The retail sector is one of the early adopters of the Internet of Things (IoT) concept of system and sensor integration to provide better management and business intelligence. One major benefit of implementing IoT technologies is that retailers can leverage the information gathered and improve customer’s in-store experience.
The retail sector is one of the early adopters of the Internet of Things (IoT) concept of system and sensor integration to provide better management and business intelligence. One major benefit of implementing IoT technologies is that retailers can leverage the information gathered and improve customer's in-store experience.
IP cameras are considered as IoT devices since network cameras can be integrated with many other systems and provide information more than just loss prevention and security, such as business intelligence and marketing insights. For example, video footage could be used to achieve below purposes:
Analyse customer's behaviour: collecting the visit frequency of a certain customer, the time period that a shopper spends in front of a shelf
Staffing: Monitoring the in-store visitor flow, assign more staff to reduce the time that clients spend waiting for in-store service
Store design: incorporating video footage with heat mapping can help retailers understand customer's interaction with products and make better strategic merchandising decisions.
Measure the effectiveness of marketing and promotional campaign: by collaborating camera, video analytics and PoS system, retailers can assess the sales data and link up with customers' profile, such as gender and age level.
A few notices for system integrators when deploying retail projects.
* Don't over promise. You need to know the accuracy of the analytic tools may still have room to improve.
* Whether the devices could be standardised so as to provide long-lasting benefit to retailer's investments
* Customers' privacy is one major concern in some countries.