Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Merged channel and E-Commerce issues will be the fighting words of the day at Retail Perspectives 2008 in Montreal on Monday (Sept. 22), where StorefrontBacktalk will be speaking and moderating discussions on those topics plus PCI, in-store strategies, supply chain and global tactics.

Panelists include IT execs from Build-A-Bear, Tesco and Reitmans, and confirmed audience participants include JC Penney, Jones Retail, Brookstone, Carters, Fortunoff and Casual Male. We would love to see you there.…

After a one-year trial, Walgreens has now officially committed to making its 600,000-square-foot distribution center in Anderson, S.C., fully RFID automated with a system that alerts employees before they load a shipment on the wrong truck bound for retail locations throughout the Southeast.

The setup also automatically sends ASNs out as products leave the center, according to this wonderfully detailed RFID Journal story. “The RFID system is designed to alert employees when a tote has been moved to the wrong dock door, and when it is being loaded in the incorrect order. For instance, often a truck will transport multiple shipments to several stores and needs to have the goods loaded in the order in which they will be delivered.”…

In a filing on Thursday, U.S. Attorney Michael Sullivan told U.S. District Court Judge William G. Young that "There is forensic and/or testimonial evidence that the defendant and his co-conspirators hacked into numerous other businesses, which have not yet been publicly identified." Read more...

The program—which costs $7 for an individual order or $25 for a monthly subscription for unlimited orders—includes a "call button on the outside of the Grocery Express entry door to let their Personal Shopper know that they have arrived." Read more...

A U.K. firm has developed an on/off “switch” for RFID cards that could protect cardholders from being hacked. The cardholder activates the RFID transmission by squeezing the card between his thumb and forefinger when it must be scanned by a reader, according to this story from Dark Reading. The patented polymer-based technology comprised of metal particles is embedded into a circuit and gets built into a smart card during the lamination process. When compressed, it acts as an RFID signal conductor. “The difference is that RFID is always on and being interrogated, but this is always off until the instant you want it read,” the story said.

The approach from Peratech has good potential, as the biggest security risk for contactless payment cards is a thief wirelessly interrogating the card while standing nearby. But the approach—which the firm said would cost “cents, not dollars” per card—may not be much more than potential, as no one has yet agreed to use the technology in card manufacturing. With the razor-thin card margins today and an utter lack of consumer demand for better security, it’s unclear if those few pennies could be justified.…

When Gomez reported its latest batch of uptime figures for the Top 50 E-tailers covering the month of August, 3,000-employee Oriental Trading came in dead last. How dead last? The top retailer's high broadband connection (Costco) was a 99.83 percent uptime, and the numbers for retailers stayed in the upper 90s all the way down the list, with the 49th weakest high bandwidth uptime performance going to PC Connection, which clocked in at 98.83 percent uptime. Number 50, Oriental Trading, had only 68.15 percent uptime. Read more...

The application, called Giftag, requires a small applet to be downloaded and then integrated into either Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox browsers. Once installed, users can theoretically visit any E-Commerce site, find something they want and then click on an icon to select it. The application also allows users to select specific elements of the retailer's page to visually highlight it for a friend or relative. Read more...

The potentially even worse perception problem is if retailers see the list as a series of advertisers and not as a comprehensive list of all compliant applications. It's not clear, though, what recourse such merchants would have if they did perceive it that way. But anything that would undermine the perceived credibility of PCI as it tries to establish its independence from Visa can't be good. Read more...

That watered-down bill—The Consumer Data Protection Act, or AB 1656—passed in the California State Senate 34-3 last Wednesday (Aug. 27) and was then OK'd by the California State Assembly by a 74-1 margin on Saturday (Aug. 30). The governor has until the end of September to decide whether to sign. Read more...

With a new entry into the browser battleground—Google's Chrome—comes more customization nightmares. This problem is going to get a lot worse very quickly as many E-Commerce sites try and get more complex with more interactivity, multimedia and even 3-D experiments at the same time as consumers are getting more comfortable playing with their browser settings. Read more...

Home Depot said that Carey is joining the company directly from his SVP/Chief Technology Officer role at eBay, a job that—according to eBay—started Feb. 1, 2006. But before that two-and-a-half-year gig at eBay, Carey had worked at Wal-Mart for 21 years, leaving the world's largest retailer in the same title that eBay offered him: SVP/Chief Technology Officer. Read more...

Now that the PCI Council has confirmed that version 1.2 will be unveiled Oct. 1, the pre-briefings set for Oct. 21-23 in Belgium are especially perplexing. The initial intent of the briefings had been to show respect to European industry leaders, to give them an opportunity to provide feedback on 1.2 before it was solidified.

Given that the briefing won’t happen until 20 days after the rules have been set in stone and announced, it’s unclear how honored the Euro execs will feel. Among the giveaways PCI should probably avoid would be a multi-language t-shirt reading, “PCI’s Belgium ‘Talk To The Hand’ Briefing.” It might send the wrong message. …

Rite Aid has severed part of a 9-year-old deal with Drugstore.com and will take back its over-the-counter medication online purchases, a move that forced Drugstore.com to “significantly cut its outlook for fiscal 2008,” according to this Wall Street Journal story.

