ne of the sectors that stand to benefit the most from the Internet of Things (IoT) is retail. In past years brick-and-mortar stores have been fighting a fierce battle with online retailers. One of the great benefits e-commerce gives consumers is an enormous amount of available information. With a click of a button the consumer can learn everything they want to know about the features, price, and availability of a product. Adoption of IoT concepts in retail can help brick-and-mortar stores recover some of the lost sales by leveraging the information they have in the store for an improved shopping experience. “IoT includes everything. Each and every device, all the things in a store, can or will produce data, and that data will be used to better manage the store,” explained George Shaw, Head of R&D at RetailNext. “An obvious example of this currently
is PoS systems. The PoS system produces a wealth of data, both product and shopper, which then flow into analytics platforms to get analyzed and, eventually, acted upon,” he added. IoT implementations are gaining pace and spanning across different platforms. “We are only limited by imagination,” said Scott Thomas, Global Director of Business Development for Retail & Banking at Genetec, “In a few years you will be able to walk up to a kiosk in a store and type in a product name, the kiosk will tell you where the item is and even show you a feed from a camera where the item is on the shelf, a mobile app can direct you to the item within the store or order it for you if it’s not there.” Another possible use-case is multifactor authentication to enhance security. “Facial and voice recognition can be used to identify clients for additional payment security. Another example is using the shopper’s cell phone to verify they are indeed at the location of purchase. If somebody is trying to make a purchase but their cell phone is located elsewhere this could raise a flag to the store attendant to double check the transaction,” described Jerry Hwang, Senior Strategy Manager at Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions.
IP Cameras as IoT DevICes
Consumers are maximizing their time and money by finding products and services that combine multiple needs. Source: Euromonitor
The year 2015 will see a rise in collaborative consumption and a culture of sharing products and services. Source: Euromonitor
Customers who prefer to shop online do so mainly because they can shop 24/7 online and don’t have to travel, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. Customers who prefer to shop in physical stores do so mainly because they can try the product and buy it immediately, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers.
The introduction of IoT devices in retail is an evolving process. “It’s not a cliff, where we all of a sudden have IoT,” said Shaw, “more and more devices are getting data-enabled and added to the data ecosystem all the time and we will continue to see it grow at an increasing rate of deployment.” In this sense, IP cameras are already IoT enabled devices and can provide “more than security” in terms of insights and business intelligence. Today network cameras can be integrated with many other systems and provide more than just loss prevention and security, and also provide business intelligence and marketing insights. “The use of surveillance cameras is expanding from their traditional role in security to business applications. A surveillance system combined with intelligent video content analysis can be a tool to improve the business efficiency. Retail stores can make good use of video footage captured by cameras for further content analysis. From this footage, retail store’s management can recognize customers when they step into the store, count the time that a shopper spends in front of a
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