Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

In the high-tech and retail worlds, there is a small group of marketers who seem to believe that they control branding and that even after decades of use, pronunciations and nicknames can be changed by marketing dictate. These people are what is known in retail IT circles as “Wrong. Dead Wrong. Absolutely and forever wrong and they were never even the teensiest bit right.” (IT knows not nuance.)

What brings this up is the recent debate—best articulated by our friends at The New York Times—about whether the graphical standard GIF should be pronounced as a homonym with Jif, the peanut butter. (Never quite understood the campaign “Choosy Mothers Choose Jif.” Did that mean that less uptight, less anal-retentive mothers chose Skippy? But I digress.) For decades—since 1987—it’s been pronounced with a hard G, as in the word graphic. Seems that Steve Wilhite, the inventor of the popular graphic approach back when he worked at CompuServe, now has opted for the peanut-butter pronunciation.

In a bid to attract new customers, Amazon recently announced a new program in which it would give customers 50 Amazon “coins” to use in playing games and for other purposes. The idea is sort of like what happens at the boardwalk in the summer or at the gaming tables in Las Vegas. Rather than playing with real money (and risking losing real money), gamers play with coins or chips with an artificial “value.” It’s easier to lose 500 Amazon coins than it is to lose actual cash.

But in creating an artificial currency, and allowing it to be transferred and exchanged, retailers like Amazon may be getting themselves into potential legal trouble, writes Legal Columnist Mark Rasch. In fact, they may be making themselves into an illegal unregistered money transfer company or even an unlicensed bank. Such is the problem with digital “money.”

Is Google Checkout finally ready to checkout? We know all about the traditional Hollywood fondness for the long goodbye scene, but even by movie standards, Google is pushing it. Google has been trying to say goodbye to GoogleCheckout for years. It was mid-June 2011—just about two years ago—when Google officials threw in the towel on Google Checkout publicly, admitting that it was being allowed to “stagnate through a starvation of marketing and engineering resources.” That’s a slow death scene that Cleopatra would have been proud of. (We ran a story back in 2009, asking if a then-recent fee increase was “the dying gasp of Google Checkout.”)

Yes, it’s the same goldie oldie plot: Search Engine Loves Payment App, Search Engine Loses Payment App, Search Engine Prays That No One Finds Payment App, Search Engine Wonders If It Can Get Away With Doing A Jodi Arias On Payment App. On Tuesday (May 21), Google again tried killing Google Checkout. In a “We really mean it this time. Dead. We promise” statement, Google said: “Today, we’re letting web merchants know that in six months, Google Checkout will be retired as we transition to Google Wallet.” Really?

Use of tablets and iPods as point-of-sale devices is growing rapidly, but it’s not going to knock cashwraps out of most stores anytime soon, according to an IHL Group report released Tuesday (May 21). More than 85 percent of big retailers say that for the next three years, mobile POS devices will be add-ons to—not replacements for—traditional fixed checkouts.

The most likely users of those devices: specialty retailers (both mall-based specialty chains and small independents), who are deploying about 45 percent of all tablets shipped to retail for POS, IHL said. But only 28 percent of U.S. retailers plan to roll out any mobile POS devices by the end of 2013, a drop from previous estimates. That suggests the reality of mobile POS is beginning to set in for early adopters, who are beginning to see some of the limits—and counterintuitive aspects—of the technology.

Eight months into a controversial customer-tracking mobile trial, Nordstrom (NYSE:JWN) has halted the effort. Although Nordstrom took a lot of criticism for the mostly misunderstood program from consumer media, it’s not clear whether the project ended as a result of the criticism or the trial had simply run its course. The trial’s purpose was straightforward: to use routine signals coming from shopper’s mobile devices to count how many people showed at Nordstrom and, critically, which were repeat visitors (and, if so, how many times they had previously visited, dates they visited and where in the store they went). Nordstrom had maintained that it was only seeing anonymous data, meaning that it didn’t know the names of the shoppers being tracked.

The trial was controversial for a reason other than consumers’ fears that their privacy was somehow being invaded.The problem is that Euclid was able to see cross-retail activity. That means that it saw when, for example, a Nordstrom shopper left Nordstrom without visiting POS and then her mobile signal appeared 20 minutes later inside Macy’s, where she ended her visit with that always-desired visit to POS. (Note: That was just an example. Other than Nordstrom, we’re not identifying which retailers are using Euclid.) The fact that Nordstrom is only receiving anonymous data (or so it says) doesn’t mean that its rivals all are similarly limited. This is a key industry problem with many forms of mobile information gathering.

