Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

The next rev of kiosks will also do a better job of bridging the gap between Web site and store. “Today, the kiosk is pointed at the online assortment, meaning that there’s no merchandise tied to that transaction,” Robben said. “We want to make that better. We’ve got some features that we need to add around promotions and gift carding. Once we do that, that’ll help even increase the business we’re seeing today on that kiosk. Could I take store merchandise and check out on that device? We’d have to think about how that’s going to work just in-store process-wise around removing ink tags and bagging.”

That can’t happen until JCPenney has an enterprise-wide inventory system—and that’s two or three years away from seamless integration, Robben said. Shifting the Web site from Microsoft’s .NET technology to Oracle’s ATG, which will set the stage for cross-channel inventory, is about a year from going live.

That will also make a lot more possible than just better use of the kiosks. “If we want it to be true multichannel, we’ve got to overlap those experiences, so you could take a mobile phone into our store, scan a barcode and, whether it’s private label or a national label, get the data that you need to make a shopping decision, and then carry that through the checkout,” Robben said.

“We’re working through how does that really work in-store from the mobile-payment aspect. Do you do self-checkout, or do they always have to go to the cash wrap? I think we could get there with some sort of roaming POS at a minimum, and then evolve into some sort of customer self-checkout.”

Even starting down that path will have JCPenney butting heads with the PCI Council, which has stopped approving mobile POS devices. Home Depot and Apple have gone ahead with mobile POS anyway, and Robben said JCPenney is likely to move ahead, too.

“We want to move as aggressively as we can,” he said. “If they’re not going to approve it, I think we’d have to dig into what is it they’re not going to approve. If it’s any wireless, no matter private wireless or encrypted, we might have a tougher case around it. But I don’t think we’d wait for them to decide that we could go do something. In the past we’ve been aggressive on various innovations, and we’ve been able to work through some of the bureaucracy that’s been a friction point for it. We’ll fight to make it work.”

What won’t necessarily work is the idea that mobile payments of any type will actually cut costs such as interchange fees, including whatever mobile carriers end up offering. “In the discussions we’ve had with carriers, they come in and want to sell you services—we can do the mobile wallet, all these value adds and features and functions,” Robben said. “Then once you get down to what the business model is for how this is going to work, it’s a discussion of a per-transaction fee or who’s going to own the customer data. Is it going to decrease the cost? I think it’s another avenue for another fee for somebody to charge me on my transactions.”