Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

The European Union is considering new rules that will enable it to fine retailers as much as five percent of their annual revenue—yep, you read that right—for breaching EU privacy rules. The rules would also cover the protection of payment-card data.

If enacted with enforcement teeth, this could be huge. Not only are the threatened amounts (at least the ceiling) orders of magnitude beyond what major U.S. chains have been threatened with by card brands and processors, but the threats are far more realistic.

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.

Wal-Mart on Thursday (Dec. 1) officially rolled out its Shopycat Facebook app, which lets consumers see WalmartLabs-fueled gift suggestions for all of your Facebook friends, based on their posts and stated likes/dislikes. Wal-Mart said that “Shopycat is designed to trigger gift ideas for friends ranging from music, books and movies to games and electronics, making gifting more fun and saving on time and the pressures of discovering the perfect gift.” About time that someone put an end to this pressure to find the perfect gift. Effort, thought and attention are simply making America weak. When I think gifts for loved ones, I think compromise and just get it over with. (And yes, that fits in so well with the image that Wal-Mart is trying to shake.)

The idea is indeed interesting, as the Wal-Mart algorithms have already done the work of predicting what would be desirable. Then again, does it factor in that something of strong interest to someone has likely already been purchased by—or for—them? One nice touch about Shopycat is that it doesn’t technically limit its suggestions to walmart.com and Wal-Mart stores. But testing on the app certainly shows that the overwhelming majority of choices are—coincidentally—only on walmart.com.

The biggest E-Commerce surprise of Black Friday was probably what didn’t happen: The problem-plagued Target.com didn’t crash. Despite an absent E-Commerce chief for six weeks before the big day, and what some saw as a half-hearted defense of the site by Target’s CEO on an earnings call, the chain’s online store weathered the Black Friday-Cyber Monday weekend with just some performance degradation—about the same as other major E-tailers.

The most likely reason it survived: Target.com deep-sixed its clever but ill-fated experiment in limiting the number of customers who could be on the site at the same time.

Amidst all of the reports this week detailing record-breaking revenue for the start of the holiday shopping season, one critical point has been overshadowed. While E-Commerce sales have indeed been strong, the rate of increase has been essentially flat for the third year in a row. Indeed, the rate of increase of sales this year is projected to be lower than either of the other two most recent years. EMarketer’s comparison stats only go back to 2007, showing a 19.4 growth in 2007′s holiday season, an unusual drop in 2008 (-7.8 percent) and then three similar growth stats for 2009( 16.9 percent), 2010 (17.4 percent) and 2011 (16.8 percent). On the happy side, in this economy, a steady 16-17 percent annual growth rate is pretty nice. And given the steady (other than 2008) E-Commerce revenue increases through this year’s projected $46.7 billion online holiday season, the slight drop of growth percentage is certainly acceptable.

But with the revenue hype fest that has been going on the last few days, it’s worth remembering that this year is simply projected to have the same kind of season-over-season growth that it’s enjoyed the last couple of years.

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.

Distributed denial-of-service attacks on commercial Web sites have taken a nasty turn since last year: They’re now throwing four times as many packets, and the type of packets are more likely to bring targeted sites to their knees. That’s according to security vendor Prolexic Technologies, which on Thursday (Nov. 17) is slated to release a report that says since Q3 2010, attackers have shifted from attacks that aim at Web servers to those that target routers—a change that could require retailers to put up much stronger defenses against brute-force attacks.

It’s hard enough defending against a botnet firing an endless stream of “show me your homepage” requests at an E-Commerce site. Retailers have already seen those attacks amped up to 50 times their previous level during a few days after Black Friday last year. But the new style of attack (so far aimed mainly at online gambling sites) is likely to require a lot more hardware to pick off nasty packets—and it’s hardware that’s only necessary until the attack ends, at which point it’s very expensive bric-a-brac.

E-Commerce has been depending on the trustworthiness of strangers for a long time—customers typing in what might easily be stolen payment-card numbers from thousands of miles away. That might be changing soon, and with a real advantage for E-tailers. On Monday (Nov. 14), MasterCard and Intel announced a push to install a contactless reader in laptops, so they’ll function as PayPass readers to take contactless payment cards—with a lot less trust required.

A MasterCard spokesman wouldn’t commit to the card brand accepting such transactions as “card present,” at least not at this point. It’s early—MasterCard and Intel expect to get all the authentication issues nailed down by 2012, with actual payments by laptop-owning online shoppers starting shortly thereafter. But anything that uses built-in hardware to close the gulf between the retailer and the physical card should help push interchange rates down.

