Modern technologies change the customer experience

Despite the development of e-commerce, stationary stores are still often visited by customers. New technologies are becoming more and more important in traditional trade. Technologies meet the expectations of customers, solve their problems and contribute to the simplification of the purchasing process. On the other hand, they help shop owners to increase their knowledge about customers.

Here are examples of some solutions.

1. Scan & shop

In stores using this system, the customer scans products by himself and finally pays for them. This solution has already been introduced by Tesco in Great Britain, as well as in the Czech Republic, Hungary and in selected stores in Poland. The customer can download the device to scan at the entrance to the store or use a special mobile application that works like a scanner.

2. Amazon Go

One step further goes the solution introduced by Amazon, providing a completely automated purchasing process. The client scans his entrance to the store using the mobile application and then scans the products he wants to buy and places them in his bag. After shopping, he scans its output, and the payment is automatically charged from the payment card attached to the application.

3. Shopping without leaving the car

This is a transfer of solutions known from the restaurants like McDrive or Drive Thru at KFC. Shopping without getting off the car can be done, among others in the F1 chain, whose first store was opened in 2009 in Kalisz. F1 stores are addressed to all motorized customers who do not have time to shop in traditional stores.

These solutions are designed to make shopping easier, but new technologies also help retailers manage the store and obtain information about customers. While in the case of online stores measuring unique users and tracking their behavior on the website is already well-established, in traditional trade this issue is more complicated. With the help of systems based on stereoscopic cameras that register entering and leaving the store and can omit the employees (previously used solutions based on infrared beams could not distinguish customers from the staff).

Owners and managers of stores also use technologies that use the capabilities of smartphones. The Polish company Cosmose has developed a method for tracking offline customers, where it is enough for the customer to have a wireless card enabled in the phone, without logging into the local WiFi network. This technology allows you to locate the client with an accuracy of a few meters, so we can check what products he was interested in. The next step is offering this customer special promotions or discounts.

These solutions can not only solve specific problems of customers or retailers. In the case of customers, they strengthen their customer expierence. They give something that trade in a traditional form can’t offer.