There are many discussions about using IoT in retail to increase sales and customer engagement. The most common scenario being the use of beacon technology to learn more about in-store behavior and engage shoppers with personalized offers. In combination with mobile apps, the retail experience can leverage IoT technology to also reduce wait times at checkout lines by enabling self service point-of-sales systems. Perhaps more future-oriented solutions will include smart mirrors that can determine your ideal fit or dynamic pricing with electronic shelf labels in grocery stores. There are a lot of different possibilities.
A big area of interest is whether retailers can enable consumers to do more with their mobile devices. Can they add items to their cart and make a purchase transaction without standing in line? One of the banes of a busy retail season is customers standing in line and waiting for a long time to part with money. Retailers are starting to realize they can do what Apple, for example, does in its stores: launch a mobile app, scan a product, make a purchase and leave.
Another area where we’re seeing a lot of interest is the employees in a retail store using mobility to help shoppers find what they want. This is happening in more upscale stores that have concierge services or personal shoppers that can pull up a customer’s profile, look at their past history, make recommendations and show them how certain items would look. And it’s all done on a tablet or other mobile device so they can be wherever the customer is on the floor.
While these scenarios are fantastic at helping retailers grow the top line, there are also opportunities to leverage IoT to help with cost savings. For example, leveraging RFID tags for faster and more accurate inventory management. Energy management is also a low hanging fruit for IoT-based optimization around smart lighting, or sensors in refrigerators to manage thermostats when there are no more products on the shelf.
One of the next stages of IoT maturity is tapping into the innovation of customers and partners. Retailers being able to provide API access to their systems and allow third-party software developers to build interesting solutions could be another trend that we see. We’re have seen this model in the financial services sector where companies like MasterCard and Citi and others have exposed their services as APIs and leveraging external partners to encourage innovation. MasterCard runs a Masters of Code series around the world; Citibank runs Mobile Challenge days around the world, where they encourage and partner with others to foster mobile app innovation. We may soon start to see similar programs in retail, and I look forward to seeing some disruptive retail solutions in practice, even if it is just to eliminate standing in the checkout line.
All these scenarios involve orchestration of multiple smart devices, so backend technology is a must to tie together disparate APIs and enable business processes and workflow coordination. If specialized apps are needed in the process then having SDKs will help accelerate the development. AnyPresence can be used to enable these types of retail scenarios. Check out a free trial of the AnyPresence MBaaS platform today.