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.

What, if anything, should retailers do differently about tablet computers, in an M-Commerce context? Not much, it turns out. But it’s hard to glean that from the flood of stats out there. Consider some numbers IBM Coremetrics has been talking up recently. The company reported that “shoppers using an iPad will lead to more retail purchases more often per visit than other mobile devices,” with iPad conversion rates at 6.8 percent versus 3.6 percent for all mobile devices. That may be true, of course. But it’s also obvious that the larger screen of a tablet will enable more activity than the typical smartphone. What if IBM Coremetrics had said that shoppers using a laptop or a desktop computer will deliver more purchases than a smartphone? What if IBM Coremetrics had said that shoppers using a laptop or a desktop computer will deliver more purchases than a smartphone?

That said, tablets are becoming quite popular, and a migration of sales from PCs and laptops down to tablets is inevitable. From the chain’s perspective, though, that change may be barely felt, because the tablets will simply be accessing your regular Web site. At best, it might be a slightly tweaked version of your site. Most of the current tablets don’t really need much—if any—tweaking to deliver an acceptable experience.

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.

Given the dominance of the key U.S. holiday next week (we mean Thanksgiving, not Black Friday), StorefrontBacktalk‘s weekly newsletter won’t publish on November 24. Everything else will still be live (the Web sites, our Kindle version, our Twitter tweets, our mobile sites, etc.), but we need a little time off to burn some turkey and over-season some stuffing.

Speaking of which, we want to tap into the knowledge of our audience with a question that has nothing to do with retail technology. One of us here at StorefrontBacktalk is going to try something new for Thanksgiving: Cooking the turkey on a gas grill. The problem is that, well, it’s me. And my Weber grill seems to have two temperature settings: 750 degrees Fahrenheit and OFF. To be precise, it has tons of settings, but those two numbers seem to be the only heat levels the beast is capable of delivering and maintaining. In a short duration grilling (say 5 to 8 minutes), it’s easy to compensate. But when dinner for a dozen people needs to cook for five hours, I’m open to any tricks to get the temperature to get down to 325 degrees and to stay there. Any suggestions? If you do have any suggestions, please E-mail me at Help Evan To Not Turn His Entree Into Sawdust Held Together By Static Electricity.

In retail, social media shares a very narrow attribute with CRM and Web analytics. All three were initially undermined because of the way they were sold to retailers. Specifically, the amount of effort required to extract value from them was criminally understated. A report this week showed the impact of such sales malpractice and slammed some of the largest retailers—including Wal-Mart, Costco, Kmart, Kroger and Macy’s—for either ignoring complaints on their own Facebook pages or being ludicrously slow in responding.

Costco, Kmart and Kroger took the top dishonors, with each chain responding to zero of the complaints lodged against it during the review period (five working days in September). Wal-Mart ignored 41 percent of all legitimate complaints, Macy’s ignored 35 percent of its complaints, Bloomingdale’s ignored 20 percent, Nordstrom ignored 20 percent, Sears ignored 11 percent and Safeway ignored only five percent.

Macy’s is testing a merged version of its brick-and-mortar and online inventory systems chain-wide, and it expects to go live with the new system early in 2012. On Wednesday (Nov. 9), Macy’s CFO Karen Hoguet told an earnings call that “we’re going to be able to do [chain-wide merged inventory] very soon. We’re testing it right now. And early next year, I think we’re going to start doing it more and more, with the systems we have today. Having said that, we are going to invest over time in better systems that allow us to maximize the inventory easier without as much manual intervention, but it’s not going to prevent us from doing the site to store to door.”

That merged inventory will presumably be the base for Macy’s item-level RFID efforts, which are slated to go chain-wide by 2013. Merged inventory could also smooth out some of the kinks in Macy’s Search-and-Send program, which lets one store access inventory from another store and have items shipped directly to a customer. That’s currently in only a few dozen stores, but it should be easy to roll out chain-wide once the merged-channel inventory is in place.

‘Tis the season for Mobile-Commerce hype: On Tuesday (Nov. 8), Sybase and the Mobile Marketing Association announced that, according to an October survey, 62 percent of consumers are “poised to make purchases with their mobile devices this holiday season.” Well, sort of. In fact, the survey of 1,000 consumers offers a slightly grimmer view of M-Commerce: Only 22 percent actually plan to use a mobile phone to buy anything—and that includes people who will just phone a retailer’s call center and order that way.

