Smart Retail
At the largest digitization event of the year, the A1 IoT Day 2020, well-known industry representatives met to discuss the Internet of Things and its numerous applications.
Smart Retail - IoT solutions in retail!
The Internet of Things helps retailers to improve the shopping experience and can optimize processes by collecting data. Information can thus be easily linked. The 5G Campus Network of A1 provides us with a secure and reliable basis for data transfer.
Our current main area of application is the cash register system, although further devices will be added in the future. Since the individual elements communicate wirelessly with each other, we can do without complex cabling. Therefore, flexibility for omni-channel concepts is a big advantage.
One technology that we are currently testing in a store in Vienna is smart shopping trolleys. By collecting anonymous data, we can track the position of the shopping trolley in the store. The customer journey of our customers becomes visible. This allows us to focus on optimizing the shopping experience, for example with intelligent shelf systems. The most exciting opportunity that smart shopping carts offer is the prediction of congestion at the checkout. If we know how many trolleys are in the shop and we analyze the customer journey, we can proactively open checkouts to prevent long queues.
Theft prevention is also a positive side effect of cart tracking. If the shopping trolley leaves a defined area, this is registered and an alarm is triggered.
The trend is clearly going in the direction of Smart Retail and we are right at the forefront!
A kind of private mobile phone network is set up at the store location. Unlike WLAN, which uses frequencies that are freely available to everyone, the private campus network uses licensed frequency bands. This enables exclusive resources and interference-free communication.