Some Marks & Spencer customers have reported that the U.K. chain’s contactless payment terminals have taken money from contactless cards even when those cards were still in purses or wallets a foot or more away—and in at least one case, the grabby POS behavior was repeatable.

The retailer recently rolled out contactless point-of-sale terminals to 644 U.K. stores and reportedly processes more than 230,000 contactless transactions every week. But several customers told the BBC that they had the experience of inserting a chip-and-PIN card in the PINpad’s slot, but being issued a receipt for a contactless card that was nowhere near the PINpad. The contactless system isn’t supposed to work at distances of more than about two inches.

Sometimes, doing the right thing can mean saying no to what shoppers might think is the right thing. Victoria’s Secret (NYSE:LTD) recently found itself in the middle of a challenging issue when the daughter of a breast cancer survivor started campaigning vigorously—including helping to get 120,000 signatures on a petition—to get the apparel retailer to start offering mastectomy bras.

The truth is that Victoria’s Secret has been a longtime champion of cancer issues, having donated more than $1.6 million to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation and the American Cancer Society to fund breast cancer research, education, screening and treatment. It’s also donated some $10 million (over two years) to fund cancer research at the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center. But the company was in the awkward position of knowing that it couldn’t do mastectomy bras in the proper way.

Walmart (NYSE:WMT), Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) and more than a dozen other retailers who applied for their own top-level domains (TLDs) were expecting to see them rolled out starting this year. But the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is running into more delays in approving the vanity domains, and some—including .amazon—look like they may not be available to retailers at all.

The problem comes down to the fact that anyone can object to a TLD that has special significance beyond being a trademark, and far more objections have been filed over the nearly 2,000 applications for the new TLDs. In .amazon’s case, there’s a South American river with the same name (what a coincidence, huh?)—and several South American countries believe that’s a good reason for Amazon not to get control of .amazon.

As Walmart was reporting its first same-store sales drop in seven quarters along with a barely increasing profit on Thursday (May 16), it also detailed its impressive IT and e-commerce growth. Quarterly online sales soared more than 30 percent as the chain kept boosting its number of self-checkout POS units (a 38 percent boost in that quarter alone). “Customer response (to self-checkout) has been positive, with utilization across the chain up more than 300 basis point years over year,” reported Bill Simon, Walmart’s senior U.S. executive. And even while reports continue that Walmart staff cutbacks are slowing down its ability to stock its shelves in a timely manner, Simon spoke of using IT magic to improve efficiency and get those shelves loaded again.

“In the back rooms, projects like MyGuide and OneTouch also enabled improvements in stocker productivity by helping to facilitate the process of moving merchandise from the truck to the shelf and prioritizing work for our associates,” Simon said. “In the first quarter, these initiatives contributed to an increase of more than 3 percent cases handled per work hour.”

Legal columnist Mark Rasch recently received a $25 debit card as an honorarium for giving a speech. To “activate” the gift card from GreenDot.com, he had to give them his name, address, telephone number, Social Security number, user ID, PIN, and answer to three security questions – all that just for 25 bucks. In fact, what he really did was to open a bank account with $25 and a monthly maintenance fee of $4.95. He apparently agreed to all of this on the website of GreenDot.com under their terms of service. But that’s not all he agreed to.

Years ago, he got a Wachovia stored value card, which similarly had outrageous fees – fees for putting money in, taking it out, checking the balance, loading the card, not loading the card, as well as an annual fee, monthly fees, etc. It amounted to usurious interest rates and fees of over 3000 percent. When he called to dispute one of the fees, the person on the other end told him that his wife (who had just handed him the phone) had authorized the fee–she did not, and he knew this because he was standing right there. That’s when Wachovia said they had recorded the call. To a litigator, them’s fightin’ words.

The myth of showrooming—the suggestion that tons of shoppers are flooding stores to only use them as a physical showroom as they had always intended to purchase the product at Amazon—lives on. But a survey conducted in late April by Bizrate Insights is helping to add a little clarity. First, showrooming really doesn’t happen very often. But more interestingly, when it does, it’s more likely to be within the same chain. That’s a problem all right, but the name of that problem isn’t showrooming. It’s internal politics.

Bizrate surveyed more than 9,000 shoppers (between April 24-30) who had just completed an online purchase at one of their e-tailers. The first—and arguably most meaningful—stat is an overwhelming 78.15 percent of those online purchasers had not looked at those products in any physical store. No surprise there, but it’s a key number to remember the next time someone shouts about how showrooming is gutting brick-and-mortars. When they zeroed in on that remaining 21.85 percent of shoppers who had looked instore before buying online, most of them (54 percent) ended up buying from the same chain.