If this was just another marketing survey that over-hyped its results, it would be one thing. But there’s a serious issue at play here. The holiday shopping season of 2011 is going to be a crucial one in retail M-Commerce, the one where meaningful purchases start to happen and where millions of consumers will try—or consider trying—M-Commerce. And it is where they will be satisfied or dissatisfied. Even more crucially, there is a critical expectation issue at play. What will your CEO and board expect from mobile? Surveys will create the bogus impression that a huge number of mobile transactions will happen this month (the 61 percent from this survey’s headline is a perfect example), and when that doesn’t happen, you’re going to be blamed.

Apple is about to complete its conversion to a merged-channel retailer—and maybe put its first stake in the ground for mobile payments, too. Most critically, Apple is changing how it doles out bonuses and commissions, which is the only way to get anyone’s attention. Sales will no longer be credited to the division (online or in-store) that collects the money, but to whoever actually delivers the product. On November 3, Apple is expected to roll out a new system that will merge its in-store and mobile-commerce channels, offer a 12-minute turnaround time for M-Commerce orders and reward brick-and-mortar stores for pushing customers to shop online and pick up in-store. And—as you may have heard—it’s letting customers do self-checkout, too.

If that sounds like an afterthought, it very nearly is, even though self-checkout alone would be a big deal for most chains. What Apple is primarily trying to do is demolish the wall between stores and M-Commerce. It may not work—that 12-minute turnaround promise may just be impossible, and some of Apple’s plans for prioritizing customers can collapse when things get busy. But if it does work, it may also represent Apple’s demonstration of how it plans to offer mobile payments to other retailers—without either NFC or mimicking a plastic card.

In unrelated trials this week, Debenhams—the UK’s second-largest department store—and eBay are trying to push the mobile limits of creating stores with no physical infrastructure. But unlike Web sites, these virtual stores exist in a specific place to which customers must travel. In Debenhams’ case, a human being at that location would see nothing, except other human beings oddly pointing their phones around the sky.

The virtual store is not new. In a much publicized trial this summer, Tesco re-created almost all of the merchandise from one of its stores as a series of high-res photographs with QR codes on the walls of a South Korean subway. But the Debenhams’ effort takes it farther than any other retailer. At least consumers arriving at that subway would see pictures of products and could guess what to do. In the Debenhams’ trial, consumers were directed to very prominent street corners in London (Trafalgar Square), Manchester (Albert Square), Birmingham (Centenary Square), Cardiff (Cardiff Castle) and Glasgow (George Square). They then loaded a mobile app onto their phones. If the geolocation of the phones matched what the app had been programmed to look for, it would display a ghostly image of a dress.

Google is finally beginning to tighten the screws on users of its Google Maps. Well, sort of. On October 26, the search giant said that, starting Jan. 1, 2012, it will begin charging $4 per 1,000 views through its Maps API—but only for Web sites that exceed 25,000 map-views in a single day. Because Google is only counting the initial map access in that 25,000, it should be pretty easy for retailers to calculate whether this change will cost them anything at all.

For many retailers using Google Maps just on “find a store” pages, that pricing pretty much wipes out any incentive to jump ship to Microsoft’s or Yahoo’s map offerings—changing and testing the code would probably cost more than paying the overage fee on a few busy days. (If you’re a heavier user, because you have Google Maps in logistics or other geotracking applications, you may want to consider your options.) The actual pain may be trivial this time around, but it’s still a reminder that free Internet services probably won’t stay free forever—even from Google, which really wants retailers to be its new best friends.

Macy’s, Target and Kohl’s this week all announced they’ll be opening brick-and-mortar stores at midnight on Black Friday, as the start of holiday shopping keeps carving farther into Turkey Day. That presents a tricky E-Commerce issue, though: When does Black Friday start online? If those door-buster deals show up for E-Commerce shoppers at midnight in New York, that means they’ll be available in San Francisco at 9:00 PM on Thanksgiving night. After all, it seems silly to try to block Web shoppers from buying online before their local stores have opened. (Really, this year you’re going to refuse to take their money?)

But there’s certainly a difference between a marketing event that begins at midnight and one that starts in the middle of prime time on the West Coast. Last year, Kohl’s started its Black Friday sales at 3:00 AM New York time, midnight Pacific time, with Macy’s and Target an hour later. That didn’t make much of a difference online—it was still late-night across the U.S. But wind those times back a few hours, and suddenly it won’t just be night owls who are hammering on E-tail sites.

