Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Starbucks revealed just how far it is ahead of everyone else in mobile payments last week, and the answer should be both terrifying and heartening for other retailers. The coffee-house chain said its customers do 2.1 million mobile transactions at Starbucks every week—about 5 percent of all its sales transactions in U.S. stores.

That’s the terrifying part: No other brick-and-mortar retailer comes remotely close to those numbers in mobile payments. The heartening part: It’s possible. Despite all the wheel-spinning from PayPal, Google and Isis when it comes to getting customers to use mobile payments, it can be done. And it’s not something unique to Starbucks customers.

It seems that Macy’s has taken advantage of the retirement of a senior executive to consolidate power to help its ongoing merged-channel strategies. Macy’s created a new C-level position and promoted its EVP for omnichannel strategy to chief omnichannel officer (COO is already taken, so who knows what acronym it will get). The chain also gave the new chief (which, at Macy’s, is a higher rank than EVP) control over IT and logistics.

This power consolidation happened when Thomas L. Cole retired as chief administrative officer following a 41-year career at Macy’s (and companies that Macy’s acquired). That gave Macy’s the ability to promote Robert B. “RB” Harrison from EVP for omnichannel strategy to his new chief role. “Among his duties, Tom has been responsible for systems and logistics for many years. As Tom’s duties were re-assigned, it was decided that systems and logistics fit best under R.B. Harrison, given the increasing omnichannel nature of our business,” said Jim Sluzewski, Macy’s SVP of corporate communications. “In that process, R.B. was promoted to a chief and he joined the company’s executive committee. Tom’s retirement was the trigger point.”

Who actually believes in MSRP, anyway? On January 24, the New York Post breathlessly reported that JCPenney was asking (or maybe just planning to ask) suppliers for a “fake” list price, even if they don’t have one, so the 110-year-old chain could display that price along with JCPenney’s own lower price. The Post was shocked, shocked to find that pricing gimmicks were going on in retail.

The chain denied any fakery, but the real shock is that JCPenney bothered. Customers don’t care about the Manufacturer’s Spurious Retail Price. They care whether JCPenney’s price is lower than Macy’s or Kohl’s, and they can get that information online. Why isn’t JCPenney doing the same thing?

In a move that should send a frightening jolt to retailers, a group of iPhone users in London announced on Monday (Jan. 28) it is in the process of suing Google for online tracking that goes beyond the expectations of those users. On the surface, such legal action against Google falls under the heading of “Join the club.” But there’s actually more danger here than that.

The essence of the London case is that Google and Apple made privacy promises that are being broken. That fact may make it more of a contract law and a deceptive trade practices claim than a criminal case. And even that is dicey, because the news release from the first plaintiff to file a suit indicates it’s less a matter of Google or Apple lying than it is about the companies being vague. But all of that is an issue for the lawyers at Google and maybe Apple. How does this make retailers’ lives miserable? Quite easily.

Major electronics E-tailer Newegg received some good news Tuesday (Jan. 22), when a federal appellate panel overruled a $2.5 million patent ruling against the retailer. The most interesting part of the case, though, was when Soverain Software—the software firm trying to protect its E-Commerce patent—tried to argue that its success is proof that its patents are worthwhile. The Appellate judges looked into that claim.

“Soverain argues that obviousness of all of the claims in suit is negated by the favorable market response that was achieved by Open Market’s Transact product, which Soverain states received ‘widespread recognition in the general media,’ ‘an excellence award from the industry’ and was ‘widely licensed.’” Sounds good. So it would appear that the wide licensing meant Soverain had a lot of fans, right? The Appellate judges’ written decision continued: “Newegg responds with evidence that the Transact system was abandoned by its developers and almost all of its original users. Newegg points out that licenses were taken to avoid the costs of litigation, and not to use the flawed Transact system embodied in its software.”

When there is a retail IT contractual dispute with a software vendor—as is now happening with Lands’ End—that ISV (or cloud or other “as a service” provider) may have a contractual right to terminate access to the software or service, with or without notice.

