Leveraging IoT in Retail by Tracking Shoppers

The main aim of one of the very first projects was obtaining continuous customer behavior analysis by leveraging IoT in retail. The project for Germany based retailer Edeka was delivered by Sewio partner Grottini LAB.

Tracking shoppers within the store in real time enables a whole set of behavior data to be leveraged, not only by the retailer but also by the vendors who are selling their products at the store.

The retailer gets the insights into the movements of all shoppers, thereby answering questions such as:

• Is the store space optimally utilized?
• What is the common customer journey within the store?
• Where does the customer spend the most time?
• What are the most exposed placements within the store and their impact on sales?
• How is the movement affected by the date and time through the day?
• and others

Vendors can take advantage of knowing the answers to:

• What is the impact of our enhanced product placement?
• Does our sampling booth bring positive ROI?
• How does the current sale affect the behavior?
• What are the complements of our products?
• and others

Better customer understanding through RTLS

To digitize the retail space of 1,800 square meters, a Sewio RTLS powered by 24 anchors has been used, tracking shoppers by using s shopping cart tracking system of 250 carts and 50 baskets. To get the full picture of customer behavior, the RTLS has been integrated with infrared cameras on the ceiling. These cameras identify how many times a customer touched the product and whether they added it to their shopping cart (or didn’t).  The combined information tells us how the customer came to the product, whether they touched it, for how long they were considering the purchase, whether they added it to their cart or not and what were their next steps within the store. The customer can use the same infrastructure for increasing the safety of employees by employee location tracking.

IoT in retail brings insights that enable retailers to better utilize their store, improve product placement, streamline customer journeys and boost monetization additional marketing offers for vendors.