Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

In a trial initially limited to the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Israel and Italy, Visa Europe is starting a trial this month of a card with an 8-digit alphanumeric display, 12-button keyboard and a long-life battery, according to a report in The Nilson Report, a respected credit card industry newsletter.

The card has the ability to offer reciprocal authentication, which is designed to allow consumers “making transactions via phone or the Web a way to identify the party on the other end before transmitting identifying credentials,” the report said. Such a card could be extremely useful to E-Commerce efforts to thwart phishing sites set up to harvest credit card data from unsuspecting consumers visiting look-alike fraudulent Web sites.…

Sears.com was "completely offline," said Shawn White, director of operations at site performance monitoring company Keynote Systems. "And if anybody made it through without getting redirected (to a placeholder page that said the site was experiencing load-related difficulties), their experience would have just been horrendously slow. Slow to the point they would have walked away." Read more...

According to a probable cause document, the defendants' lack of discretion may have done them in. Best Buy regional loss prevention officer Steve Castillo "noticed a strange pattern of purchase activity," according to the federal filing. How strange? The reward card was linked to 77 different credit card accounts between April 2007 and June 2008. And it was used to make 125 separate credit card purchases totaling $252,000, the filing said. Read more...

It's almost unfair to even label it E-Commerce, because the site is equally focused on helping in-store sales. The in-store features—such as tracking in-store inventory on the site and allowing in-store POS units to access online-only products—aren't new to the space, but JCPenney has added some nice touches. Read more...

Following a site meltdown by a major U.K. retailer this month, Internet traffic tracking firm Hitwise was able to document and make concrete what has always been assumed: Consumers abandon a retail site when it melts down faster than politicians vote for a tax cut. When Debenhams’ site suffered severely during a well-publicized late November sale, the percent of its downstream traffic that went to competing retailers jumped from 33.2 percent to 46.9 percent, according to a nicely detailed Hitwise post.

“Looking at the top individual retail Web sites that received traffic from debenhams.com last week, the biggest beneficiaries were Marks & Spencer (which accounted for 4.6 percent of downstream visits, up from 2.8 percent the previous week), Next (2.2 percent) and John Lewis (1.7 percent),” said the posting written by Hitwise Research Director Robin Goad.…

Recently released numbers raise questions as to whether online will be much of a savior at all. New figures from eMarketer project that E-Commerce sales will top last year's numbers by some $5.6 billion, a 4.1 percent increase from $136.8 billion to $142.4 billion. Read more...

Indeed, some are going so far as to suggest that the decision could undermine Web comparison sites in general. But is that necessarily a bad thing? Read more...

Wal-Mart has agreed to pay $1.4 million to settle complaints that it overcharged customers in California. The Nov. 24 deal involved the mispricing of some 1,043 items over four years, according to this BusinessWeek story. This announcement comes on the heels of Target agreeing to pay $1.7 million in penalties for overcharging customers in five northern California counties in October.

One of the prosecutors on the case said some of the problems happened because associates would make pricing changes to items in the store’s register database but not in the aisle.…

PayPal has come up with yet another payment-related use of a cellphone: to authenticate a non-mobile E-Commerce transaction. Customers of the payment giant “can now choose to receive a unique six-digit security code via text message to their mobile phones prior to logging in to their accounts,” PayPal said in a Nov. 24 statement.

PayPal has already been using two-factor authentication with a physical device (the PayPal Security Key), but using SMS and mobile leverages hardware consumers already have. Consumers would have to use the codes in addition to their regular username/password combos. …

The IT struggle with knowing where all payment data is—let alone trying to enforce rules that pretty much try and keep it there—was the topic of a StorefrontBacktalk podcast this week with our own PCI columnist, David Taylor, and security specialist J.D. Oder, the chief technology officer at Shift4.

Oder said most payment data security problems start with an employee error. These are typically employees who truly thought they were doing everything right, but they were undercut by a failed corporate infrastructure. Taylor’s approach was more basic: Retailers must put much less payment data into the hands of employees and return to a centralized approach, as painful as it will be and as backward as it will feel. To listen to these folks argue it out, please click here.…

In theory, this would allow people who only want to buy American products an easy way to do that. The only problem is that the trick doesn't always work, which means it could have the opposite effect.Read more...