Under what has been called “digital repossession,” software vendors may even have the right to decide for themselves whether the terms of a contract have been breached and to simply terminate access to the software or the service. The key here, writes StorefrontBacktalk Legal Columnist Mark Rasch, is to make sure both software license agreements and service agreements have a “soft landing” provision that ensures the vendor is paid for its services while limiting the impact of a sudden withdrawal of the service or software.

Lands’ End has landed in a nasty fight over software licensing. On January 17, the Sears mail-order and online subsidiary sued the supplier of its HR and payroll software, Genesys Software Systems, which wants Lands’ End to either pay for a new million-dollar license or pull the plug on the software immediately.

The lawsuit has the tactical advantage of freezing the situation, giving Lands’ End a little more time (very little time) to find a new home for its payroll system. But it’s also an object lesson in software end-of-life issues—that lesson being, “when a vendor has you over a barrel, it doesn’t have to play nice.”

The secret sauce for beating interchange is ACH. That, at least, is the plan of the Walmart-led Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX), according to sources familiar with the payment system being developed by the retailer consortium. By using ACH transactions to debit bank accounts or credit lines instead of going through payment-card brands’ networks, MCX expects to reduce transaction cost to as little as four cents—and cut Visa and card-issuing banks out of the loop.

MCX still hasn’t revealed most of the details of the system, but some things are becoming clear. Others are still up in the air—like whether banks will accept a few pennies per transaction when an ACH withdrawal typically costs them more than that. Also, will banks want to get into such an effort, knowing the toxic politics surrounding any effort to knock out Visa and MasterCard? The much more fundamental issue for MCX is whether it can come up with—and agree to fund—a compelling reason for shoppers to participate. That, coupled with what some retailers—namely, those who have been pitched—see as an overly aggressive approach, has prompted some to question whether MCX can deliver the interchange relief it promises. One example of the pitch approach some have cited: MCX demanding $30,000 from retailers just to see the official PowerPoint. Chains are also being asked to commit to three-year mobile payment app exclusivity, meaning they won’t support any non-MCX mobile payment other than any mobile payment app they have already deployed.

Best Buy’s $50-off fiasco this week is a reminder of a simple fact of merged-channel retail: A little technology usually isn’t enough. Early on Monday (Jan. 21), Best Buy E-mailed a coupon to some customers, offering $50 off most purchases of $100 or more if the customer paid by MasterCard, with the discount good for a week. Word quickly spread on bargain-hunter Web sites, and soon customers were online, reporting their successes ($2,500 in Amazon giftcards for $1,250) and failures (one store manager insisted it must be a hoax). By Monday afternoon, Best Buy had pulled the plug on the offer.

Automating coupon-based offers is fine. But if you’re going to Internet-up paper-style coupons, you really have to go all the way. And these pretty clearly were conceived as paper coupons. One clue comes in the boilerplate on the coupon, which had relatively few restrictions on products that could be bought (no Apple, Sony or Nikon) but also specified the coupon was good in-store only. It also sported classic paper-coupon language, including “No copies.”

In-store mobile payments are still looking for the right technology, with NFC struggling for a foothold and QR codes only successful in pockets (or, more accurately, in Starbucks). But a new smartphone mobile wallet announced on January 18 by China’s Alipay takes a new tack: It communicates via what Alipay describes as “white noise.” (We’re pretty sure what that really means is “it sounds like the hiss of a dial-up modem, just without all the screeching.”) The Alipay wallet isn’t currently supporting POS payments, just data transfers between phones. But there’s no special reason it couldn’t be used for transactions, especially because that’s the business Alipay is in.

True, a hissing phone would be really easy to eavesdrop on, but you’d want that transaction data encrypted anyway. And as retro (and annoying) as it would sound at a POS, a pay-by-hiss system would work even for smartphones without a camera and high-resolution screen—all the phone needs is a speaker and microphone. Still, there’s that hiss, which certainly would be out of place in a tony store and might be inaudible on Black Friday. But maybe there’s a retro solution for both those problems. Acoustic couplers, anyone?

