Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

KMart.com went down a few minutes after midnight (New York time) on Thursday (March 19) morning and stayed down for at least several hours. Pingdom first detected the outage but it wasn’t hard to confirm. Initially the site was simply not responsive. After a little more than two hours, the homepage was replaced with a sign that said, “We’re sorry. Kmart.com is temporarily closed for site enhancements.” Is it coincidental that this comes on the heels of Sears declaring this week that it was going to be expanding more of its online efforts with its KMart corporate brother?

The early morning timing of the outage could suggest some site maintenance, but the fact that the site went silent for hours and that it was only then that such a “Move along. Nothing to see here today, folk” sign was posted, that does make it look a little baffling. (Note: The site seems to have come back now, several hours after the darkness. That’s certainly good, but the question of why it went dark for hours before a maintenance note was posted still exists. Sears just messaged that the outage was for a planned site upgrade and that they had thought the splash page had been there since it went down. It might have been somewhere, but we didn’t see it.) …

The Form 10-K also listed a wide range of agencies probing the breach, including what a few whose Heartland probes had not been public. The list now includes the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council, the Federal Trade Commission, the Louisiana Department of Justice Office of the Attorney General, the Canadian Privacy Commission and quite a few state Attorneys General.Read more...

When Heartland announced in November that it was acquiring Chockstone, it issued a statement that “Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.” Why do publicly-held companies try such things? They know they’ll likely have to disclose it at SEC filing time.

This week, that filing time came and the Breach Boys had to report that they had dropped some $4.1 million in cash for Chockstone, including $1.6 million in goodwill and $2.4 million in intangible assets. They also took on some $200K in short-term capital lease obligations and about $300K in long-term capital lease obligations.…

The blogosphere was having lots of pun-fun this week with a story out of Finland about a fellow who stuck a USB thumb drive onto the end of his prosthetic finger. Indeed, it’s hard to resist the urge to make light of Jerry Jalava’s creation by resorting to groaners such as “Did you ever want to give the finger to your data storage systems?” Jalava, a programmer from Helsinki, lost part of his left ring finger in a motorcycle accident. He was inspired to build his prosthetic finger, containing a 2GB USB memory stick, when surgeons performing his finger amputation cracked jokes about installing a “finger drive.”

Sometimes, since the prosthesis is easily removed, Jalava just leaves it plugged into his computer’s USB port. According to reports, Jalava is planning an upgraded version that has a removable fingertip, an RFID tag and more memory. That’s some pretty innovative thinking and it’s a sure way of being sure you have the data you need, ahem, right at your fingertips. …

When Toys R Us paid more than $5 million this month to buy Toys.com, perhaps they should have set aside a few more dollars for search engine optimization (SEO) counsel. This after the popular domain was de-indexed by Google because Toys R Us chose to forward the domain, rather than transfer it. Oops!

There’s some nice background on the case at Domain Name Wire, especially the context about how much more value the different method would have realized. “Now the value of Toys ‘R’ Us’ $5.1M purchase of Toys.com has been relegated to type-in traffic and potentially some of the inbound links to Toys.com,” the story said.…

The decision by U.S. District Court Judge Alicemarie H. Stotler raises issues of how strictly retail laws should be interpreted when it comes to E-Commerce issues, many of which couldn't have been imagined when the laws were written.Read more...

Could these be coincidences? Might they indeed be isolated debit card incidents? Absolutely. But this also might be an initial heads up that the debit card system relied on by major retailers today has inherent flaws. What happened, with both Macys and Best Buy, with software specifically designed to look for and prevent these kinds of multiple identical charges? What about the systems at the card processors and the banks?Read more...

In addition to monitoring--audio, video and even key logging--call center employees, call centers are sometimes classified as "sensitive areas" (per PCI 9.1.1), but GuestView PCI Columnist David Taylor argues that that has caused some companies to build walls and erect partitions to physically isolate the call center or those specific agents who have privileged access to card data or other confidential data, an approach that may cause as many problems as it fixes.Read more...

ABI Research Senior analyst Mark Beccue said North American mobile commerce totaled about $346 million last year and is expected to hit $577 million this year. "Then, you're going to get a big jump by year-end 2010, reaching $2.09 billion," Beccue said. The analyst pointed out that even if it doubles in size as predicted, mobile commerce will remain a drop in the bucket compared to all types of E-Commerce. He said E-Commerce in North America alone was a $204 billion industry last year.Read more...

A minor observation. Over the last couple of weeks, have noticed a depressing trend. Many new subscribers from very large chains are subscribing with personal addresses (gmail.com, hotmail.com, etc.). Even worse, many of these are existing subscribers who are logging in to change their addresses to personal domains. Are these recently laid off folk? Or are they merely getting worried that they soon will be and are trying to make sure that they won’t get cut off from the world if that happens.

It used to be that these domains would pop up very infrequently, mostly for execs who wanted to read newsletters at home on the weekend. Another sign of an economy in deep doo-doo: A surge in generic consumer domains among business people. *sigh*…

The Visa move is interesting, but it appears to be much less about protecting data and card accounts than protecting Visa's public persona. If the suspension prevented Visa transactions from going through Heartland, that would have sent a very loud message. But that didn't happen. What has happened with Visa are some delicious attempts at rewriting history. In presentations that have been given this month by two top Visa data risk executives, Eduardo Perez and Hector Rodriguez, Visa's party line is now "As of today, no compromised entity has been found to be compliant at the time of the breach." And it shall forever be so.Read more...