Amazon has formally responded to a lawsuit from two of its onetime sellers—in which the sellers said Amazon held their money for more than 90 days, in violation of state law—by essentially saying, “We won’t see you in court, buddy.” Amazon’s position is that a mandatory check-off box on its site means that sellers are not allowed to sue, having agreed to settle all disputes via arbitration.

Amazon’s position is very direct: that by agreeing to be a seller, the merchant has to abide by the terms of the agreement, which includes arbitration. The sellers’ legal position is focused on how long Amazon held the money and that it violates state law, which sets 10 days as the limit. By violating Washington state law, the action goes beyond the contract (and its arbitration clause) and needs to be settled by a government court, in open proceedings. Amazon’s contract sets a maximum time of 90 days and the lawsuit contends that it didn’t even meet that deadline.

PayPal is offering free credit, debit, check and PayPal processing for qualifying merchants until the end of 2013. The catch: The retailer has to trade in a cash register for a PayPal-compatible point-of-sale system, according to a blog post by PayPal president David Marcus on Tuesday (May 14). The promotion will go live in June, although applications are being accepted now, Marcus wrote. He didn’t give any other details of the deal, such as how much trade-in value a retailer will get in order to buy a PayPal-equipped POS from Erply, Leapset, Leaf, NCR Silver, ShopKeep or Vend, or exactly what “free” means when it comes to processing costs.

But to qualify for the promotion, merchants currently must be primarily using an old-fashioned system such as a cash register, and PayPal may send out employees to collect the register and verify the system upgrade.

A U.S. payment card processor was attacked in February as part of a $40 million cyberheist, federal prosecutors said last Thursday (May 9)—but they didn’t identify who the processor was. That left retailers no way of knowing whether their processor was the one that thieves breached to gain essentially unlimited access to the processor’s systems, potentially including merchant card data.

It wasn’t until Sunday that the mystery breach victim was revealed to be EnStage, a processor that’s headquartered in Silicon Valley but outsources its processing to a site in India. And it’s still not certain whether any merchant card data was actually stolen in the breach.

One of the most challenging retail sales issues is trying to market products to children. The pitch made to sell a cereal, game, toy or piece of clothing to a child will be different than the one aimed at a parent or guardian. That’s tricky when the two are often standing next to each other. A child pitch might focus on a cereal’s taste, with an adult pitch focusing on nutrition and price. Or a toy message to a younger customer might emphasize fun, while the adult pitch speaks of education. What if digital signage and in-aisle displays could simultaneously make different sales pitches to children and adults?

Through the use of lenticular technology, it’s quite possible. Indeed, it’s being used today for something of a much more serious nature. A Spanish operation called the Aid To Children and Adolescents At Risk Foundation has created a series of street signage that was designed to send a message to a potentially abused child, understanding that the abuser could very well be standing right him to the child.

Sears Holdings has a new chief information officer. On Thursday (May 9), the chain said Jeff Balagna will become executive VP and CIO. Balagna arrives at Sears from drug maker Eli Lilly, where he was CIO for just over a year. Before that, he was CIO at Carlson Cos., the corporate parent of restaurant chain T.G.I. Fridays and Radisson Hotels, and later CEO of Carlson Marketing, a spinoff that specialized in loyalty programs.

What’s not clear is what has become of Keith Sherwell, Sears’ highly visible (and now former) CIO.

The scenario is tempting. Retailers can have so much richer information about shoppers when they leverage mobile app data, including knowing when any one of those shoppers comes into one of your stores, roughly where they go and anything they scan. Although that’s all true, it’s also data that is about only a small percentage of your shoppers, and it’s about your most loyal shoppers. Would extrapolation of that information yield any accurate trends about the rest of your potential shopper population?

Placed, a mobile geolocation vendor specializing in retail, found some intriguing stats when it was reviewing some of its retail findings. It found that the number of Barnes & Noble shoppers who were older than 55 increased 3.4 percent (for the month being probed) and that the number of customers earning fewer than $50,000/year decreased 2.2 percent. It noticed that Kohl’s said its shoppers who earned more than $100,000 increased by 1.8 percent. And Target saw the largest increase in physical visits in the Midwest and Northeast regions of the U.S. Clearly, without many months (and perhaps years) of trend data, those stats are meaningless. But it does illustrate the kinds of insights that are possible when overlaying mobile geolocation tracking with CRM and demographic data.

Data brokers are now in the sights of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and that could affect some retailers’ customer-information systems. The FTC sent out letters last week warning that some brokers might be violating federal law by collecting and selling information on individuals, even if the information is publicly available.

