Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

The assumption of some anonymity on E-Commerce sites can be critical. Let's look at a scenario for Amazon.com. One of its most critical value-adds is customer comments—both good and bad—about its products. What if a consumer—employed in the consumer appliance world—purchased a toaster that was absolutely horrible? Read more...

But several major cellphone carriers are preparing to bundle the 2-D barcode software with phones as they ship. Will that make a difference? Read more...

The first move has to be to take a serious look at your data. Think of it like a residential move. How much of that accumulated stuff do you really need anymore? How much are you honestly going to be leveraging and using? The less you keep, the less you have to protect and manage. And the less you keep, the easier it will be to outsource. Read more...

No sooner had IT concocted a system to try and automatically detect an under-age shopper than someone has crafted a remarkably low-tech way to fool it. How low-tech? How about a picture ripped out of a magazine?

This delightful story from Pink Tentacle shows how the Japanese cigarette-machine RFID-leveraging face-recognition system is completely fooled by the magazine photo. “The face-recognition machines rely on cameras that scan the purchaser’s face for wrinkles, sagging skin and other signs of age. Facial characteristics are compared with a database of more than 100,000 people, and if the purchaser is thought to be well over 20 years old (the legal age), the sale is approved,” the story said.…

Will consumers ever deploy counter-top barcode scanners and a Web site to have groceries delivered to them automatically? A company called Ikan.net is hoping they will.

The system combines a Web-connected barcode scanner, which scans every product before it’s thrown out or recycled, and then adds it to a shopping list. The list then is shared with either a grocery retailer directly or a grocery delivery service like Peapod, which does the delivery of the empty items. This nicely done New York Times story shows the efforts of its writer to use the system.…

A new E-commerce payment system at UrbanOutfitters.com allows users to complete purchases in one screen, boosting cart conversion rates by 19 percent, according to an Internet Retailer story that quoted Dmitri Siegel, managing director of Urban Outfitters Direct.

The original approach forced customers to use several pages to handle payment, address and other purchase details. “We were losing a lot of customers with that,” Siegel said.…

The PCI Security Council is branching out a little, with an attempt to bring unattended payment terminals (UPTs) under its jurisdiction. As kiosks get more sophisticated and start taking cash, credit cards, mobile transactions and other payment methods, the UPT security risk is sharply increasing.

The council has also launched a testing program for Hardware Security Modules (HSMs). “PIN entry devices go well beyond the typical POS terminals we are all familiar with and we are continually expanding into more and more areas,” said Bob Russo, general manager, PCI Security Standards Council. “Any device that processes personal identification numbers is an important link in the transaction chain.” …

Amazon.com on Wednesday (July 9) finally deployed Bill Me Later as a payment option, almost eight months to the day after Amazon announced its intent to do so.

The credit-card-less payment option is partially owned by Amazon (Bill Me Later would only say that it was a minority investment), which is OK, given that Google owns GoogleCheckout and EBay owns PayPal. Web giants simply can’t go anywhere these days without sporting their very own alternative payment vendor. …

A semiconductor company is suing a Dutch university to keep its researchers from publishing information about security flaws in the RFID chips used in up to 2 billion smart cards, according to this intriguing Computerworld story.

NXP Semiconductors filed suit in Court Arnhem in The Netherlands against Radboud University Nijmegen. The company is pushing the courts to keep university researchers from publishing a paper about reported security flaws in the MiFare Classic, an RFID chip manufactured by NXP Semiconductors, the story said.…

The first outage on June 20 was an internal glitch with the retailer's delivery processing system, forcing the chain to take down its site because it couldn't fulfill the orders. But the site itself wasn't the problem. Read more...

On Tuesday (July 8), the tenth day of the problematic performance and a "our website and call center are running slowly as we fine-tune the improvements" apology replacing JCrew's homepage, JCrew spokesperson Margot Brunelle-Fooshee said the problems are still slowing things down and the associated disclaimer "will probably be up until Friday" (July 11).Read more...

J.C. Penney customers are twice as likely to say they are highly satisfied with their in-store shopping experience if they are working with store employees who are accessing the company’s Web site while standing next to them. That according to an Internet Retailer story quoting Kevin Gebhardt, the chain’s director of multi-channel coordination and implementation.

