The rise of e-commerce has brought both challenges and opportunities to the retail industry. With the emergence of IoT, big data and artificial intelligence, many retailers are now embracing omni-channel, meaning to provide both online and brick-and-mortar shopping channels for consumers, to deliver seamless and high-quality customer experiences. And all of these will not be made possible without Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), a technology that enables users to identify, locate, authenticate and engage each item. Although RFID has been around for decades, its implementation is considerably slow due to technical issues, high cost, and inconsistent recognition accuracy. However, with technology advancement enabling higher accuracy and lower cost, RFID has received growing attention in various industries, especially in the retail sector.
RFID systems can be categorized into low frequency (LF), high frequency (HF), and ultra-high frequency (UHF), each of which operates in a different frequency band. One of the widely expanded types of RFID is ultra-high frequency, also known as Rain RFID, because of its faster transfer rate. When choosing the right RFID systems, there are many factors to take into considerations, including the weather, surfaces for mounting, the reading distance, the number of objects and so on.
RFID solutions for retail
With RFID systems' ability to read unique tags from up to 12 meters and scan more than hundreds of items within just a few seconds, it can simply replace time consuming and sometimes erroneous manual scanning with automated and efficient tracking of the merchandize from the warehouse to the store, enabling a transparent and real-time inventory management. As the result, common issues faced by the retailers such as limited inventory visibility and theft and shrinkage can be effectively tackled. Real-time inventory management meaning there will be no more overstocking or understocking problems, and when a customer is looking for a particular product, the store personnel will be able to quickly pinpoint its exact location to deliver a satisfactory customer experience. Moreover, a few stores have now equipped fitting rooms with smart mirrors integrating RFID technology. When a smart mirror reads the RFID tags on the apparels, it will display other recommend items such as shoes and accessories to enable an interactive and smart shopping experience.
Smart retail pavilion at Secutech 2018
Out of the realm of retail, RFIDs are also providing solutions in logistics, parking, access control and more. Given the importance of RFID technology, Secutech will be demonstrating RFID applications in factory, retail, healthcare, transportation, home, building and safe city sectors, highlighting RFID logistic system, RFID tags for medication tacking and management and smart parking systems.
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