Tracking Shoppers’ Habits

04 August 2008, 9:08am

According to Forrester Research, consumers like Procter & Gamble and their retailers spend more than $100 billion annually to promote products in stores, including fees for shelf space and premiums for their products to be at eye level. They also pay for special promotion stands and armies of checkers to see whether retailers follow through on the deals.

Infosys may have solved their problem and also created the potential for stores and consumer-goods companies to track things like traffic and inventory in real time, with ShoppingTrip 360, a hosted software application that can track shoppers and inventory, using wireless sensors placed on shelving, promotional displays, and shopping carts.

The sensors use the 802.15.4 wireless protocol to interconnect in a mesh network, sending information such as where shoppers stop in a store, what products they pick up, what they put back, what they put in their cart, and whether a product is out of stock. Infosys also has an application that lets shoppers use their cell phones to get information such as store maps, or to access an online shopping list or collection of recipes.

Collecting good quality data about product sales was a big reason why major retailers adopted RDIF (radio frequency identification) technology. However, RFID chips are still too expensive to be truly ubiquitous, not just because of the cost of the chips, but the ancilliary cost of outfitting whole store chains to use the technology company-wide.

Also, RFID technology raises privacy concerns that ShoppingTrip 360 might not, as the system is completely anonymous - unless the shopper agrees via cell phone to tell the system who he or she is. They can also opt to identify themselves based only on their shopping-cart number. To reduce cost, Infosys says that it will pay to install the sensors in stores, charging retailers only for the data that they want to use. Infosys claim that it is no harder to install its wireless sensors than to set up a wireless router in a home. Initially, it will take a week per store to deploy and test the system. Exactly what the data will cost is not yet determined, as Infosys is piloting the system at a number of retailers in the United States, Europe, and Asia.

Based on article by Michael Fitzgerald in MIT Technology Review online news

Copyright Technology Review 2008.

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Infosys

Geo: International