As retailers struggle with how to get shoppers to try mobile payments, PayPal has been experimenting with different approaches. Last month, for example, PayPal set up a booth at a very large New Jersey mall and offered shoppers $10 to try its mobile payment system. But the trial ran into the same issues that have tripped up so many mobile trials: lack of associate and store manager training; an approach that made it awkward for some shoppers (already rushed during December holiday shopping at an extremely crowded mall) to get the incentive; and no reason for customers to try it again after the promotion.

The trial at the 2.1 million square foot Garden State Plaza (about 300 stores) involved six chains and managers at each of the stores discussed the trial, on the condition of anonymity. The chains involved were American Eagle Outfitters, Jamba Juice, Nine West, Champs, Aerie and Foot Action (part of the FootLocker chain). On the plus side, all of the stores reported that some shoppers tried using the app. On the down side, far from all of them were able to do so.

An unorthodox use of Bluetooth is being tested at a huge Russian shopping mall for both in-store customer location and payment transactions. The catch: It’s extremely nonstandard. Instead of pairing with customer smartphones the way Bluetooth devices usually would, individual devices throughout the store broadcast amped-up signals (range: 100 meters, rather than Bluetooth’s usual 30 to 50 meters) that tell a smartphone app about discounts and specials. If the signal from, say, the display of Bartlett pears is strongest (because it’s the nearest broadcaster) and if it meets various demographic criteria (send this one to only males, this one to shoppers older than 70, etc.), that’s the signal the app displays. Meanwhile, other Bluetooth signals with very low range (a few millimeters) are used for payments—no NFC required.

We saw this demonstrated at last week’s NRF show by vendor WiseSec, and it’s clever. But WiseSec says some retailers with especially large footprints may need as many as 50 or 60 Bluetooth beacons per store. With a 100-meter range, multiple stores in a mall will overlap, which is why the differentiation of signal makes sense. A potentially bigger problem: If you’re using high-powered, nonstandard Bluetooth signals, could they interfere with other Bluetooth devices (in-store that means everything from customer phone headsets to POS keyboards)? Not that we don’t trust the Muscovites, but we’ll like this a lot better once we see it not interfering with American or Western European customers and their toys.

Some years ago, Legal Columnist Mark Rasch demoed an ATM that had no card, no chip, no PIN and only a limited keyboard. The ATM used facial recognition software to identify him, so he only had to walk up to the machine, type in $20 from checking and, voila! Money dispensed. Assuming that everything works as promised and that facial recognition software is close to 100 percent accurate and reliable, retailers should consider the legal, privacy and compliance issues related to biometrics before rushing in.

Like all innovative technologies (from credit cards to loss prevention devices), it’s not clear yet whether consumers will embrace or reject the new technology, or how regulators will ultimately react.

The payment-card breach revealed on January 11 by 560-store restaurant chain Zaxby’s throws a light on what may be the near-future of major breaches. The chain said it found malware on systems at 108 stores across the southeastern U.S. after card processors identified the stores as common points of purchase for fraudulent card activity.

But Zaxby’s doesn’t operate any of the stores—they’re all franchisees, putting both the company and the franchisees in a worst-of-both-worlds situation.

Merchant Customer Exchange, the retail group trying to offer its own mobile wallet, plans on using QR codes as the heart of its cloud-based payment app, the group announced Monday (Jan. 14). But beyond the QR code detail and the names of a few new retail members—including Meijer and Wawa—little was discussed during an hour-long panel that meaningfully addressed how the group plans on making a difference, beyond the general platitudes MCX has stressed since its March 2012 launch.

