Evan Schuman

A commonly used testing utility is apparently behind the security alert that Visa issued late last week claiming Fujitsu retail point-of-sale software may have a problem. Shortly after Visa—the owner of the world’s largest electronic payments network—issued an alert warning retailers about security problems with POS software issued by Fujitsu Transaction Solutions, Fujitsu officials said […]

With more home deliveries and installations, retailers and restaurants are facing the point-of-sale challenge of verifying payments away from the POS while paying higher credit-card fees for card-not-present purchases.Commerciant, a Houston-based wireless paying processing house, is trying to milk those merchants with the introduction of a combination unit that wirelessly authenticates and processes both check […]

Analysts are giving Microsoft credit for doing better than expected in the retail POS (point of sale) space as it announces March 8 a new version that adds native support for several common peripherals. The significance of the new support for the devices—including coin dispenser, keylock, MICR (magnetic ink character recognition), POS power, scale, signature […]

During congressional testimony Thursday, executives from bank and credit card companies involved in the largest credit card data loss ever pointed fingers at a new culprit for gaps in security: the auditors who had certified the credit card processing systems as being up to snuff. But in an interview with Ziff Davis Internet News, those […]

Global retail IT spending among midmarket companies is expected to sharply increase in the next few years, from about $22 billion last year to almost $31 billion by 2009, an almost 41 percent increase, according to a new report from technology analysis firm AMI Partners. AMI Partners Inc. defined the midmarket retailer as one with […]

Somewhere in Arizona—they insist that their exact location be kept secret so that e-commerce bandits won’t recognize their address—sits a team of 18 Internet experts who hunt down people and companies that are either selling products illegally or are violating copyrights. But the real work is done overnight, where a suite of homegrown applications crawls […]

When major customers walk into a Circuit City location, CIO Mike Jones wants to whisper customized sales pitches into their ears—literally. Jones’s scenario is simple: As customers walk into the store, they receive a very light wireless headset. As they walk through the store, the device uses sensors to learn where the customer is. When […]

You’re cleaning away papers that accumulated during the holidays and find a portable CD player that is identical to the one you use every day. It was given to you as a gift and you have no receipt, nor any clue where it was purchased. On a whim, you take the CD player to your […]

In one corner of Microsoft Corp., the smaller the better is the order of the day for new customers. Microsoft’s latest retail push is focusing on the smallest of retailers, those with perhaps a single checkout lane and no more than nine stores. Microsoft’s pitch is a fully bundled $3,000 package with software and just […]

As the holiday season approaches, we have good news and bad news on the major retail multichannel front. The good news is that some retailers are getting a lot better at handling the technology. The bad news is that their employees often don’t know about it, making the advantages moot. Retail executives are optimistically projecting […]

One problem that retailers have with the World Wide Web is that it’s so … well … worldwide. A group of newspaper publishers tried to address that issue Thursday with the launch of a Web site intended to match consumers looking for specific products with local retailers that have those products on special promotions. The […]