Envision an in-store system that addresses every customer by name and points out to the customer—out loud, in earshot of other customers—prior purchases, including highly sensitive products. The system would know the customer’s address, relatives, neighbors and friends, and might even mention embarrassing incidents involving the customer as a child. The name of this invasive system is “the friendly shopkeeper,” and almost every corner pharmacy, grocery and hardware store had one back in the 1950s and 1960s—back when we like to think customers were very privacy conscious.

Conventional wisdom is that consumer resistance to invasive marketing consistently softens over time with each new retail tech innovation. But the friendly shopkeeper demonstrates that’s not a linear trend. And there’s a school of thought that says mobile technology may break that trend, too. The potential invasiveness of mobile payments is so intense that customers might rebel and resist all privacy-infringing efforts even more—making mobile dangerously likely to blow up in retailers’ faces.

Level 3 merchants, whose compliance Visa only started making public this summer, have seen their relatively weak compliance numbers drop further, according to new figures the card brand released Monday (Oct. 31). Level 2 chains saw an even stronger drop, while Level 1s continued their improvement trend.

The numbers on their own are somewhat of a concern, given that compliance in any group is supposed to steadily improve. That’s especially true with a new entry, such as Level 3s, which start at such a relatively low level of compliance. In this instance, though, the explanation for the compliance dip might lie in a recent increase in the number of Level 3s trying to get compliant.

Wal-Mart on Monday (Oct. 24) unveiled its Christmas Price Guarantee, whereby the chain promises that if a customer finds a Wal-Mart-purchased item “advertised for less at another store, Wal-Mart will give the customer a giftcard for the difference through December 25. Guaranteed.” Unfortunately, the exceptions and practical limits of the offer have enough strings attached to keep Santa’s elves well-stocked through at least late March.

First off, the world’s largest retailer is excluding any online sites. Really? In late October 2011, you’re still not convinced that E-Commerce isn’t just a fad? Second, it’s a clever move in that once customers purchase an item from their lists, they are unlikely to continue researching and looking for it.

Sears on Wednesday (Oct. 26) made its local-only E-Commerce move, rolling out two new sites (searslocalad.com and kmartlocalad.com) that would limit their displays to just products sold by and available at the most local store. It would also display non-advertised local sale items plus—and this is a nice touch—a preview of items slated to go on sale the following week.

There are two main drivers behind this move. The first is the recent E-Commerce obsession with local: consider Wal-Mart’s local Facebook move two weeks ago. But the second issue is the rapid death of many regional newspapers, which are taking to their graves the local circulars. The Sears local move not only enables the chain to migrate many of those local promotions from dead-tree to pixels, but it also is upgrading the experience. Consider a circular where the ads instantly disappear as soon as the product is out of stock.

A QR code approach that will display different information—and initiate different actions—based on the purchase history of the person scanning it is being evaluated by Home Depot, Target and Macy’s, according to the CEO of the QR vendor that is trying to sell that system. This next-generation QR code tactic leverages tracking codes from the mobile phones to establish a customer history and thereby permit highly customized responses.

“At the scan, we get a certain amount of metadata as a result of the scan itself—operating system, carrier, cell tower being used, etc. We get all of that,” said Scanbuy CEO Mike Wehrs. “We know what that app has scanned in the past.” Indeed, Wehrs argues, the app can secure data from the QR code plus the phone plus online data accessed from a retailer’s loyalty card database. “If the app integrates with their CRM files, it can give a completely customized experience.”

Mobile-commerce sites, take note: Android phones are now outselling all other smartphones in Asia. On October 20, ABI Research reported that in 2011, Android will represent 52 percent of smartphones sold in Asian markets, up from 16 percent last year. (Combined with the 56 percent increase in Asian smartphone sales that ABI reported, that means a stunning five times as many Asian Android phones sold in 2011 as in 2010.) ABI also reported on Monday (Oct. 24) that, worldwide, downloads of Android apps now outpace those for the iPhone by 44 to 31 percent, although Apple users still download twice as many apps per phone.

That doesn’t mean iPhone use has fallen off a cliff—many of those Androids are likely lower-priced phones that are being snapped up by customers who can’t afford Apple’s price tag. But it does mean large numbers of M-Commerce customers will be using Android phones. That could actually make life easier for M-Commerce developers: With the market mainly split between spendthrift iPhone customers and more numerous cheapskate Android users, developers can decide who they want to target and how to make their mobile sites work well with either group—or both.