Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Noting that Wal-Mart, Target and Best Buy, among other major retailers, “are moving rapidly to require RFID tags on the products they sell,” two New York legislators have introduced a bill governing the use of the technology. Similar legislation has been introduced or enacted in 28 other states, according to RFID Update.

The “Radio Frequency Identification Right to Know Act” would require retailers to disclose the use of RFID devices and any gathered personal information. It would also require labeling of retail products or packages containing an RFID tag as well as POS removal of RFID tags. Additionally, the bill “restricts aggregation and disclosure of personal information.”…

Following a lawsuit, Expedia and Hotels.com have agreed to augment their sites' search capabilities so people with disabilities can find and book hotel rooms that accommodate their special needs. The hotel-booking sites were sued in California Superior Court on the grounds that they did not provide ways for people with disabilities to determine whether hotels offered special accommodations.Read more...

The Kroger grocery chain apparently saw good results from a 219-store digital coupon last summer, as it announced on Tuesday (Jan. 27) that it was expanding digital coupons to virtually all of its 2,400 stores in 31 states.

Kroger, which used Cellfire for its initial trial, will be varying coupon price discounts regionally. The Kroger brands involved include Ralph’s, Bakers, City Markets, Dillon, Gerbes, Gilander, Jay-C, King Scoopers, Owens, Payless, QFC, Smiths, Scott’s, Fry’s, Cala Foods and Bell Markets.…

"Why would you want to invest in technology, training, software and people when Wal-Mart can do it for you for 12 cents?" asked Louis Bianchin, senior RFID analyst and program manager at VDC Research. "The risk there is that they (Sam's Club) could have sent the wrong message to the supplier community. That is not the message the supplier community needs to get."Read more...

The adoption of contactless by a retailer of Carrefour's size "is one of the largest victories so far" and a "very positive win" for contactless technology, said Forrester Research Analyst Ed Kountz. "It's looking like we are going to see more deployments in Europe. It's also being done well in Turkey, of all places, and Asia really remains the number one market for contactless payments."Read more...

Wangfujing, a huge Chinese department store chain that claims to serve 10 million shoppers every day and is Beijing’s largest retailer, has launched a SaaS trial, a move that the chain said will be the first time for any retailer in China.

The Web-based supply chain package will be available to all of Wangfujing’s 20,000 suppliers–to handle all business transactions from order processing to settlement—by December 2008, but only about one-tenth that many have access now, according to a Wangfujing statement. Wangfujing brought IBM in for this trial, where Big Blue said it would be using its WebSphere Application Server and DB2 database.…

The government believes it has identified the cyber thief involved, has "pinpointed" that suspect's location and that it's outside of North America, the source said.Read more...

A rather blatant incident that was widely reported last week (Jan. 16) involving Amazon and electronics manufacturer Belkin has sharply reinforced those fears among e-tailers. Even worse, it has the potential to shatter the confidence of online shoppers.Read more...

But within days of the Canadian Tire (CT) statement, Circuit City shut down its Web site entirely (months before closing its physical stores) and Sears added a drive-through for its buy-online-pick-up-in-store program. Is this the next growth phase for E-Commerce, or is it more of a "We can't afford anymore to subsidize this bits-and-byte annoying albatross"?Read more...

Beyond the advantage of being able to physically shop without having to take a shower, there are some tactical reasons for Sears' plan to convert one of its Illinois stores into what it is calling a "MyGofer Store." Read more...

Among the changes are a centralized search box, new categories and comments that are much more easily accessible.Read more...

Malware has two countervailing trends, both likely to continue. The first is that there is a rapidly growing market for highly automated malware that uses basic building blocks and can be easily adapted to identify and exploit new vulnerabilities. This malware exploits unpatched servers, poorly defined firewall rules, the OWASP top 10, etc. It is really aimed at the mass market--SMEs and consumers. Then there is the high-end malware that employs the "personal touch"--customized to specific companies and often combined with social engineering to ensure it's installed in the right systems. This type of malware got TJX, Hannaford and now Heartland.Read more...

Early on Tuesday (Jan. 20), Heartland issued a statement saying that it had been "the victim of a security breach within its processing system in 2008." But it didn't take long for some of those initial details to fall apart.Read more...

When we recently heard of one such startup, an Atlanta company called Transaction Tree, whose products allow retailers to offer E-mailed receipts instead of receipts printed on paper, we wondered how that would work. Who hasn't been the victim of lost, sent-to-the-wrong-address or spam-bucket-swallowed E-mails? Read more...

Dan Mullen, President of the Association for Automatic Identification and Mobility (AIM) said the proposals "could be pretty traumatic for businesses and consumers." Read more...

It's the Great PCI divide: The Dids and The Never Dids. The problem with this divide is that the retailers who need PCI's guidelines the most are the ones most likely to be put off by the guidelines, seeing them as unreasonably demanding and expensive.Read more...

VDC is now slashing its RFID projections for this year by a billion dollars, with growth rates “no more than 9.2 percent over 2008 levels.”

The new figures, according to RFID Update, are attributed entirely to the economy. “There is still going to be growth. It is going to slow significantly, but there isn’t going to be a contraction,” said Drew Nathanson, VDC’s director of research operations.…

Once PCI is assigned (still, for the most part, to IT), most people in the company assume that it's "done." Read more...

The common refrain was not how new retail technology can boost revenue but how it can slow the ongoing bleeding. Despite the absence of any single regal retail rollout, the more than 100 products and services introduced at the show did tend to cluster in groups. And those groups—not coincidentally—reflected today's difficult economic climate.Read more...

But the crime fighter's statement only deepened the mystery around an incident that is expanding daily, in terms of both potential scope and the number of factual contradictions that permeate the case. Read more...

Although Amazon has announced that it had a wonderful holiday season in 2008, the details in terms of revenue were not to be seen. But one analyst firm has projected Amazon’s sales metrics, and the numbers are rather impressive.

The Geezeo’s Main Street Spending Index projected a 17 percent boost in per-customer spending (to $163.63), a 12 percent increase in the number of visits per customer each month (to 3.11) and a 4 percent boost in customer spending per visit (to $52.54). Those are nice numbers normally, but they are outstanding in a season as bad as the one everyone just experienced.…

As mobile payments try to pick up steam in the United States—an economy that today can be described as remarkably steam-free—retailers are mixed about whether mobile payments are indeed viable. But one vendor is trying a new tactic: bypassing telecom carriers by directly using Bluetooth for transactions.

A nice piece in the American Banker details the ways that Bluetooth could be easier to deploy than near field communication (NFC). Much of the problem in the United States is financial and working out compensation plans that please telecom carriers, phone manufacturers, credit card companies and retailers. Getting even two of those groups to cooperate is difficult enough.…

A key suspect in the TJX data breach case has been sentenced to 30 years in prison, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with the TJX case.

Maksym Yastremskiy was charged in Turkey with breaking into Turkish bank accounts electronically. During the hearing where he was sentenced to 30 years, he said that a laptop computer found in his hotel room containing bank information belonged to a friend. “I am innocent. I didn’t do anything to break bank accounts. Somebody else did it, not me. I want to be released from the jail,” he told the judge, according to The Boston Globe.…