When are related product lists helpful and when are they distracting? Is it an obviously useful upsell or is it doomed to the fate of the salesperson who shows a customer one too many choices? HP thinks it’s often the latter and has sharply trimmed the number of related items it shows. And the company is claiming a 30 percent sales increase as a result.

An interesting detail in this BusinessWeek piece points out that an Argentinean physicist apparently analyzed—on HP’s nickel—data from Facebook, YouTube, Digg and Amazon to mathematically model user attention. Conclusion: “The long lists of recommended add-on products commonly featured on E-Commerce sites yield diminishing returns. Web shoppers tend to stop paying attention after a certain point.” Aside from the fact that all of the sites selected (other than Amazon) skew to one demographic extreme of Web shoppers, this raises the question: Don’t HP E-Commerce workers ever shop online for themselves? They truly needed a physicist to tell them this? …

Such is the plight of Michal Geller, Amazon's director of consumer gift cards. Down the road, Amazon is toying with other ways to truly customize cards. But avoiding privacy issues, Geller said, is non-negotiable. "Anything related to privacy is off the table," he said, forcing Amazon to focus on "some creative ways (that are) not creepy." Read more...

The trial is only available to a little more than one-fifth of TiVo's 3.6 million subscribers (just those who pay for broadband TiVo) and is limited to those willing to pay cash. Still, the approach is quite interesting, at least for those who believe that convergence was a good idea ahead of its time. Read more...

In response to a contest—OK, a very weird contest, even by the relatively loose digital signage standards—one industry CFO chose to try and explain the difference in poetic verse. The result was decidedly less Shakespeare, Byron, Keats or Poe and much more Dr. Seuss and Burma-Shave. Even so, his poem is worth reading, if for no other reason than to make yourself feel better about your poem-crafting skill. (A free gift of decidedly little value to the first five readers who can correctly identify the Burma-Shave reference. Extra credit if you can cite an example.) Read more...

Some 30 meters below solid bedrock underneath Stockholm, an abandoned nuclear bunker has been transformed into what could only be described as the world’s coolest datacenter. The 16-inch thick entrance doors lead to a facility that, to quote this wonderfully illustrated Hot Hardware.com story, is “replete with waterfalls, greenhouses, German submarine backup engines and simulated daylight (and) this facility has the added benefit of being able to withstand an almost direct hit by a hydrogen bomb.”

The story is nice, but the pictures of this underground computer facility inside a cave are stunning. It almost makes me want to give up telecommuting. As fellow blogger Jason Perlow commented, “This is what a Bond villain’s datacenter would look like.”…

The crash itself, resolved by the end of the day, was caused by a hardware problem with Cisco routers in the company's San Jose datacenter, said Ranjith Kumaran, YouSendIt's chief technology officer. But the bigger problem was twofold: When the file transfer systems died, that also brought down the Web site. And the system crashed in such a way that customers weren't sure if their files had been transmitted or not.Read more...

Beyond the simple fact that a consumer with such a card could decide to cut off a particular chain's access to the CRM data juice to which they have grown addicted, Equifax President Steve Ely argues that his firm could leverage the masses of consumers. In so doing, he could tell consumers which retailers have been disappointing a certain percentage of their fellow consumers. Read more...

The largest factor hitting gift cards will be the traditional complaint that they are seen as too impersonal (cash is impersonal, too, but there's something about a stack of greenbacks piled in front of a cozy fireplace that is hard to resist. Maybe that's just a New Jersey thing).Read more...

When Sears rolled out its mobile effort (Sears2go) this month, it illustrated the challenges for a retailer trying to craft a clean and stable mobile strategy at a time of extreme flux for the mobile space.

In a sense, the first decision on mobile a retail chain needs to make is the cellphone’s equivalent of the age-old buy-versus-build debate. Do you take your full-fledged E-Commerce site and strip out almost all of the images and the most sophisticated functionality until it’s barely one step ahead of pure ASCII? Or do you add an extensive layer—most likely outsourced—that tries to interpret and translate queries and responses from your full Web site into something a smartphone can handle? Read more.…

The Web is overflowing with analysis of the TJX data breach disaster, but this posting from Plausible Deniability does a better job than most. What’s intriguing is the possibility that some of the indicted suspects may have worked as code writers in the light of day for some major companies, including Morgan Stanley.

With so much security outsourcing today, it raises some uncomfortable questions about how much you really know about the security specialists you now have working in your computer room.…