She hit Walmart.com and found tons of different printer paper, all of which looked quite acceptable. But she tried one or two and searched if it was in-stock at her store. Nope. She simply wanted to ask the site, "Limiting your answer to this one store, what printer paper does it have in stock?" If she was only interested in one very specific brand and paper type, she could have searched that store. The generic searches made so easy on the site, though, wouldn't work when focused on one store.Read more...

New stats coming from research at RISNews.com are suggesting that, as suspected, homegrown packages are losing their home. IT execs saying that their "preferred IT deployment philosophy" is "deploying packaged applications with few modifications" came in at 53.8 percent, almost twice as popular an answer as "best of breed" at 28.8 percent. Even though RISNews has seen that trend for years, the difference had never been so stark. While the packaged response has been right around today's 53.8 percent figure for years (ranging no farther than from the low- to mid-50s), best-of-breed has suddenly plummeted. It was at 46 percent in 2006, 45 percent in 2007 and 47 percent in 2008, before plunging to 28.8 percent this year.Read more...

Having gotten that off our product lifecycle management chest, the Tradestone effort does have quite a few things going for it. First, it's A Team list of retailers—including Macy's, Kohl's, Lowe's, Urban Outfitters and Pacific Sunwear--forces it to be taken seriously. Secondly, there has been so little truly accomplished with PLM standardization that practically any effort should be applauded.Read more...

Even more cynically, is it possible that those execs know that surveys like this tend to impact CEO/CFO expectations and, therefore, they'll give the answers they want their CFOs to believe? Even if the execs are being straight with the survey takers—and that the survey takers are being straight in reporting all of the collected data without sanitation—we have to wonder what was behind those answers.Read more...

The researchers predict the U.S. digital signage market — including hardware, software, installation, and maintenance — will grow by about 33 percent this year. "This report was done in the fourth quarter of 2008," noted ABI Research analyst Zippy Aima. "At that time, the economy was not in as dire straits as it is now. We might have to revisit some of the numbers, but despite that fact, we are seeing very promising growth."Read more...

Surveys show the public's lack of enthusiasm for mobile device-based shopping held steady between late 2007 and late 2008. "Consistent from year to year, a little over one-half of all respondents are not interested in using their mobile phones to make purchases," ABI Senior Analyst Jeff Orr said. "Transaction security was cited by 71 percent of mobile phone users as a major concern preventing wider uptake."Read more...

As GuestView PCI Columnist David Taylor points out, data security is mostly about FUD. The more you scare people about unknown risks (of breaches, fraud, data loss), the more they tend to spend to guard against these risks. But given the high level of fear that already exists in the SME environment about going out of business, even the loudest and most well justified pitches don't even make the radar screen.Read more...

The eMarketer gurus are predicting online sales will rebound next year and, in 2011, "return to the double-digit growth rates seen prior to 2008." Of course, companies need to stay in business long enough to see that sunny day. EMarketer says retail E-Commerce sales will drop by 0.4 percent in 2009, ending the year at $133.1 billion. 2008 online retail sales came in at $133.6 billion.Read more...

OK, maybe it's a reach, but not so much as one might think. A study published by Carnegie Mellon University Tuesday (March 3) found that "shopping online reduces environmental impact with 35 percent less energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions compared to the traditional retail shopping model."Read more...

The IHL Group, which conducted the independent research, had expected to find the economic disaster was giving low-cost Linux a boost, but found the opposite, said IHL President Greg Buzek. "This aggressive pricing and packaging of the operating platform not only took share from Linux, but also took a heavy toll on other legacy operating systems as retailers sought replacements as part of their PCI DSS compliance initiatives."Read more...

In a Japan-only (for now) rollout, Sony is including a TV remote control with its new line of HDTVs, but this is no ordinary remote control. With a built-in RFID tag reader, it’s designed to talk with consumer’s cellphones and authorize purchases.

Initially, the devices are to be used to pay for very TV-related items such as video-on-demand, ringtones from a music show and other multimedia features. But the next phase could include any purchases, whether it’s a barbecue grill from the Home Shopping Network, a washing machine from Amazon (as seen through the TV’s Web connection, courtesy of a built-in Ethernet port) or groceries from the local Wal-Mart (to be picked up later). Of course, that’s in Japan. Here in New York metro, I’m happy if my Treo can actually connect two phonecalls in a row.…

Some of the state legislation doesn't even limit itself to dictating what retailers must do while operating in their states but are setting new rules protecting the residents of that state when they happen to be shopping out-of-state or online. Do they expect cashiers at Wal-Mart to ask what state a customer lives in and then, based on the answer, change the way they handle a credit card payment?Read more...

Just a couple weeks after word got out that Wal-Mart and Procter & Gamble had backed off their support for RFID tags on marketing displays comes the news that the nation’s largest drugstore chain, Walgreens, is boosting its support for the very same RFID tagging of promotional displays.

“The results have been impressive: Over the past year, our in–store execution has grown to nearly double the industry average,” said David Van Howe, purchasing VP for the $60 billion 6,658-store chain. “Store–level information about what is up and where it is in the store allows unprecedented accountability for achieving program potential.”…

The few details that have been released raise more questions than they answer, but it also provides crucial clues as to what really happened.Read more...