The deal will have Rite Aid handling those purchases on its own site, which in turn will be supported by Drugstore.com. “Drugstore.com will receive about $10 million in 10 monthly payments from Rite Aid in return for relinquishing the prescription service, and will get paid for marketing the new prescription service on its Web site,” the story said.…

A California startup is touting technology that it argues will make RFID chips that can’t be cloned. Verayo’s approach is based on a circuit-building approach called PUFs (Physically Unclonable Functions), which uses subtle chip differences to fuel a challenge-and-response system.

“There is a slight difference between your Pentium chip and my Pentium chip, even if they were produced next to each other in the fab,” Vivek Khandelwal, Verayo’s director of marketing, is quoted as saying in RFID Update. “PUFs capture the unique fingerprint of each chip by sending current through the circuit and measuring the path it takes. Verayo’s technology uses the measurement data to create a 64-bit challenge that is unique to the chip,” the story said. Verayo has made its case in a technical white paper on its site.…

The chain sent out invites to its exclusive Premier Black members—supposedly limited to the biggest spenders in the chain—on Wednesday, but inadvertently E-mailed it to the full CRM database. Oops! Read more...

Will E-Commerce Work? You no longer have a choice. You're thinking like this is an optional matter, such as whether you open a new store in Detroit or add a line of gloves. To be blunt, it's not. E-Commerce is now mandatory, as dictated by the Three F Reality: Faith, Force, and Fiasco. Read more...

It looks like Amazon is no longer backing up its pricing, putting an end to its Post-Order Price Guarantee—a policy that allowed customers to recover the difference from an Amazon price drop within 30 days of a purchase. As of Monday (Sept. 1), customers who place orders on Amazon.com are not offered the 30-day guarantee, a customer service representative confirmed.

The representative said Amazon decided to do away with the policy because sometimes price drops on the Web site were actually special offers by the manufacturer of the product. Amazon would then have to compensate the difference to a customer who purchased that item within 30 days of the drop. Amazon corporate did not return repeated phone calls asking about the change. The sharks are already in the water, with at least one company smelling fresh blood. A new Web site called priceprotectr.com is hoping to benefit from Amazon’s change, expediting the launch of a new price protection plan designed for Amazon users. …

How so? PCI's jurisdiction is limited to payment data and, therefore, it phrases most of its guidelines and requirements in those terms. So a retailer that uses appropriate encryption, firewall and intrusion detection systems only on systems that directly handle payments would be compliant and praiseworthy. But with today's networked systems, cyberthieves seek out soft spots in the network just so they can somehow get inside. Read more...

Quite a few retailers have been involved in site changes to make the Web more accessible to those with vision difficulties, but Target has been the most aggressive in fighting such efforts. As such, Target's settlement has an especially strong chance of pressuring retailers to aggressively embrace such changes. Read more...

Wal-Mart on Wednesday (Sept. 3) launched what it dubbed the Walmart Smart Network—a series of next-generation digital-ad systems—to 2,700 stores. The funky aspect of this rollout is that all 27,000 screens will be centrally controlled via an Internet Protocol Television connection.

In theory, this will allow content to be adjusted based on a virtually endless list of criteria and could be tweaked on a per-store, per-screen and time-of-day basis, said officials with Wal-Mart, who seem to be unsure when they’re Wal-Mart and when they’re Walmart. (Both were used.) “Every screen and every message has a purpose and we will be analyzing point of sale data on an ongoing basis,” said Stephen Quinn, chief marketing officer, Walmart Stores, U.S..…

Site navigation problems and unpleasant booking engines are driving customers away from online travel sites and pushing them through the doors of traditional, more personable travel agencies. Even though sales for online travel sites are growing, fewer travelers are actually booking their trips online, this eMarketer report said.

This shift in trip booking bucks the trend for online travel sites, which have been more popular than offline agencies throughout the last decade. The reason for this about-face is that many customers are fed up with “unfriendly booking engines and navigation tools” and are seeking the personal touch of an offline agent. “Not so long ago, industry observers cast traditional travel agents as has-beens,” said Jeff Grau, senior analyst at eMarketer and author of the report. “Perhaps this has helped them to focus on what they do best: provide travel expertise and personalized service.”…

Campbell also backed encrypting data as it is sent to banks, even over private networks. There's little question that both moves would improve security, but the cost and change required will also make them almost impossible to deploy. As TJX execs know better than anyone, market forces to push such change are essentially non-existent. Read more...

Calvin Klein finally gave its HTML blessing to E-Commerce, offering its first for-sale items on its Web, although the E-Commerce launching as U.S.-only. Anyone visiting from outside the United States will be routed to the existing corporate brochure site.

The site is trying to attract subscribers with a gimmick this month: Offering consumers the chance to win a $1,000 online fall shopping spree in exchange for registering. Calvin Klein is also—sort of—offering a free shipping deal, but only for customers who buy more than $200 worth of apparel at a time.…

A retail IT lesson from the world of politics? Maybe. Web tracking firm Keynote studied the text message blast sent by the U.S. presidential campaign of Barack Obama, the one in which his campaign promised to tell supporters his VP selection before it was broadly announced.

That message didn’t quite work out politically, as CNN broadcast the choice hours before the text blast was supposed to start. As a result, the campaign immediately triggered the blast, which didn’t work well, either. About 50 percent of people who subscribed to receive the text message from the Obama campaign regarding the VP pick may not have received it “in a timely fashion and perhaps not at all,” Keynote said. Does this mean Common Short Code SMS messaging won’t work for large national blasts? Not necessarily. But if you’re relying on getting your data out to prospects, it’s probably a good idea to vote for a different transmission method. …