Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

When it comes to loyalty, many retailers are stuck in the 1990s. Does anyone else find it funny that in a world where you can very easily have a video conference with your kids from a $500 tablet over free Wi-Fi from a random hotel, we’re expected to keep a 3.3- x 2.2-inch piece of plastic in our wallets to get benefits from some of our favorite retailers? All of this, pens Retail Columnist Todd Michaud, in an area—such as CRM—where the application of technology could directly impact a retailer’s top and bottom lines.

When a customer walks into a store and gives a payment card to an associate, who charges it on a store-branded mobile device, is that customer interacting with that retailer? If that device is using Square, the answer is “no,” but the customer won’t know that. If an E-mail address is requested, is it for Square or that retailer?

If a marketing opt-in question is posed, who is posing it? And how will customers react when they later learn they weren’t sharing with whom they thought they were sharing? Bad news: This is not hypothetical. There is a broader issue at play here. With any of the third-party mobile payment efforts—Google Wallet, PayPal, ISIS, maybe even Apple—there is the potential for this type of confusion.

Speed-tuning for retail Web sites may have finally hit a wall. A report released Wednesday (Jan. 25) says Nike, JCPenney, JCrew and Amazon had the fastest retail sites in 2011. But the survey also notes that the most popular and profitable sites are actually slower to load than the average site, because they contain so much content, and that content delivery networks don’t actually speed up load times.

In theory, load times of 3 seconds or more should cost retailers half their customers. If that’s true, E-tailers should be going out of business. Maybe it’s time to dump those theories.

When the $7.3 billion Hy-Vee regional grocery chain on Monday (Jan. 23) rolled out its in-store mobile app, it encouraged customers to use Twitter to report out-of-stock items. It’s a wonderful move, acknowledging—and addressing—a communication hole that exists because of an outdated management structure.

In a typical chain store, what happens when a customer discovers a problem, be it an incorrect price label or an out-of-stock or expired product? It’s up to the customer to track down an associate. What happens then? Usually nothing, because it’s quite unlikely it’s the primary responsibility of that employee to deal with that problem.

In the power struggle between retail marketing and retail IT, IT is getting its server farms kicked. It started with E-Commerce and is now growing with mobile and social. What has to go? If it can go in the cloud, get rid of it. E-Mail? Gone. Web hosting? Out of here. CRM? Exit, stage right. If it can be easily outsourced by specialist firms or even done by people in the business unit, you need to let it go.

It’s time to evict Web and mobile app development, and pretty much any marketing initiative that isn’t core to your business. Heresy? Certainly, pens Retail Columnist Todd Michaud. But it’s necessary.

As retail rapidly moves to integrate mobile into almost every aspect of its customer interactions, many in IT and Loss Prevention are wisely scared about the security holes that will crop up during the rush. One such exec, William Titus, LP VP at Sears, said on Tuesday (Jan. 17) that one of his biggest fears involves mobile electronic receipts.

“The E-receipt problem is that the customer now has a valid receipt. I can’t bring it in. I’m not checking it off and signing off on it. So the ability to use that fraudulently increases unless you have a true returns management system,” Titus said.

Mobile payment is going to change retail in an unknown number of unknown ways, and your lawyers will have healthy employment. Consider in-aisle checkout and shoplifting rules, pens Legal Columnist Mark Rasch. Today, customers who put products in a concealed place—a pocket, backpack, purse, etc.—while still in the store can be convicted of shoplifting even if they have yet to reach the POS checkout area.

The conceal part of that action is considered evidence of criminal intent. Now let’s see you try and enforce that rule when you have in-aisle mobile checkout.

Mobile wallets face a time-honored Catch-22: because very few stores support the technology, consumers have very little reason to bother getting it. Exactly how barren is this dial-tone desert for Google Wallet, currently the only actively being trialed game in mobile town?

We have our early clues from the CIO of the $2.5-billion 481-store Guess chain, one of the first test sites for Google Wallet in “a couple of stores” in California since May. In total, how many customers have tried Google Wallet? Says CIO Michael Relich: “Five or six.” Not 500 or 600 customers, mind you. Five or six.

Walk into one of about 25 Guess stores this week and you’ll see customer-accessible iPads in the men’s, women’s and accessories departments and even in the dressing rooms. “For the cost of a kiosk, I can put in four or five of these,” said Guess CIO Michael Relich. “This is the consumerization of IT.”

But the Guess iPad trial is hardly being done to save costs. The flexibility of the tablets and sharp, customer-friendly graphics make the devices a much more effective way to show demos and to locate merchandise, check inventory and do anything else that a kiosk would normally do.

How’s this for ironic? Retailers complain about how difficult it is to get shoppers to explore their social media efforts. And yet these same retailers have the almost undivided attention of these shoppers, often for hours every month, in an environment where the retailer has complete control of the surroundings, the store layout and the staff.

