JCPenney is working on a new plan that will affect customers and vendors. Though the department store did not release specific details of the plan, JCPenney did reveal it will not adopt an everyday low-price model similar to Walmart's. Recognizing that it is extremely difficult to compete with Walmart in EDLP, JCPenney could be aiming for more of a hybrid high/low price strategy with its recent acquisition of Liz Claiborne.

 

JCPenney acquired Liz Claiborne's brand portfolio for $288 million in cash, including an advance of $20 million in exchange for the company's agreement to develop exclusive brands for JCPenney. Under the terms of the agreement, JCPenney will acquire the worldwide rights and intellectual property for the entire Liz Claiborne brand portfolio and Liz Claiborne must change its name within the next 12 months.

 

JCPenney is known for discounting prices and holding sales throughout the year to compete with its competitors. While this strategy draws bargain-hunting shoppers to drive sales and store traffic, the acquisition of Liz Claiborne is expected to help the retailer cater to customers who are high-price spenders, and in turn boost sales.

 

"The performance of the Liz Claiborne and Claiborne brands at JCPenney have consistently exceeded our high expectations," says Myron E. Ullman III, chairman and CEO of JCPenney.

Joie de Vivre, which manages the largest collection of boutique hotels in California and an assortment of restaurants and spas, will implement Merchant Link’s tokenization solution to protect the credit card data of its guests across 27 of its locations.  Merchant Link is a leading provider of cloud-based payment gateway and data security solutions.
 

Merchant Link will deploy its hosted, card-based tokenization solution across the Joie de Vivre enterprise, including the hotel property management systems and the spa point-of-sale systems, ensuring that every transaction is tokenized and there is an extra layer of protection that will protect Joie de Vivre’s brand. 

“We pride ourselves on being innovative and offering exceptional hospitality services and products to our customers,” said Michael Stano, Joie de Vivre’s vice president of technology. “Our commitment to excellence extends even further by offering safe and secure financial transactions for our customers so they can enjoy their experience without worrying about the safety of their payment information.  And we have the peace of mind knowing that sensitive data doesn’t live on our network.”
 

Joie de Vivre, a long time customer of Merchant Link, will use TransactionVault™, a tokenization technology that removes customer card data from merchants’ systems where it is most at risk of being compromised by hackers. By tokenizing every transaction throughout the entire hotel experience from check-in to purchases at the gift shop and more, Joie de Vivre can remove payment data from all points in the payment process.  This data will instead be stored in Merchant Link’s secure, hosted “vault,” and therefore effectively lowering the cost and effort of attaining and maintaining PCI compliance.