What was different this time, though, is that members were more candid in explaining why they have the goals they do, even if they were not especially forthcoming in how they plan on achieving those goals. The group, for example, re-stressed its intent that data from one chain will not be shared with another chain. Jay Culotta, the treasurer at regional convenience chain Wawa, said many of the mobile vendors say they are not—today—planning on sharing data, but they refuse to say what will happen down the road. “It’s not a forever situation,” Culotta said, adding that the temptations for leveraging such data will likely be overwhelming. “It’s unclear what their business case would be without monetizing that data.”

Putting Albertsons back together again won’t be as easy as it looks. The grocery chain was split in 2006 between Supervalu and private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management, with both chains using the same logo in different geographic regions. But on January 10 the two owners decided to reunite what will now be a 650-store chain in a complicated deal that leaves only one thing very clear: These money managers aren’t thinking about IT when it comes to reassembling the chain.

Yes, the Albertsons logo is the same on both sides. But seven years later, everything from self-checkout to loyalty to POS to prescription systems is now different across the soon-to-be-unsplit chain. And everything will have to be merged—and fast.

Home Depot has been using a CRM practice that uses payment-card numbers to match in-store customers with their online purchases. It’s a move that, although likely passable for PCI, is rather unnerving to privacy advocates. Home Depot officials stress that they only use the technique with shoppers who opt in, an argument that is somewhat tempered by how often consumers don’t even notice privacy opt-in and opt-out Web site declarations. The chain has been using this technique for various purposes, including E-mailing in-store customers to ask them to review their recent purchases.

Home Depot’s use of the card-matching procedure is not that unusual among major chains, but the norm is for the effort to be kept internal, to help improve general marketing. It was Home Depot’s reaching out to customers that made some of them realize what was going on. And therein lies the problem.

Sometimes, it’s what is not talked about in a news release that is much more informative than what is. Consider PayPal. On Monday (Jan. 14), the eBay subsidiary named 21 chains signed up to offer brick-and-mortar PayPal (along with two more chains too shy to be identified) and said its system is now available in 18,000 store locations. That’s the good news: PayPal is now the most widely available U.S. mobile-payments provider, with more stores using it at POS than even the very successful Starbucks approach.

The bad news: PayPal has said nothing whatsoever about how many shoppers in all of these stores, plus Home Depot, JCPenney, Abercrombie & Fitch, Toys”R”Us, Foot Locker and Barnes & Noble, have actually used the service. And of those who did, how many came back to use it again? How many dollars are shoppers pushing through the retail PayPal system? You know that if those figures were anything less than humiliating, they’d have been released by now.

At an NRF panel on Monday (Jan. 14), a Macy’s E-Commerce exec said the chain wants to run quite a few small-scale analytics trials, something the exec said was “Amazon-like.” (Now there’s an adjective that strikes deep retail emotions.) “We want to build an Amazon-like testing environment, but a testing culture is not something people understand right away,” said Kerem Tomak, Macys.com VP of marketing analytics, according to our U.K. media partner, Retail Week. “We are educating others of the power of testing.”

Experimenting online to see what works best for collecting useful marketing and CRM data? Yes, that’s Amazonian, but it’s less of a culture change for Macy’s than it might seem. Remember, this is the chain that developed its shipping-from-stores system by starting with limited, low-cost experiments and then growing what worked and killing what didn’t. (Contrast that with JCPenney’s big-bang approach, where the chain locked into a grand plan and is now grimly marching into oblivion.) We’re pretty sure Tomak is wrong about Macy’s customers not understanding a “testing culture.” What they’ll hate is an “I found out somebody else was offered a lower price” culture. That’s when Macy’s will have trouble.

Retailers have discovered that, although the benefits of a truly merged-channel supply chain are vast, the pain-points are potentially even more vast—at least in the beginning. Michelle Tinsley, the director of transactional retail at Intel, said chains can find it difficult to strike the right balance. “The customer views that brick-and-mortar location as today’s face of that retailer, so they need to uphold that brand image and take the (online) returns,” Tinsley said. “But in this merged world, (the chain needs to) allow any location in that nationwide retailer to see those shoes now back into inventory and to then sell them very quickly and ship it from that location. So even though it was returned to a brick-and-mortar store, let it be seen in those warehousing systems so that the next order that comes in over the Internet or from a store in Cincinnati gets placed from that store in, say, California.”

