The retail sector has gone through tremendous change over the past few years and the lockdowns during the pandemic forced retailers to adopt modern age industry 4.0 technologies, streamlining their day-to-day business operations, strengthening their supply chain, removing bottlenecks, and upgrading their digital infrastructure as well. While retailers face stiff competition from e-commerce firms, cutting retail profit, businesses also need to enhance customer experience inside retail stores to meet the changing customer demands and keep the customers with themselves. Customer experience is a vital part of retail grocery stores and technologies like IoT, RFID, BLE, NFC can help retailers by connecting physical devices to the internet and enabling easy check-ins, shoppings, payments, and check-outs. Even technology enabled feedback is also helping businesses to figure out what they are doing right and what is going wrong.
The Future of Retail Shopping
Contactless shopping is the future of retail shopping where people can easily check in, purchase items they like, put them in that smart cart and do a quick contactless payment and check-out. And this is what people like nowadays. If you think about e-commerce, the same thing is available there. People can select the items they like, add to cart and order.
Radio Frequency Identification is a technology that can be a big enabler in contactless shopping experience in retail grocery stores but that is all that this technology is used for.
In September, 2022, the real giant Wal-mart made it mandatory for its suppliers to tag pallets and boxes of toys, electronics and apparels. And it’s quite successful in its effort to automate inventory management, stock replenishment and consignment tracking with the help of RFID tags.
While we are talking about RFID, let’s see what RFID actually is. RFID stands for Radio Frequency Identification. It is a wireless technology that is capable of tracking and correctly identifying RFID tagged objects with the help of an RFID reader and a software system that shows the encoded data for the end users.
In essence, it is a technology that uses radio waves to read and capture information stored on a tag attached to an object. And the most important thing about RFID, that differentiates it from barcoding (previously used for article tagging) is the fact that RFID doesn’t need a clear line of sight to scan articles and update the data on a computer system. It is done wirelessly.
Various kinds of RFID tags can be used for this purpose but UHF passive RFID is the most cost-effective and efficient option to go about tagging and tracking items in a retail grocery store.
RFID and contactless shopping
To implement RFID in a retail grocery store, RFID tags can be attached to products in a grocery store and RFID readers can be installed at various locations in the store. When a customer picks up an item with an RFID tag, the reader captures the information on the tag.
The reader then sends the information to the store's computer system which updates the inventory database with the new information.
Customers can view their cart on their smartphone or on a screen in the store, what they have added to their cart and how much it costs.
They can remove items from their cart if they change their mind and when the customer is ready to check out, they can pay using their smartphone or at a self-checkout kiosk.
The RFID reader captures the information on each item as it is scanned and the computer system updates the inventory database with the new information. The customer pays for their items and receives a receipt and easily checks out from the retail store.
Store employees can use handheld RFID readers to quickly locate items that are out of stock or misplaced or have been recalled or expired and need to be restocked. RFID can also be used to quickly find items that have been stolen or misplaced by customers. Thus, the RFID technology helps grocery stores reduce costs and improve efficiency by automating many of the tasks that are currently done manually.
RFID-based self-checkout in Walmart’s store of the future
The American retail giant Walmart has new ideas about how its thousands of retail stores spread across continents might look like in a few years. The “store of the future” as it calls it, these retail stores are nothing like Amazon’s “grab and go” (Amazon GO) stores. However, Walmart aims to combine various Internet of Things technologies, AI, and ML to not just streamline their inventory issues but to provide customers with an enhanced shopping experience while keeping their privacy concerns in mind.
In Arkansas, USA, Walmart has been testing their RFID-based self checkout stations where customers can place their cart full of RFID-tagged items (a blue rectangle marked in front of the station) and get a quick receipt and leave. The self-checkout station fitted with an RFID reader and antenna can scan all the items tagged with RFID labels in the cart accurately and quicken the entire process of receipt verification, allowing for a quick in-and-out shopping experience for consumers.
The RFID self-checkout kiosk is also fitted with an item bagging station where customers can pack their items and easily checkout.
The benefits of contactless shopping
RFID technology is increasingly getting popular in retail. According to a report by Market Research, the retail sector is the largest to adopt RFID technology for enhancing customer experience and transforming the physical retail stores and retail supply chain.
Some of the benefits of RFID in retail grocery stores is as follows:
1. It saves time by eliminating the need to stand in line and reduces the risk of spreading germs and viruses.
2. It is more convenient because customers can pay using their smartphone or other mobile device.
3. RFID for contactless shopping is more secure because customers don't have to hand over their credit card to a cashier and faster as customers can pay for their items quickly and easily.
4. Contactless shoping is efficient because it reduces the amount of time employees spend handling cash and credit cards and they can use that time for more stocking the inventory.
5. It is accurate because it eliminates the possibility of human error when entering prices or calculating change and scalable, being used in stores of all sizes.
6. It uses cutting-edge technology to improve the shopping experience, environmentally friendly, flexible, and transparent.
7. Contactless shopping also enhnaces personalization because it allows customers to view their purchase history and receive personalized recommendations.
8. RFID enabled contactless shopping is engaging and fun as it allows customers to interact with products in new and exciting ways.
Future retail grocery shopping is heading towards IoT and RFID enabled shopping stores where people can simply put the items in the smart cart and pay the bill pretty quick, without having to waste time at POS or in queues. It being transparent and accurate and hasslefree will drive more customers towards such smart retail grocery stores and creating a demand in same type of customer experince in other shopping facilities as well.
Disclaimer: The information presented here is for general information purposes only and true to best of our understanding. Users are requested to use any information as per their own understanding and knowledge. Before using any of the information, please refer to our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions.
