Evan Schuman

Peer just a year or two down the retail road, and the most exciting source of technological potential comes from the all-but-ignored pillar of digital signage. This is not merely a multimedia ad displayer. It has the potential to interact with smartphones, smartcarts and contactless credit cards. This means targeted ads with audio that can […]

Now that Facebook is having to face its about-face (readers, please forgive me), the privacy-versus-marketing debate is just revving up. This RetailWire story nicely sums up the action, but the essence is that Facebook tried sharing-without permission-customers’ purchases with people on their friends list. Did Facebook cross the line? I’d rather say that they made […]

With all of the concern today about retailers inadequately protecting their credit card data, its logical to assume that retail IT managers would have made themselves familiar with the ins and outs of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. But every day, we see evidence that PCI adherence is fraught with confusion. For example, […]

In a pair of crucial decisions, TJX has moved closer to completely clearing itself of the lawsuits from the worlds worst credit card data breach. Those two rulings came from the federal judge overseeing the case—who refused to approve making the case a class action—and from Visa, which said it would reduce its fining of […]

The pairing of a judges decision late Nov. 29 with a Visa deal announced the next day are the latest examples of a TJX strategy that could hardly be called anything short of brilliant. The judges decision to deny the request by banks to allow class actions certification in their lawsuit against TJX—a decision that […]

National Retail Federation CIO Dave Hogan was featured on the popular TV news magazine “60 Minutes” Nov. 25 and made some controversial charges against Visa, namely that the worlds largest credit card company preferred fining retailers to helping them fix their security. Visa now happens to be in the middle of its $10 billion IPO, […]

Gadget retailer Brookstone showed guts this week when it unveiled one of the first-ever retail 3-D e-commerce sites. The trouble with being a pioneer is that its virtually impossible to get it right the first time. Pulling in $512 million last year through 306 stores plus Web and catalogue sales, Brookstone makes its living selling […]

In the middle of Cyber Monday, Costco.com melted down, with its time for a full transaction soaring to 200 seconds, from a typical Costco average of about 18 seconds, according to Matt Poepsel, performance strategies vice president for Web traffic tracking firm Gomez. Although Costco fared far worse, Gomez also saw sharply slower performances from […]

A major gift card exchange site has launched an unusual gift card program that guarantees all exchange transactions. The Plastic Jungle guarantee plan is done by insisting that card sellers give a verifiable physical address along with a credit card number associated with that physical address. Payment is then made solely by mailing a check […]

Tis the time of year for journalists to be buried in meaningless surveys, all of which come down to: “Holiday shopping will be up (or down) this shopping season, depending on which is better for the surveying company.” My favorite survey this year thus far came Nov. 20 from a company called BuySafe, which sells […]

A surge of e-commerce traffic on Thanksgiving night and all day Friday apparently caught several retail giants by surprise, with Lowes, Macys and Victorias Secret especially hard hit. But they were far from the exception, as almost a third of leading retailers suffered significant slowdowns on Black Friday, according to statistics released this weekend by […]

When Starbucks on Nov. 15 reported for the first time in years that the number of customers visiting its stores had dropped, the coffee reseller announced plans to send more managers into the field. Company officials pointed to recent price increases—because of milk price hikes—and denied that store saturation may have played a role in […]