It’s been almost two years since the chain connected all 35,000 of its point-of-sale systems to the Web, giving associates in its nearly 1,100 stores access to the retailer’s e-commerce site, JCP.com, the story said. “J.C. Penney also has tested placing Web-enabled kiosks in stores so that customers can access JCP.com on their own, but decided against deploying them,” Gebhardt said. He added that “the retailer is focusing on helping employees provide better service rather than on self-service technologies, with the exception of kiosks that customers use for accessing online gift registries.” …

The London-based 823-store Sainsbury's grocery chain immediately issued almost a half-million dollars' worth of £10 (roughly equivalent to $20) vouchers to some 30,000 disgruntled customers and personally--through staff volunteers and no software automation—called every one of those 30,000 to apologize and tell them about the vouchers. Read more...

A new Retail Systems Research report is challenging the way retail IT looks at application development backlogs. The report is based on a survey showing that some 79 percent of retailers have app dev backlogs of at least a year, with one-fifth of those hitting delays of more than two years.

But that’s not news to retail IT execs, who have come to see huge backlogs as a way of life. A time-revered IT tradition, if you will. The report, however, argues that the battle between system maintenance/security patches—which always get top priority—and the creation of new capabilities that the business needs should be thought of in different terms. Some are opting for outsourcing more, which would allow them to reallocate resources to accelerate new capabilities. “There’s been this shift where business has been taking more of the direction of IT investments,” said RSR’s Nikki Baird. “It should no longer be about ‘either/or.'”…

The conventional wisdom has held that China is not likely to embrace E-Commerce, because of the Chinese aversion to credit payments and fears of piracy and poor quality products. But a Forbes story this week makes a powerful argument that E-Commerce—and a credit-card lifestyle in general—will be coming to China very soon and in a big way.

“In interviews the China Market Research Group (CMR) has conducted with 500 young adults between the ages of 18 and 32 in six cities across China, nearly 80 percent of respondents said they had made an online purchase in the last six months. The vast majority expected to buy something again in the next quarter. Seventy percent said they weren’t putting aside any money in savings accounts and that they would use a credit card for online purchases if they had one,” the story said, adding that the study “suggests it is a lack of credit cards and other payment options, rather than a cultural aversion to buying online, that has curtailed the growth of e-commerce in China. But the problem of payment is resolving itself. Credit card use is booming as domestic banks like Bank of China and China Merchants Bank roll out services targeting consumers in China’s smaller cities. We expect the number of credit cards in China to increase fivefold, from 56 million at the end of 2006 to 250 million by the end of 2013.” …

Although the question of RFID safety has been debated extensively over the years, with conflicting study results, a major new medical study released this week points to very specific electromagnetic dangers within nine inches of the transmitter.

The highly respected Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found 34 electromagnetic interference instances out of 123 tests, with 22 of them rated potentially hazardous. “Interference changed breathing machines’ ventilation rates and caused syringe pumps to stop” at a distance of about nine inches, according to a story in The Wall Street Journal. This may give serious pause to some retail IT operations, who can have dozens of RFID devices in loading docks and assembly lines, in addition to trucks and even on shelves. …

"Response times for some short codes degraded severely during the busiest hours of the day. One CSC (common short code) showed a 60 percent peak-period slowdown every day, indicating a major capacity issue was present," Keynote said. "Many of the CSCs monitored showed significant reliability issues. Several (experienced) more than 10 hours of outage while one (experienced) more than 50 hours." Read more...

A UK company is pushing retailers to use voice-recognition to authenticate purchases over the phone and online.

The Voice Commerce Group’s Voice Transact package has consumers call the service, quote a pre-arranged product code and then a series of digits dictated by the automated system. Verizon is involved in the rollout. VCG CEO Nick Ogden was quoted in E-Commerce Times saying that there are “current problems with the system, the biggest of which was interoperability between different banks’ systems and the standards used in the technology.”…

Since almost no one can afford to add another group of people with both auditing skills and IT skills, nor can most retailers afford to pay consulting firms to do this, I tend to recommend very specific PCI audit training courses for your internal audit staff. One way to do this is to send them to the same two day course that PCI auditors go through. Read more...

But Wal-Mart and a handful of others have been trying to do green the right way, with policies that will have a significant environmental impact and that also improve operations.Read more...