POS System at Wilsons
Leather Helps Improve
Returns, Compliance

Editorial Director
Jean V. Murphy
A conversation with Scott Christian, director of information technology at
Wilsons Leather, a wholly-owned subsidiary of G-III Apparel Group.

Wilsons Leather is a leading specialty retailer of quality accessories and outerwear for men and women. These include leather and non-leather, branded and private-label goods, which are designed by Wilsons in collaboration with G-III and manufactured in China and India. The company operates 120 stores in 43 states, and it also markets and sells through its e-commerce site. Wilsons recently upgraded its point-of-sale (POS) system with a new solution from JDA Software.

Q: What were the issues that led you to look for a new point-of-sale solution?

Christian: The first thing was compliance with the PCI [Payment Card Industry] data standard. This is an information security standard to which the credit card issuing banks hold the retailers accountable. There are a whole bunch of privacy issues related to credit card information and a lot of things that I, as a retailer, cannot do with that information. So being PCI-compliant is a big thing and something that actually is driving a lot of changes in POS.

There are different levels of standards for different sized retailers, based on how many credit card transactions they process. As a smaller retailer, we don’t have as stringent requirements as someone like Target or Best Buy – we don’t, for example, have to have an audit firm come in and verify our processes – but if we were not PCI-compliant, we would be at risk of being fined by the credit card bank. And we also would be liable for any damages caused by a breach of information. In our old system, the credit card numbers that were stored in our POS were not encrypted, so that was a data security risk and we felt we were putting the organization at risk for a possible breach of that information.

So that was a big thing for us and, like I said, it is
driving a lot of change in POS right now because
many companies are in the same situation we were.
What happened is that people had heavily cus-
tomized the POS version that they probably put in
for Y2K compliance, which is when our old system
went in. With all that customization, it was not easy
to just go out and get an upgrade from the software
vendor so it kind of opened up the search again for
most retailers. So there is a lot of play right now in
the POS market, especially among small to mid-
sized retailers that are more heavily reliant on pack-
age solutions. Big retailers do a lot of their own
development and have an IT staff big enough to
support that, but smaller retailers like us rely on
what is available in the market.

Q: And JDA solved this problem for you? Christian: Absolutely. In the JDA POS, the data card number is encrypted with an encryption key. Even if somebody hacked into the data base at the store, they could not get a customer’s credit card number.

Q: Were there other drivers?

Christian: We also felt that we were at risk from a returns perspective. Our returns were being handled manually. We relied on the store associate to figure out, based on the receipt the customer provided or their own store knowledge, what refund or credit to give the customer. In our stores, we often will have a price that will ring up with a discount off the transaction, so the store associate had to try and determine from that receipt how much the customer actually paid for the item. Based on the way the receipt was printed, that was not always clear. So we felt there was inaccuracy in the returns. In addition, we felt that we were at risk for returns fraud, so we required a ton of information from customers that were returning items – a three-part form had to be completed and the store associate then had to key all that into the computer as part of the returns process, so the process took a long time.