Evan Schuman

When Fidelity National Information Services this week announced that about 2.3 million customer records had been illegally sold to a group of direct marketers, most media overlooked the most interesting part: The story behind Fidelitys weakest link. Some quick background. The Fidelity National were talking about is a Jacksonville, Fla., firm that owns a company […]

When red-hot startups grow quickly, they tend to grow until they hit their head on the ceiling. This is that awkward stage where the company starts making inexplicable decisions. This isnt Burn Rate, that ability to go through tons of money very quickly. Rather, lets call this the Burn Up and Implode Rate. The pattern […]

A senior executive at the $81 billion European retail giant Metro Group says the efficiencies the chain saw in RFID trials were so compelling they just had to deploy. The chain, based in Germany, has informed all of its suppliers that they need to ship all RFID pallets to Metro fully RFID tagged by Oct. […]

I have to confess a certain fondness for Google, an admiration that has grown out of frequent innovation and creativity. And its frequent luck in the form of success. Then again, my livelihood doesnt overwhelmingly depend on the whims of Google, so the idiosyncrasies of its search and other services is professionally interesting and not […]

Summer is so strenuous on travel Web sites this year that at least one major site had 2-and-a-half hours of downtime, according to an uptime monitoring service. The report, issued by Pingdom, looked at 16 major travel sites—including Orbitz, Travelocity, Yahoo and Priceline. The worst performer: OneTravel, which was down for 150 minutes. Popular site […]

A key division of the Albertsons grocery chain officially abandoned its loyalty card program on Wednesday, officially saying that it wanted customers to be relieved of the burden of having to show a card to get discounts. Unofficially, the program got pulled because grocery managers werent bothering to use the data. To be fair, the […]

Electronic payment vendor CyberSource is buying fellow e-payment player Authorize.Net for $565 million in cash and stock, the companies announced June 18. Steve Rowen, a research analyst at Retail System Research, said the merger of these two players is not in itself surprising, but the size of the deal reveals a lot about retail interests. […]

In Sundays The New York Times, theres this intriguing piece talking about how e-commerce sales are quickly running out of steam. Perhaps “intriguing” is the wrong word for it. A more apt term might be “dangerous.” The piece is not dangerous because it reveals some deep, dark secret. It doesnt, nor does it claim to. […]

A high percentage of retailers are using unprotected customer information when they test their credit card processing systems, leaving the door open to a host of security problems, analysts say. The problems arise when retailers, seeking to test any system that might impact credit card processing (point-of-sale upgrades, operating system patches, database changes, and so […]

Unless the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit intervenes early next year, retailers who have been sued for printing federally prohibited information on consumer credit card receipts will almost certainly get off the hook. Two federal judges this week rejected a critical class-action certification request from the consumers suing the retailers. Those two […]

Magnus Gustafsson is a marketing executive with a very clear mission. As vice president of direct marketing for Aerosoles, he uses the chains more than 250 Aerosole stores and thousands of department and specialty store partners to push one form of apparel—shoes—and to only form of customer: women. The chain recently kicked off its mens […]

Retailers with concerns about credit card data protection face an uncertain legal landscape as a series of lawsuits and federal court decisions render contradictory rulings. The outcome of several lawsuits against retailers for violating federal law by printing full credit card numbers on receipts remains unresolved, with two federal judges issuing contradictory rulings and the […]