Almost all retail marketing efforts are based on the not-so-simple premise of getting people to purchase from them, either online or in person. The problem, pens Retail Columnist Todd Michaud, is likely a mesh of old-mentality thinking with a heavy dose of channel conflict.

Amazon is floating the idea—via a patent filing—of launching a social service. Whether it would be a dating site or a potential business partner finder or just a more intelligent way of choosing who to hang with online, that’s not clear.

But it is clear that Amazon is drooling over its vast CRM files and trying to figure out how much money it can make off them.

If detecting a customer’s age is tricky when the customer is standing right in front of a kiosk, it’s an even bigger problem for E-Commerce—one with hard legal consequences. Just after Christmas, a California father discovered his 14-year-old son had successfully ordered a water pipe and tobacco through Amazon—both illegal for minors to buy in California.

Age verification is something mail-order vendors have struggled with for years, and mostly given up on. But E-tailers can no longer use impossibility as an excuse. A recent federal law requires age-verification for tobacco sold online—and other age-controlled items can’t be far behind.

A U.K. buying site that tracks the frequency of online customer reviews said on December 8 that retailers shouldn’t expect a flood of product reviews on the run-up to Christmas. If the usual trends hold, there should be a lull in reviews between October and New Year’s when the pace of review writing should pick up again, according to DooYoo.com.

As obvious as that seems (after all, how can a gift recipient review a gift until it’s actually opened?), there may be a few more subtleties in when retailers can expect reviews—and what type of reviews they can expect.

As is our tradition, StorefrontBacktalk shuts down for the last two weeks in December, due to the fact that y’all are far too busy (a) supporting the biggest selling weeks of the year until December 25th, (b) supporting the biggest returns-and-exchanges week of the year after December 25th and (c) closing the quarterly books until December 31st on what everyone hopes will be a bigger year than 2010.

That means our next regular weekly issue will arrive on January 5th, 2012. In the meantime, everything else will still be live (the Web sites, our Kindle version, our Twitter tweets, our mobile sites, etc.). And we’ll, as always, send out breaking news alerts if circumstances merit.

Google Wallet isn’t safe, at least not on the consumer end. That’s the conclusion from security firm viaForensic’s analysis released on Monday (Dec. 12). Yes, Google does a good job of blocking man-in-the-middle attacks. And having a PIN to open the wallet restores some security that Visa stripped out when it brought Chip-and-PIN to the U.S.

But Google also stores far too much customer information unencrypted on the phone—and if the phone is malware-infected or stolen, that data becomes far too easy for a thief to get at.

A message from our beloved business side: As the NRF Big Show happens next month, StorefrontBacktalk has a couple of last-minute slots for anyone wanting to communicate with NRF attendees. In mid-January, as our readers leave their postmortem holiday shopping meetings with the list of everything that went wrong, every feature management wants to add and a wishlist of products to make it all, it’s a nice time message.

We will also be adding several content channels next year—including several new weekly podcast series, more monthlies, events in addition to our usual weekly and monthly newsletters, and Web sites—and if your marketing people have any interest in getting involved, we now have new opportunities. Some of these new channels were specifically created to enable smaller vendors, with much more limited resources, into our community. If your marketers want to get your brand in the middle of these discussions, please drop us a note.

A 26-hour (minus one minute) Amazon in-store mobile price-comparison experiment starting Friday (Dec. 9) is scaring a lot of retailers, who fear that allowing consumers to scan barcodes, compare prices and buy from within the store will hurt them. One retail lobbying group objects to Amazon taking advantage of its sales-tax-free status to make in-store sales.

Much of the concern may have little foundation, because Amazon has low-balled the incentives to such an extent that it’s unclear if many consumers will even bother to try it.

The ongoing debate about how far retailers can—and should—go when tracking customers through their mobile devices is getting confused, thanks to the illegal misinterpretations made by some of the vendors pushing these approaches.

But Legal Columnist Mark Rasch wants to be clear: Be ahead of the curve in tracking consumers, and do it before case law and legislation have a chance to play themselves out, and you could find yourself with legal headaches for years—potentially having to somehow remove all of that ill-gotten data from your systems.

Maybe using mobile phone signals to track customers isn’t looking so sweet after all. On Monday (Nov. 28) two U.S. shopping malls said they stopped using a people-tracking system that used mobile signals, after the malls’ developer got letters from U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY), who threatened to call in the Federal Trade Commission to investigate privacy issues. That’s despite the fact that the system is designed to be anonymous—and the system’s legality is untested.

There are some ironies in all this. One is that, with all the genuinely invasive customer-tracking technologies online and even in malls, the mobile signals used in this one really are anonymous to everyone but the mobile phone operators. Another is that if the system were actually targeting individual customers and the data were used by store associates, it might actually be more palatable to shoppers. After all, when location data is anonymously collected, it feels creepy. But when an associate knows you’ve already been to Wet Seal and Nordstrom, that just means she knows your tastes and can serve you better—or at least it feels that way.