There’s no indication that any retailers are being targeted directly by the FTC. But increasingly, retailers that collect large amounts of customer data through CRM or loyalty programs are using additional data they acquire from brokers to fill in the gaps as they build a picture of customers. Some chains even use data as minimal as a name and Zip code, plus broker-provided data, to get a complete CRM record on a customer from a single transaction.

Retail security experts have long argued that shoppers in-store provide more security identification potential than those online and that shoppers phoning into a call center offer the least. But a major U.K. bank is using biometrics to authenticate telephone customers by using the customers’ pre-recorded vocal patterns. Could the same approach help reduce fraud pushed through retail call centers?

The bank, Barclays Wealth and Investment Management, uses 20 to 30 seconds of the conversation with the phone agent and compares the audio WAV file to a sample taken from that customer earlier. If the software thinks it’s a match, the agent is silently signaled that the customer’s voice has been verified. If the software does not find a match, agents are supposed to use their regular security questions to verify.

Target (NYSE:TGT) has started a trial program with Facebook, where its customers get discounts on products on services that are pushed through the social network, if they buy them inside a Target store. Bafflingly, the effort prohibits users from using the program to work with Target.com, even though that would be the much easier and intuitive way for shoppers to use the service.

This is far from the first time that Target has talked up its commitment to a merged channel/omnichannel strategy, while delivering something that seems to force shoppers to stay in whatever channel Target is pushing at that moment. Consider the chain’s giftcard digital strategy deployed during last year’s holiday season.

The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has approved a final rule allowing publicly traded companies to disclose “material nonpublic information” to the public through social media. In other words, if you have something you want to say to the public, instead of releasing a press release or putting it on your webpage, now you can comply with SEC rules by simply sending a tweet. But, as the Associated Press learned when its Twitter feed was hijacked, it’s not entirely clear when you send a tweet that it’s actually you who sent that tweet.

Companies spend a great deal of money to manage their social media presence, penned legal columnist Mark Rasch. They hire consultants and experts to craft a message that they will be putting out on Twitter. They monitor these networks for disgruntled customers and respond when customers mention their names. However, because of the inherent insecurity of social networks, companies need to do more to ensure that there Twitter feeds, Facebook pages and other social networking sites are secure. Otherwise, like the Associated Press learned, social networking can be decidedly antisocial.

Regional convenience-store chain Mapco Express (NYSE:DK) said on Monday (May 6) that thieves may have stolen credit and debit card information from all 377 of its stores during March and April.

“The hackers accessed the payment processing systems used in all of our stores from March 19-25, in certain stores from April 20-21, 2013, and at two stores in Goodlettsville and Nashville, Tenn., from April 14-15, 2013. If you used your credit or debit card at one of these locations during these time periods, you card data may have been compromised,” the retailer said in a statement.

Now that the U.S. Senate has passed its bill to allow states to force online retailers to collect sales tax, the question for both brick-and-mortar chains and E-tailers is how quickly—or slowly—the bill will move through the House on its way to becoming law. The 69-27 vote on the Marketplace Fairness Act on Monday (May 6) was lopsided, as expected. But that may be the end of any foregone conclusions as the bill heads into a much less certain future.

One assumption has already gone by the boards: House Speaker John Boehner plans to send the bill to the House Judiciary Committee, instead of the Ways and Means Committee, which would normally handle tax legislation. The Judiciary chairman, Robert Goodlatte, has said he has reservations about the bill, and hasn’t yet scheduled any hearings on it. And as anyone who has followed the progress of this over the years knows, in a Congressional committee, the chairman can decide whether a bill lives or dies, no matter how the rest of his colleagues might vote.

The idea of retailers assessing customers’ value based on their social media influence—rather than what they personally spend—is not new. But the challenge of meaningfully figuring that out is still huge. American Airlines on Tuesday (May 7) announced that it was going to offer people who have a high social influence free access to its airport lounges. On the plus side, this is one of the first major programs to offer shoppers a concrete item of value (people pay a lot to join airline clubs) in exchange for having a high social influence number. The downside is that the company calculating the social influence number—a vendor called Klout—has taken the easy way out. It simply counts up the Twitter followers and Facebook friends (and other social media stats) and looks at forwarded Tweets.

It doesn’t take the next logical step and try and determine actual purchasing clout. For example, the most meaningful number would be how many dollars of purchases did that shopper’s Tweets generate? It’s nice if someone has a lot of Twitter followers and if they Tweet that the shoes on your homepage now are must-haves. But an influence rating needs to factor in what happened after that Tweet went out. Did it deliver 48 purchases of that product from the recipients of that Tweet?