To get the right VCA solution up and running in a retail environment, there are quite a few hurdles to overcome. To Eric Olson, VP of Marketing at PureTech Systems, these include object occlusion and target overlap.
To get the right VCA solution up and running in a retail environment, there are quite a few hurdles to overcome. To
Eric Olson, VP of Marketing at PureTech Systems, these include object occlusion and target overlap. Similarly, as VCA becomes more intelligent, it also becomes more difficult to distinguish between different complex movements, such as an act of shoplifting, versus merely checking a product label.
“Margins are also a major challenge in the retail space,” said Olson. “Development of precise video analytics come at a cost, and the retail space have always operated on very slim margins. To this respect, although VCA will play a role in loss prevention, safety and customer satisfaction, the biggest gains in retail will be aligning VCA with actionable sales feedback for brands or products. Brand and products are willing to pay top dollar to link marketing actions directly with a sale. VCA products that can help provide that by customizing messages to gender/age which drive sales or by providing direct links between a digital online campaign and the physical product purchase, will be able to command margins to cover the required development.”
Others talked more about the challenges that come in from a business perspective.
“Perhaps the biggest challenge is to stay focused on the retailer’s most pressing business opportunities,” Jason Luther, Head of Products at RetailNext said. “It’s sometimes easy to become infatuated with technology, but implementing technology for technology’s sake is expensive and counter-productive. If it’s not directly or indirectly assisting the shopper in her ever more complicated and circuitous shopping journey, it’s a non-value added activity. There’s one singular truth in retail: what’s good for shoppers is good for the business.”
Uma Welingkar, VP of Product Management at
3VR suggested that there are many solutions to count customer traffic but they don’t all give accurate counts. Testing is essential to ensure a particular solution is generating accurate counts.
“Another challenge is finding the right use case to unlock the true value of analytics,” Welingkar said. “Choosing a vendor with strong experience across a variety of industries can help retailers understand the questions they are trying to answer and apply the most powerful analytic to gather the right data to answer the question.”
Brien TerBush, Global A&E Manager at
Aimetis said that in his perspective, one challenge is that not all VCA solutions are the same and some of them difficult to install or are prone to errors. Finding the right product and integration partner is extremely important.
“Price is still a common objection to overcome. Compared to a straightforward security system, there is also a noticeable price increase, but the positive impact VCA solutions have on profitability and lowering a system’s total cost of ownership far outweigh the initial implementation cost,” TerBush said. “The reporting can be cumbersome especially if the analytics are implemented in the camera and the VMS does not provide a good interface to display the information. Again, finding the right product and integrator can be worth the initial cost.”
But such challenges are not the only problem. According to
David Jones, VP of Marketing at IntelliVision, the major difficulty is getting the concept of video analytics across the retailers.
“The challenge I believe is less of technical and more of retailers understanding what video analytics get them at the end of the day,” said Jones.