In Part Two of this week’s StorefrontBacktalk Radio segment, Tinsley argues that this problem is one manifestation of the old way retailers look at problems. “I think you need to flip it. Instead of saying, ‘I’ve got the inventory in the wrong place,’ say, ‘Well, I’ve just got to open up the inventory to where the next demand signal is coming from.”

Finish Line is giving itself 90 days to decide if it will resurrect a cloud site that almost wrecked the chain’s holiday season with extensive functionality problems, all seemingly due to a major site refresh handled by Demandware.

“We believe the new site, which came online Nov. 19, 2012, cost us approximately $3 million in lost sales for the third quarter. Following the launch, it became apparent that the customer experience was negatively impacted, evidenced by a decline in several key performance factors,” said Glenn Lyon, CEO of the $1.4 billion sports apparel chain with more than 640 stores in 47 U.S. states, during an earnings call on Friday (Jan. 4). A few weeks earlier, Finish Line was singing a very different tune when it said the chain’s “aggressive omni-channel growth initiatives drove its decision to move away from legacy in-house-managed software to Demandware’s flexible and scalable cloud-based solution.”

Put this one under the “no good retail deed ever goes unpunished” category. When chains listen to their customers and create localized store inventory, and then they listen more and accept online returns to any store the shopper chooses, they run into inventory train wrecks. Those Gomez Addams train crash moments occur when a shopper returns something—let’s say a pair of shoes—to a store that happens to not have that SKU in that store’s localized inventory.

Problem #1: Shoes have an extremely short shelf life. At the end of that shelf life (“that shoe is sooo last month”), the shoe is typically priced at a steep discount. Problem #2: Stores can’t sell one or two products. The display unit would represent half of all inventory. So, again, that orphaned product goes on steep discount. Problem #3: The store could ship that shoe to a store that does have that SKU in its inventory. But you then have the cost (hard out-of-pocket shipping costs as well as labor to prep the product on both ends) and time (the multiple days involved in shipping) delays, and you’re still fighting against that extremely short shelf life.

If printed catalogs are dead, someone should tell E-Commerce customers. On Tuesday (Jan. 8), personalization vendor Baynote released the results of a holiday survey of online consumers that found paper catalogs still have a bigger influence on buying than social media sites Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter. And that’s not just among geezers who grew up with the Sears Wish Book—online customers age 18 to 24 also rated catalogs higher than anything except Facebook, where it’s essentially neck-and-neck.

Part of that may be a novelty factor—glossy printed material isn’t so much a part of young consumers’ lives today. But that only explains why catalogs might have some influence, not as-big-as-Facebook influence. Given that many chains completely dumped their catalog efforts in favor of social efforts in recent years, this is a genuinely annoying result.

The PCI Council’s Qualified Integrator and Reseller (QIR) program is officially up and running. Reliant Security is the first systems integrator to qualify under the QIR program and be listed on the PCI Council’s Web site. Qualifying the first systems integrator is a significant milestone, one that follows last May’s announcement of the QIR program and the beginning of formalized training this past autumn.

What everyone involved in retail payments will now want to see, pens PCI Columnist Walter Conway, is how many other resellers and systems integrators will join Reliant. The ultimate success of the QIR program depends on the decisions made by retailers, payment application vendors and, quite possibly, the PCI Council and even the card brands, too.

By now, almost everyone in retail knows about Amazon’s glitch that sent congratulatory victory E-mails to fans of both Alabama and Notre Dame—half a day before they played in the NCAA championship game on Monday night (Jan. 7). The obvious question: Why weren’t safeguards in place to prevent this from happening?

Amazon isn’t saying, but chances are good that such safeguards were in place—and that’s why the victory E-mails went out hours before the game even started.