SiteCatalyst adds mobile tracking

According to Omniture, the new version of SiteCatalyst, its Web Analytics solution, incorporates mobile measurement to give marketers better identification of unique mobile visitors and clearer identification of device types, helping marketers better understand how to design their sites for mobile users. It also provides a view of visitors by country and carrier, helping marketers tailor Web advertising to specific audiences.

"Hot Potato" Payment Processing

Here's another nugget from Doug Schwegman, Market Research Director at Cybersource: To reduce their security risks in payment processing, merchants are completely eliminating payment data contact with their systems by outsourcing acceptance.

You can use a PCI-compliant payment services supplier to host the payment data fields that appear on your checkout page. This can be implemented as an iFrame within your checkout page, or a fully hosted page. Using this approach your company neither handles nor stores payment data, thereby eliminating the burden and most of the costs of payment data security management.

(From the Insider's Guide to ePayment Management.)

I would love to hear from anyone who is doing this....

Challenge fraud-related chargebacks

According to Doug Schwegman, Market Research Director at Cybersource, if you're not challenging chargebacks, you're likely missing a quick and effective way of adding revenue and reducing costs. Research shows, on average, merchants win 40% of the fraud-related chargebacks they challenge, resulting in net recovery of 28% of all fraud-related chargebacks received. Of course, experience varies by merchant and by type of goods sold, e.g. digital merchants can find it more challenging to prove delivery/fulfillment. But the opportunity is well worth investigating, both in your internal process and in your work with solution partners.

ePayment Management Guide from Cybersource

CyberSource has published "The Insider's Guide to ePayment Management: 30 Tactics Leading Merchants Use to Capture Hidden Profits." Discover proven tactics that can help you cut costs, increase sales conversion. and improve operating efficiency.

Based on CyberSource's field experience with leading online merchants, merchant surveys and analysis of industry data, this guide offers more than just statistics. The Insider's Guide conveniently compiles and discusses real-world payment management tactics you can implement to improve business results.

The Insider's Guide covers ePayment tactics the best merchants use to:

• Control the cost of accepting and processing online payments
• Increase sales conversion and revenue retention
• Reduce fraud and fraud management expense
• Cut the cost of PCI compliance and increase security
  

You can get your copy free from Cybersource.

Centris Gets PCI-Compliant

Centris Information Services, a provider of call center services, advanced automated call handling applications, on-demand interpreter services, and broadcast messaging, has received its Payment Card Industry (PCI) Compliance certificate. “Receiving this certificate ensures our customers, merchants, and cardholders our data is protected according to the industry’s highest standards”, says Dale Augustyn, Director of Information Technology for Centris.

Mining Customer Feedback

Clarabridge has unveiled Version 3.0 of its Content Mining Platform (CMP). The company says the new release incorporates a number of new customer-driven capabilities, including an intuitive guided discovery interface for analysts and researchers, enterprise class deployment capabilities and application and packaging enhancements.

Designed for use by customer-oriented analysts across marketing, product and customer care organizations, CMP 3.0 includes a drag-and-drop Web interface, Clarabridge Navigator, which makes it easy for non-IT users to harvest customer feedback from surveys, user forums, online product reviews and other consumer-oriented sources.

Further, Clarabridge says, CMP 3.0 includes significant enhancements to its sentiment extraction engine that provide clients with finer domain-specific tuning, allowing for more accurate and in-depth analysis of customer sentiment on a particular subject. Using a scalable software as a service (SaaS) model, CMP 3.0 also gives analysts from different departments the ability to collaborate on various customer experience management initiatives. It also improves the core technology that supports multi-terabyte data volumes, foreign language requirements, the processing of diverse data types, and the secure sharing of data with other applications.

Assume Your Network Will Be Breached, says Homa

Bill Homa, who just stepped down July 1 as the CIO for the 165-store Hannaford grocery chain, has two key observations about PCI, and his opinions come from hard-won experience: PCI-compliant Hannaford was the victim of an especially large data breach when data from 4.2 million payment cards was stolen.

According to an interview in Storefront Backtalk, Homa finds particular fault in one aspect of the current PCI standard: "All debit- and credit-card transactions should be encrypted from end to end. That should be the minimum. It's astonishing that isn't the standard of PCI," which only requires encryption when transmitting over a public network such as IP.

The PCI rationale is that private point-to-point networks—such as the one Hannaford uses—are sufficiently secure that they don't need encryption. Homa disagrees. "Nowadays, encryption is not that expensive. And there's no such thing as a secure network," he said. "If you think your network is secure, you're delusional."

Homa observes that most retailers handle security backwards. The put all of their attention on protecting the front door, instead of assuming theives will get through and having a plan to control them once they're inside.