What once used to be the future of retail is here now. Buyers no longer want to wait in long queues to purchase an item. Rather, they can simply go to the store, pick up the items they wish to, and leave. The amount to be paid is deducted right from their accounts, and an invoice is mailed to them.
This store is known as Amazon Go, and its tagline, “just go shopping” truly justifies how it is revolutionizing retail shopping for customers and business owners alike.
Amazon Go certainly has started a new trend of smart retail stores. Powered by AI and IoT, these stores are capable of offering exemplary shopping experiences to the buyers, taking care of their convenience while helping businesses boost sales.
At Matellio, we help these retail businesses thrive with a smooth IoT implementation service for their retail stores. Let’s talk about how in the following few minutes. But, first things first, why invest in IoT development in retail stores.
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Top IoT Use Cases in the Retail Industry
IoT implementation for your retail store delivers a wide range of benefits. It helps you dig deep into consumer data to create brilliant strategies. At the same time, it brings real-time information to your fingertips so you stay updated at all times. Not only this, having critical insights into various processes and business strategies improves your decision-making process for a company’s bottom line.
However, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Let’s check out the key benefits of IoT-based smart retail stores in detail.
1. Better In-store Experience
Imagine walking into a store, and being able to locate the products you have been looking for instantly. Yes, this is an example of how in-store experience can be improvised with IoT retail solutions.
Retail stores can leverage technologies such as beacons, NFC, geofencing, QA code scanners, and IoT to track customer data online. This helps them stay updated on the trending items that shoppers have been looking for and guides them to the right aisle. With this, they can also boost their cross-selling and upselling strategies by suggesting relevant products to the customers.
Delivering an omnichannel experience of this kind helps stores channelize their efforts in the right direction and bring sales.
2. Smart Mirrors
Smart mirrors are an exceptional way for businesses to assist their customers and boost satisfaction rates. These mirrors are powered by IoT and capable of offering customers a personalized shopping experience. They analyze customers’ features to suggest the best products. Customers can also use these mirrors to check out various color combinations, variety of the products, and even help implement cross-selling or upselling strategies.
3. Smart Tags
Smart tags are RFID-enabled technology that helps retail stores to redefine the customer’s experience. These tags hold a QR code that customers can scan. Once they do it, they are navigated to insightful information about the products and their brands.
For instance, imagine a mother buying certain nutritional products for her child. She can quickly scan the QR code and analyze what exactly goes into the making of the product to make an informed purchase decision.
That’s not it. Smart tags also help the stores to manage inventory seamlessly and track the supply chain. Once the product is sold from the aisle, the details are instantly updated to the centralized inventory system. Similarly, supply chain businesses can always stay updated on the location of their products during transit, thereby eliminating potential issues such as theft, unauthorized sale, and more.
4. Automated Inventory Management
Maintaining a long list of excel sheets and small catalogs is only manageable if you are a small retail store. However, as your business grows, you need a more reliable inventory management solution that scales with your business. An IoT-based centralized retail system is the best fit here and enables efficient inventory tracking, sales monitoring, promotions, and order tracking in real-time.
For instance, if one of your products is selling out at a good pace, automated inventory solutions can track this trend and suggest changes based on the buying behavior of customers. This keeps you competitive to fulfill customer demands and augment your sales.
Here is what else an IoT inventory management system can do for you:
Accurate Real-time Order Overview
IoT-based systems track inventory in real-time against the customer demands and compare available stock against the purchase trends. In case the stock falls short on meeting demands, they can trigger re-purchase events and even place an order.
Predicting Supply and Demands
Inventory systems can analyze past patterns against current industry dominants to predict the demand for specific products in the market. For instance, if product A sells more than B, it can cancel orders to stock up B and track purchasing of product A. This way brands only invest in something that delivers results.
5. Personalization
Personalization is driving customer engagement across industries today. Surveys show that:
- 80% of buyers purchase from brands that offer a personalized experience.
- Product revenues grow by 38% with target marketing
- Personalized shopping recommendations influence over 92% of the customers
There is no doubt that personalization can be a game-changer for your retail store. IoT devices harness data from customer’s viewing history to spot trends and indicate products. Once the customers view your stores beacon-based solutions can be used to direct them to the right section. You can also suggest products based on the ones they have purchased and boost your sales by manifolds.
Implementing such personalized solutions can be possible with AIoT where IoT-based data aggregator tools can collect data from buyers’ devices’ and indicate buying behavior, and determinants that impact their buying behavior.
Also Read- IoT Consulting Services: Everything You Need to Know
How to Develop an IoT-based Smart Retail Store?
If you are interested in IoT development for your retail store, the first step would be to hire an expert IoT development company. They are equipped with the best technology stack to help you out along with the expertise you need. Here is the brief of process they will follow:
Step:1 Market Research and Discovery
A thorough market research and discovery process is a must in order to ensure you get the product you need, and you are able to make the most of your investment. This stage is mainly to identify what your target market is looking for in order to offer them a solution that aligns with them.
You might want to look for:
- Types of shoppers you are targeting and buying trends among them
- Challenges of your key stakeholders, including managers, business owners, employees, etc., face?
- Required certifications and regulatory requirements and cost to gain them
- Budget and technology stack. However, even if you are low on budget, you can always go for MVP development and iterate as you go.
At Matellio, we have a team of dedicated business consultants who will help you achieve the full potential of your IoT implementation by covering all these aspects.
Step:2 Product Design and Prototyping
Once you have the blueprint in hand, the IoT development phase begins. This is the stage where developers would create the hardware and software solution according to your needs. They develop design mockups and working system models to help you understand what the end product would look like. Once done, you can analyze it and validate it against your needs. Your feedback would further enhance the product based on the priority features. You can even try launching the MVP and make an informed decision based on the user feedback.
Step:3 Product Development, Testing, and Launch
Your feedback from Step 3 is incorporated in this and the final product is developed. QA team takes over and creates use cases to test the entire system. This stage combines manual and test automation wherein the team understands your project and validates against the initial scope. Once they have given it a go, the system is ready to be launched.
Invest in the Future of eCommerce Business
No wonder, IoT has changed how retail stores imagine their operations. It is definitely here to stay and is recreating every stage of the buying journey from product shortlisting to final purchase and after-delivery services. If you are a retail brand wanting to invest in IoT development for your store, reach out to Matellio. Our IoT developers excel at creating business-ready consumer-faced applications that give you an extra edge over the competition. To begin right away, share your requirements with us.
