Data Security

The focus on data privacy and security on the web has reached a fever pitch in recent years. As data breaches continue to make headlines, consumers are understandably concerned about the vulnerability of their personal and financial information. Online retailers have an especially high bar when it comes to the protection of credit card data…

A year ago, marketers were experiencing a whole new kind of anxiety: the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) had just set in after months (if not years) of intensive scaremongering, and the wait was on to see what would happen. Would databases disappear? Would marketing results fall off a cliff? On the anniversary of…

Last week, 7-Eleven Japan suspended a recently launched mobile payments feature on its app after a flaw allowed a third party to make bogus charges on hundreds of customer accounts. The company released the feature on July 1. It allowed customers to scan a barcode with the app and charge a linked credit or debit card.…

Last year, consumers in the U.S. alone spent more than $517 billion with online merchants, up 15 percent from 2017. In 2018, the blockbuster holiday shopping season saw more than $17.8 billion in online sales in just the five-day period beginning on Thanksgiving, with a record $6.6 billion transacted on Cyber Monday. Black Friday marked the first…

As retailers move towards enabling more of their front-line employees with mobile devices, they're finding that if they don’t take the necessary precautions, they're leaving themselves increasingly exposed to threats from security compromises. According to the latest Mobile Security Index from Verizon, retailers, wholesalers and hospitality companies reported a significant spike in mobile compromises in…

With 2019 in full swing, retail marketers are recovering from the biggest drop in holiday-season sales since 2009. Not only was it a tough holiday season, but U.S. consumer confidence may be declining as well. Marketers are under the gun to perform against these odds, and building and maintaining customer trust is the key to…

Fast Retailing, the Japanese company behind the Uniqlo retail chain, announced this week that the data of more than 460,000 customers on its online shopping sites were accessed by hackers from April 23 to May 10. The breach gave hackers access to customers’ data including their names, addresses and contact details. The company acknowledged that partial…

The biggest e-commerce challenge of 2019 may be balancing marketing and sales channel innovation with the need for increasingly sophisticated fraud prevention. This will be especially challenging because fraud protection, like many aspects of business today, requires experience and fluency in working with data, and there's a growing shortage of data scientists across the U.S.…

The numbers of those impacted by any of the high-profile consumer data breaches over the past few years sound almost comical: 50 million, 150 million and then 500 million. Is a billion next? It may not matter, considering that the sum total may already be a significant portion of the global population with a digital…

Since the mid 1990s when Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com to sell books online, and Pierre Omidyar created eBay — enabling everyone to sell everything — new business models have threatened to destroy the traditional retail economy. To remain successful, brick-and-mortar retailers must offer personalized and deeper online and in-store customer buying experiences. How? By harnessing…