Evan Schuman

Major retailers—including Sears, Walgreen, TJX, Barnes & Noble, Aeropostale and OfficeMax—are involved in federal patent lawsuits, accusing the chains of violating a patent when they started processing their giftcards through their POS systems. TJX was the most recent defendant (do you get the impression that TJXs corporate counsels is about to install one of those […]

In a footnote in its Nov. 13 earnings announcement, TJX increased its estimate of pre-tax charges for the worlds worst credit card data breach to $216 million. Back in August, it had projected only a $168 million pre-tax hit. The data breach consisted of extensive cyber-thief activity within TJXs network from 2003 through June 2004 […]

In a move that is likely to impact retail software vendors a lot more than retail IT people themselves, the PCI Security Council this week made a key Visa security procedure PCI mandatory for all retailers. The promotion of Visas PABP (Payment Application Best Practices) to the councils PA DSS (Payment Application Data Security Standard) […]

In dropping the second shoe of its holiday video strategy, Amazon Nov. 7 launched a program to encourage customers to post video reviews of Amazon products. Amazon the week before announced that it had posted its own videos of some 450 top-selling products. The site posted a few user-generated video examples, but whether consumers will […]

A retail community with aging merchandising applications and the need to quickly strengthen merged channel technology will fuel a sharp growth in retail software purchases over the next few years, according to a new report from AMR Research. Retail software sales last year were $7.3 billion, with a compound annual growth rate of 7 percent […]

One of the more aggressive retail RFID backers in the world, Germanys Metro Group, announced Nov. 9 that it is moving its pilot to the second phase and adding 70 more suppliers in China and Vietnam. The program, which Metro calls “Tag It, Easy,” is intended to better track products through Metros global supply chain. […]

Retail lobbyists are pushing the Federal Trade Commission to update 14-year-old rules governing mail-order and telephone sales to specifically include sales made over the Internet. “Whether orders come in the mail, by telephone or over the Internet is secondary to the point that customers should receive the products they ordered, at the price they agreed […]

You might have seen recent media reports that the National Retail Federation was predicting some $200 million in additional return fraud this year. However, a closer examination of what that figure is based on wins the news release the award for our Reach of the Week. In the NRFs second annual return fraud survey, the […]

About 56 percent more comparison shopping inquiries were the made the first week of November this year compared with the same week last year, according to new figures released this week from Web traffic tracker Hitwise. The top price-comparison sites, according to Hitwise, were Yahoo Shopping (20 percent), Smarter.com (15 percent) and Bizrate (14 percent), […]

Credit card company Visa knew in late 2005 of the extensive security problems at TJX, but decided to give the retailer permission to remain non-compliant through Dec. 31, 2008, according to documents filed in federal court on Nov. 8. The Dec. 29, 2005, letter from Joseph Majka, a fraud control vice president for Visa, was […]