The elves at JCPenney have come up with something rather clever: a mobile app that allows for gift recipients to hear custom voice messages from a gift-giver. And a program that packs a multi-layered CRM data-collection punch. The recipient scans a QR code that is taped to the gift and instantly hears the gift-giver’s voice relaying a holiday-friendly message. (In my family, it would something sweet like “Here are the ^#&! gloves you wanted. So where’s the $50 you borrowed from me?”)

The reason this idea has such potential is the chain is using the mobile device solely as a tool, where both JCPenney and the app quickly get out of the way and let the recipient and the gift-giver truly communicate. From a CRM perspective, it’s clever for JCPenney because they set it up to force the system to call the gift-giver back to record the message. Therefore, the chain can gather lots of mobile numbers for later messaging use and, depending on future tracking purposes, perhaps much more through in-store interactions. The first step, though, is to collect those numbers and this is a wonderfully innocuous way to start.

The mundane underappreciated customer kiosk has been undergoing some radical changes recently. Among the most far-reaching and/or strangest: one that serves live crabs, offers ice cream in exchange for a literally measurable smile, a porn kiosk that asks a lot of specific questions and promises privacy protections, a Pepsi social kiosk that allows you to buy soda for strangers, a convenience store sandwich machine that uses privacy to boost sales, a wine kiosk that detects if you’re already drunk and a machine that measures customers for custom suits.

But this new kiosk out of Europe may just take the record (although that live crab-dispensing kiosk is pretty hard to beat). It makes pizza—from scratch. This thing shows customers its realtime process of kneading dough, forming the round, adding tomato sauce and toppings and then baking it—all in three minutes. A kiosk that creates and delivers a fresh pizza may not play well in every retailer environment, but it’s worth a shot. Honestly, Nordstrom, would a pizza kiosk in your aisles really kill you?

Just a reminder that StorefrontBacktalk now has five free monthly newsletters, each one focusing on a different key area for us: E-Commerce, Mobile, PCI/Security, In-Store and CRM. The Monthlies—see the descriptions here—are available to anyone via a quick E-mail sign up.

The Monthlies publish the first few days of each month, and they are a great way to catch up on all of the news in a given area. So before you miss the December Monthlies, sign up for your free copy.

The biggest practical challenge to in-aisle mobile checkout is verifying the receipt as the customer tries to leave. Verification is not foolproof, but it will dramatically slow traffic, which is counterproductive. What retailers need is a way to associate that phone with the customer and the purchase, and to track all three throughout the store, up to the exit. Fortunately—and simultaneously unfortunately—the very nature of a smartphone provides just such a wireless way.

By using the phone’s signals, the store could track that customer and could know exactly when that customer is approaching the exit and alert the greeter/loss-prevention associate to the approach. No need to verify the receipt, no need to stop the customer at all (unless the greeter sees something beyond the purchased items, but that’s always been the case). There are clearly hurdles to this approach. But it’s one of the few that addresses most of the current in-aisle mobile payment headaches.

Wal-Mart’s newest mobile acquisition may be a lot more than the world’s largest retailer is admitting. On November 10, the chain announced that it acquired Grabble, a tiny Australian mobile POS startup that can deliver receipts to customers’ phones. Wal-Mart also did a good job of scrubbing the Internet of information about what Grabble actually makes: hardware that attaches to POS systems to capture purchases and other customer data in real time, so that information can be used without having to change existing back-end POS software. Mobile receipts are just one obvious application.

It never really made much sense that Wal-Mart would go all the way to Australia for a mobile-receipts startup—that’s hardly a new idea. But a box that plugs into a POS, so it’s easy to experiment on a store-by-store basis with everything from mobile receipts and coupons to plug-and-play CRM, inventory and analytics systems, sounds like it’s worth the trip. And that could explain why Wal-Mart worked so hard to make most details about Grabble disappear.

Lord & Taylor recently tried an experiment where high-school girls were able to purchase a prom dress and then claim it for that event at that school, to theoretically make it less likely some other girl would show up at the prom wearing the same dress. The idea is interesting but limited, in the sense that the same dress is being sold at other retailers. It also suffers from the problem of only working when the customer bothers to go through the tagging process.

Why not use ZIP codes (IP address locations are typically too inaccurate and/or cover too wide an area to be practical for a prom no-duplicates strategy) and a high school pull-down menu (with a behind-the-scenes list of each school’s primary ZIP codes) to flag likely repeats? This approach pushes this idea beyond high-school proms and could be used to flag apparel conflicts at any type of event or formal function. Weddings? Theater? This could even be helpful beyond events. What about giving an option to indicate the name of an employer? Depending on the size of the employer, it might be nice to know if that business suit you’ve been eyeing has already been purchased by anyone else within that company.