Evan Schuman

As gift cards have soared in popularity in recent years—some $25 billion in gift cards are expected to be sold this holiday season alone—the attempts to use them fraudulently have also soared. But some of the theft techniques are woefully out of date. Does this mean that gift cards are secure financial tools for retailers […]

The problem of Internet accessibility for the visually impaired is global, with a United Nations study finding only three leading Web sites around the world—out of 100 studied—meeting the needs of “persons with disabilities,” according to a U.N. statement issued Dec. 5. The study, commissioned by the U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs and […]

On the day after Thanksgiving, Macys.coms site gave site visitors a flood of error messages and responded to page requests at a speed six times slower than normal, and it did that from about 4 a.m. until about 2:15 p.m. But the site didnt literally shut down, but for about an hour of that time. […]

Traditional credit card companies are fighting for their lives against a plethora of new alternatives, ranging from debit cards, non-credit-card contactless payment, cell phones, eCheck, PayPal and Bill Me Later, not to mention newfangled hybrids that merge loyalty and CRM, gift cards, incentive coupons and POS cards, such as a pilot at the Subway chain. […]

Despite consumer—and even some IT executive—beliefs that e-commerce poses a much greater security risk than store-based point-of-sale systems, a new Gartner report concludes that the opposite is true. Gartner is reporting that by 2008 most attacks will be on physical POS (point-of-sale) systems and that by 2009 only one out of three such systems will […]

In 2006 alone, retailers lost almost $2 billion because of consumer security fears, with about one-half of those losses ($913 million) coming from people who avoided sites that seemed to be less secure and the rest (about $1 billion) came from consumers who were too afraid to conduct e-commerce business at all, according to a […]

Two key e-commerce leaders—Wal-Mart and Macys—found themselves shut out of the online portion of the holiday sales rush for much of Friday, as their sites slowed to a crawl starting at about 4 a.m. EST. This was especially troubling as it happened on the so-called Black Friday, where major retailers hope to see their financial […]

An interesting report was published Nov. 14 by CyberSource, in the form of its annual e-commerce fraud report. Beyond touting some $3 billion in fraud in the United States this year—a 7 percent increase compared with 2005—the report talked about 1.4 percent of retail revenue lost to fraud this year, a slight decrease from the […]

Recent RFID trials are showing mixed results for RFID, with London-based retail leader Marks & Spencer declaring its 42-store test a success and preparing to add 80 more test stores in 2007 while Cardinal Health said RFID has “real promise” but a “great deal of additional work needs to be undertaken” before its practical. The […]

When the $2.5 billion Jack in the Box fast-food chain started looking at contactless payment this year, it became clear that a faster transaction time wouldnt be the only benefit to accepting RFID-enabled credit cards. Embracing the technology would also add to the 2,000-restaurant chains “coolness” factor, an especially important point given that the demographic […]