distinction because of a social site is one where the consumers dictate the topics and the exchanges. A retail giant landlord can quietly observe and follow where customers go or it can try and lead.

This BrandWeek piece details the Sears effort and it also brings up the teen-focused Wal-Mart effort from a few years ago, called The Hub. Bentonville pulled the plug on that site in barely 10 weeks. But it was only last year that Starbucks launched its own customer site, although it was pretty much limited to “telling Starbucks what it can do to get more of your money.” It’s sort of like a death row program, where condemned inmates can ride lifecycle machines to generate enough power to run the electric chair.…

With the growth of Twitter and other sites designed for the detail- and context-challenged, Amazon decided that it needed to have its very own URL shortener system: amzn.com, which is more Amazon-friendly than tinyurl.com and shorturl.com.

“It works like this: If I’m looking at Dan Brown’s upcoming book ‘The Lost Symbol’ and want to tweet about it, I take the book’s ISBN number (listed on the product page) and put it on the end of amzn.com/. ‘The Lost Symbol’ ISBN number is 0385504225. So the short URL would be amzn.com/0385504225,” according to this TechFlash story. “For other Amazon products that don’t have an ISBN, you use the ASIN number (Amazon Standard Identification Number), also on the product page. The tool also works for Amazon Wishlists. You type ‘amzn.com/w/’ plus the Wishlist ID number, which is usually at the end of a person’s Wishlist URL.”…

"Most notably, the visitors were not in a country where we do business," said Ron DeFeo, Home Depot's director of corporate communications. But given that the overwhelming majority of the programming and design investment had already been paid, why pull the plug only six months after the site's November launch?Read more...

With an eye on group buying—whether it’s 20 people in an office buying a birthday gift or 9 farflung residents chipping in on an anniversary trip or even a Boy Scout Troop—Sears.com on Tuesday (May 5) introduced Givetogether. The program allows for gift givers to use credit cards or other means to pool resources for a combined purchase.

Despite being the great-great-grandpappy of the Big Box chains, Sears has consistently been ahead of the curve with creativity in E-Commerce, mobile commerce and cross-channel thinking. Unlike many of the E-Commerce ideas we’re hearing from the largest chains these days, this development isn’t the proverbial solution in search of a problem. This is an actual awkward issue that consumers have today that the Web can help with. …

This goes far beyond the CVSes, Walgreens, Rite-Aids and Wal-Marts of the world. We often complain about the store-centric thinking that undermines merged channel strategies, where they see online, mobile and even the call center as the enemy. What about the myopic view that goes beyond "store versus online" and gets into "my wonderful store on Elm St. versus your horrible store on Maple Ave." We discuss intra-chain rivalries, often overlooking into-in-store rivalries.Read more...

Is Mobil afraid of Mobile? Is not offering an on-the-road version of a find-me-a-gas-station-quick application an example of E-Commerce fuelishness?Read more...

A Pennsylvania-based RFID tag-maker is introducing what it says is the thinnest active RFID tag in the world. CenTrak CEO Ari Naim said the size of his company’s new 3mm-thick IT-740 Staff Badge makes it an ideal tool for keeping physical track of not only employees but also of expensive equipment that can be moved, such as notebook computers. “It is pretty thin, at 3mm, for an RTLS tag,” said ABI Research RFID analyst Michael Liard. “The advantage is that the tag does not need to be the badge itself. You can overlay the active tag on current badges — retrofitting them if you will.”

Asked about the new tag’s battery power, Naim would only say that battery life is one of his company’s “specialties” and that power specifications aren’t very informative. “That, honestly, doesn’t give you much information,” said the CEO. “What defines the life of the tag has to do with how the system works. Our system updates every three seconds. If we change it to update every six seconds the battery life would nearly double.” Naim said the IT-740 unit can be programmed to operate at varying intervals and has a motion-sensor that can be used to prevent activation if the unit remains stationary for certain periods of time, such as when it is not tracking product.…

The recession will keep E-Commerce sales roughly flat (a half-percent decline) this year before returning to the days of double-digit growth next year, predicts e-Marketer Senior Analyst Jeffrey Grau. Grau said in a new report that E-Commerce sales will increase by nearly 10 percent next year, by about 13 percent in 2011, by some 11 percent in 2012 and by about 10 percent in 2013.

But his report did include this rather eyebrow-raising quote: “The recession has fostered a new breed of consumers who meticulously research big-ticket items as well as everyday purchases online. These consumers honed their Internet research skills during the 2008 holiday shopping season when, in search of savings and memorable gifts, they deftly moved between sites and tried different online shopping tactics.” We’re pretty sure most consumers were quite deft at surfing the Web for bargains long before the economy tanked last year. But maybe that’s just us.…

Every now and then, a piece we’ll run here at StorefrontBacktalk ignites a bit more of a furor than typical. Such was the case with a Dave Taylor column we ran last week called PCI’s Grading System Is Failing.

The reader comments were so strong and, in some cases, contradictory, that they make an almost more compelling case than did the original column. We’re mentioning it because our readers tend to rarely go back to a week-old story and look for comments. In this case, though, If you’re interested in PCI strategy debates, you might want to check out some of the comments.…